Growing responsibly in India...
Group Operations Director, Steve Baker, tells of his time there:“I was privileged to join five other businessmen including MLS Group CEO, Paul Williams, to go to Chennai in southwest India to see and consult on the work of a large charity called ‘Intermission India’. Intermission are involved in running children’s homes, schools, vocational training programmes, tsunami relief work and micro-development finance programmes. We visited a number of the programmes and spent time looking at some of the organisational issues the charity is facing and brainstorming ideas as to how these could be solved. We came away with two tangible projects which we are following through with Ethos: Firstly to set up a data entry company working for UK organisations, giving employment to trainees coming out of Intermission’s vocational training programme, with profits from this being redistributed to the charity. Secondly, we investigated a commercial property development on some surplus land owned by Intermission. Like all charities, Intermission is reliant on donations to fund and if there could be other income streams this would secure their long term future. Personally I found the five day experience amazing and life changing.”
Ian Kibby, Group Sales & Marketing Director, explains the project further:
“We believe our values as a company stand behind everything we do in the UK and are equally applicable to an international arena. This will give us a real opportunity to build a global brand where our offering will be matched to the needs of the local market, but our values will remain core to the business model in wherever we operate.
From the work our charitable foundation, EthosMLS, has already been doing in Chennai, an opportunity arose for us to obtain a 28,000 sq ft office building in the heart of Chennai’s new technology district to open as our first international MLS Business Centre. We are already looking at another building nearby as a second centre to open later this year to take advantage of the current high demand for office space in the Chennai area. In the meantime, we will concentrate on developing key relationships with international and local property agents and businesses to ensure these new locations do well from day one.
We will be building a country management structure in India and there will also be opportunities for UK based MLS team members to take up temporary and permanent secondments while that structure takes shape.
We have also identified other countries where we believe the MLS brand of business centre will be welcomed and are currently in negotiations for buildings in China and in the slightly longer term, a number of key cities in Eastern Europe.
Our target market in Chennai will be slightly different from that of our UK operation, in that we are going to aim at more corporate businesses that will be looking at our offering as a way of establishing a footprint in one of the fastest growing global economies.
In order to differentiate ourselves from the global competition we will promote our core values of Family, Fun, and Friendship with Care, Commitment and Concern to become a genuinely unique home from home for those businesses. This will naturally mean embracing all the flavours of the local culture and actively helping those companies to be successful with coordinated networking activities and assisted access to the local business community.
This values led approach will be core to the operating model we follow as the MLS brand continues to expand across the globe in the next few years.”
