INTERVIEW: PETER CLUSKEY:GARVAN CERASI, founder of freight and logistics recruitment specialists, Logiskills, had been expecting to break the €1 million turnover barrier this year. Instead, he's experiencing the first recession of his career.

Since setting up Logiskills in 2004, the business has been building steadily, from a fragile turnover of just €140,000 in its first year to a healthy €750,000 and rising in 2007.

Those days are over, though, for the time being at least.

“Job orders have fallen by at least a third in the recruitment sector as a whole over the past three or four months,” observes Cerasi.

“Our staff has gone from nine consultants in January to just four now and I’d anticipate that turnover will fall back to around €450,000 – pretty much where we stood in 2006.”

Despite the fact that this is his first experience of an economic downturn, he has been quick to respond.

“We’ve already implemented as many savings as we can in an effort to secure the survival of the company through to 2010. For instance, we’re in the process of moving to a smaller, serviced office.

“We’ll probably halve the number of slots we buy from recruitment websites.

“The cream has certainly gone,” Cerasi adds, “but the bread-and-butter work is still there and I believe that’s what will get us through.”

It’s not the future that Cerasi was anticipating when, after starting his career in the freight forward sector and moving into logistics software, he decided he wanted to move up the career ladder.

“That’s what made me interested in recruitment,” he recalls.

“I went to talk to a lot of the big high-street recruitment names and what I found were young, inexperienced consultants, mostly graduates, who were just flinging CVs at their clients – and mine was one of the CVs they were flinging.”

As it happened, Cerasi’s wife, Mairéad, had been in the recruitment business for more than a decade and she suggested that he set up such a business on his own.

“Nobody was specialising in the freight and logistics area, which was booming” he says, “and, because companies were so anxious to find staff, they were willing to include me among their preferred suppliers, and it went from there.”

Cerasi set out to provide the quality of service he had been so frustrated at not finding himself, achieving ISO 9001:2000 quality management certification and doing evening classes at the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport.

“A lot of people said ISO wasn’t worth it, but I wanted, from the point of view of internal procedures, to be sure there was nothing else we could be doing to improve and to allow us to benchmark ourselves as we expanded., and it helped us to sign up most of the big players as clients.

“Along the way, in 2005, we set up NorthGate Recruitment, which supplies support service recruitment in the freight and supply-chain sector and, earlier this year, Logiskills Elite, which also provides interim management services to clients.

“So the aim is to provide the total recruitment package – from driver to director.”

Cerasi’s aim now is to make Logiskills leaner, while retaining its quality of service.

It is a difficult balancing act, he admits, but it now applies to everyone.

“Companies are going to have to become leaner. Core competencies are going to have to be replaced, but after that it’s a matter of what you can afford,” Cerasi says.

“If you have three people doing a job and one leaves, the remaining two will have to get busier, but if one of those two leaves, that person will have to be replaced.”

And if the economic climate continues to worsen?

“I haven’t been through an economic downturn before. But this company has to survive because I have a mortgage and young children. What we’re going through now, they’ll be studying in college.

“But in the meantime, survival is the name of the game.”

Name: Garvan Cerasi.

Company: The Logiskills Group.

Job: Managing director.

Age: 35.

Background: He worked in the freight forwarding industry before joining an international logistics software provider.

He has a diploma in marketing and a diploma in logistics and transport management.

Inspired by: Entrepreneurs such as Denis Desmond, Michael O’Leary, Denis O’Brien and Bill Cullen.

Challenges: The recruitment industry is in the forefront of those being hit by the economic slowdown and we have to learn to deal with that.