Building a €100 million all-Ireland company employing nearly 8,000 people in just over a year is no small achievement

But following the acquisition this week of Masterclean in Santry with its 1,000-strong workforce, Terence Brannigan and his management have helped to establish Northern Ireland-based Resource as one of the leading support and soft services companies on the island.

"Recent acquisitions both in Northern Ireland and the Republic are part of our buy and build strategy designed to create a leading soft services company throughout Ireland and the UK," said Mr Brannigan. "We will continue to aggressively exploit growth opportunities in Ireland and we believe there is a strong potential for developing our business in Great Britain by taking advantage of the growing trend to outsource services."

Aggressive is an apt word to describe the company's expansion in Ireland - Brannigan led a management buy-in of Maybin Support Services, the Northern Ireland market leader, in March 2006. That buy-in was backed by Dublin-based specialist investment firm Lioncourt Capital and the company's spate of acquisitions since then have been funded by Ulster Bank.

In August 2006, the company acquired Grove Services Group, the second-largest provider of property care services and facilities management in Northern Ireland and last November it bought Corporate Cleaning Services, the Limerick-based provider of cleaning and support services that specialises in clean-room environments. The latest acquisition, under its rebranded name Resource, gives the company a solid all-Ireland dimension.

The phenomenal growth has been fuelled by what Mr Brannigan calls an "explosion" in the outsourcing market here in recent years.

"In the public sector and the private sector there is a realisation that you need to focus on your own core business and therefore the peripheral things that support that business can be done by somebody else."

A buoyant economy has also helped, while a growing trend to have outsourced services bundled into a single package is also leading to an increase in business, he says.

"There has been a realisation that additional efficiencies can be driven by bundling services together and one company delivering everything," he says. "It is not a big emotional move now for companies to give someone else some of their activity to manage."

Nevertheless, Mr Brannigan realises it can be emotional for staff and it is no surprise that outsourcing has proved controversial, particularly for its impact on staff that are being hived off from a company in which they may have worked for years. Mr Brannigan says he understands that it can be a thorny issue and concedes that some of the blame for the bad publicity outsourcing received in the past can be placed at the door of the industry and of various employers who saw it as a crude way to cut costs.

"Early on in the outsourcing cycle, a lot of people did see it as an opportunity of cutting costs and a lot in our industry went in with a sharp pencil just to make it cheap. We have come out of that cycle and that has changed. Of course that still happens to some degree but for the vast majority of clients it is about their focus, it is about freeing up their management time, it is about producing more efficiently."

He says he is fully in favour of the legislation that protects outsourced workers' terms and conditions of employment.

"The first thing that is important for me to do is to sit down with the incoming staff, take them through their protection under the legislation but also very much sell to them who we are as a company and what we are want to do."

Part of that is to show outsourced employees that there can be personal gain from the process, he says.

"In a manufacturing company whose core activity is making widgets, a person who is doing the cleaning, running the security or doing reception knows darn well there is little scope for them to advance in that business because there isn't the scale to do that.

"When they come to us it's totally the opposite. That is our core business, so if you are a cleaner or a security guy, there is a great opportunity to progress. We have 8,000 people and we grow our own management."