Tulliemet

 

Tulliemet

Last updated | 25/04/2007

The undeveloped rural peace that attracts so many people to set up business in Perth & Kinross can also prove to be one of the difficulties, but with ingenuity, lateral thought and planning finding the right premises can be one of the most rewarding.

With large parts of the area deemed to be rural, there is an abundance of natural beauty and away from the major population centres of Perth city and Kinross town, many small communities linked by a useable road network.

This means that suitable building provision for start-up or incoming business can be at a premium, but there are a number of options including an indigenous business that specialises in property development.

Tulliemet Ltd, based at Blair Atholl in Highland Perthshire has developed a number of commercial units, based on experience of knowing what the rural community needs and what business wants.

Mike Mountford runs Performance Motorcycle Parts at Ballinluig. There from a Tulliemet developed unit, he and his three staff take e-mail and telephone orders from all over the world and post them out to customers.

Mike said: "I ran the business for two years from my cottage. I live here and see no need to move anywhere else, but as the business expanded I needed premises, and where I am now was the right place at the right time."

It offers Mike storage space, good access for deliveries and dispatch, and can grow with the business when the need arises. With 60 per cent of his business coming from London and the South East, and the remainder from all over the world, predominantly Scotland and Scandinavia, Mike is already talking to Tulliemet about expansion.

Right next-door is a business as far away from the world of high performance motor-bikes as you could imagine. Batavia import and sell Indonesian furniture to the public. Nick Gilmour, the man behind Batavia has a similar story to Mike Mountford.

"Having worked for a local construction company I was ready for a change and with my wife's connections in Indonesia and the variety of different products there it was sort of fate and a natural progression to sell furniture from a building I had helped design." Nick says.

"What's the point of being in a big city where I couldn't get a container of furniture in for delivery, there might be difficulty for customers parking and rent and rates would be so much higher?

We overlook the A9 and are well-sign-posted and so get loads of passing trade. As well as using the space here as a showroom, it also provides masses of storage so that we can fulfill our orders from the web."

If the next-door neighbours in Ballinluig do not demonstrate the versatility of Tulliemet's buildings and the diversity of the rural economy in Perth & Kinross, just up the A9 at Blair Atholl is further proof.

Here we find the first Tulliemet development dating back to May 2000. Seven units with shared facilities house a wide range of functions including storage for Pitlochry Theatre, a base for a metal fabricator and storage, distribution and office facilities for Novasonic.

Novasonic grew out of a small part of the business of RW Bell, an established electrical contractor based in Pitlochry. Now employing ten people the company not only supply Boots the Chemist with an own brand electrical medical massage device, they act as dispatchers and accounts handlers for a range of similar therapeutic product businesses across the UK.

Andrew Carruthers, who heads up the company said: "We have a central cost which is now divided between seven or eight different companies. We have the space and good road links with the A9 running right past, to be able to do this successfully."

As Andrew points out they already have the software, hardware, experience and space to offer other small companies who can pay for that expertise, rather than reinventing the wheel every time and giving themselves unnecessary costs at start-up and a steep learning curve.

From the units at Blair Atholl, which have grown with the company, Andrew's team can dispatch products to almost anywhere in the UK and they will arrive the next day and within 48 hours to anywhere in Europe.

The third, and most recent, Highland Perthshire development by Tulliemet is at Dunkeld and taken with the others illustrates the flexibility of the way the company has gone about property development.

If the businesses in the other units have been outward looking, and served customers all over the UK and Europe without the need for big city overheads, one of the new businesses took up space in Dunkeld, looks very much to the rural community for its success.

John Gordon Myles is a motor-mechanic. A very useful man in a community where the car is king and travel by road is the quickest, easiest and most economical way of getting around. He plans to move into two adjacent units at the latest Tulliemet development.

His customers are expected to be local, so whilst dispatch and delivery maybe aren't as vital, flexibility of the space in which he will work and the area around it are. Parking for cars repaired, or waiting to be worked on is a must, and the units will offer that, as well as the space to work on the range of repairs required to keep the rural economy on the move.

In all Tulliemet has developed close to 12,000 square feet of new rural business accommodation in locations all over Highland Perthshire. These units are occupied by 11 different businesses. All chose to be in Perth & Kinross' rural areas and have found through their vision, drive, determination and the foresight and flexibility of other rural businesses like Tulliemet, that they can not only survive but thrive.