Paul spent most of his early career in classified publishing working in a number of sales roles before becoming general manager of Southern Auto Trader in Southampton. As the classified publishing market evolved and migrated online, in 2007 he made a complete career change into retail, firstly with a product-based business before joining Momentum as sales and marketing director six years ago.

His main passions outside of work are rugby league (he’s a season ticket holder at Warrington) playing tennis (a group from Momentum play each week) and skiing.

Tell us a bit about your business?
Momentum Instore specializes in helping bring brands to life. We work with the nation’s largest retailers and brands to deliver some of the most demanding in-store marketing campaigns across the UK and Europe. Momentum Instore offers a variety of services to retail clients in all sectors, from installation of retail displays, product merchandising, fixed asset maintenance, retail estate audit and compliance checking to full principal contractor solutions for whole store refurbishments.

Our business is supported by 80 members of staff. The majority are based at our head office in Macclesfield, who work alongside our in-store teams based across the country.

Tell Us About Your Role Within The Business?
My role as MD is to create an environment where everyone in the team can perform at their best and make sure we are doing an outstanding job for our customers, as well as ensure we position the business well within the evolving market and understand what our customers need in the future. We have an amazingly committed team of people at Momentum who consistently deliver for our clients. I’m really lucky to be able to work with such a great team every day.

In your opinion, what is the most interesting/high profile/exciting project you or your business has worked on?
It’s hard to pick as we are lucky enough to work on such a diverse range of projects, but there are two that really stand out. In 2015, Momentum Instore completed the installation of new National Lottery point of sale items in UK stores. This was a huge project due to the number of stores we visited and the logistics and scheduling that went with that. Our team completed the roll-out of updated National Lottery playstations, scratchcard dispensers and signage over 19 weeks in over 37,000 stores.

I also want to mention our involvement in Project Sweetshop, the largest and most complex installation programme of its kind in Europe. We replaced the self-selection cosmetic displays in 1302 Boots stores over 7 months which equated to almost 16,000 individual cosmetic stands.

Our European expansion has also been really exciting. We have completed projects in over 28 countries, from Iceland to Turkey.

How long has the business been operating and how long have you been based in Macclesfield?
Momentum Instore has been around for over 45 years. We started life as NDI in 1973. In 1999, NDI was acquired by McCann Worldwide Group to become NDI Momentum. Later, united with three other marketing agencies in 2005, Momentum Instore was born. In June 2012 the company entered the next stage in its evolution as Rob and Steph Gleave purchased Momentum Instore from McCann and today we continue to work with some of the best known brands in retail. We have been based in Macclesfield since 2014.

What made you choose Macclesfield as a place to base your business?
Momentum Instore has been based in Cheshire since its inception nearly 50 years ago. The transport links from Macclesfield to London and Manchester are also really important to us as many of our clients are based there, not to mention Manchester Airport for visiting our European headquarters just outside of Paris.

What’s the best thing about working in Macclesfield?
The people. Many of our team live in Macclesfield and the surrounding area and without them we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. We have a very talented and dedicated group of people at Momentum . Macclesfield is also a beautiful area and in the summer lots of us enjoy getting out for lunchtime walks along the canal.

Do You Have Any Specific Future Goals For The Business That You Would Like To Share?
To carry on doing a great job for our customers we really see this as the key to sustainable growth. We also launched our European business in France last year so we see the international arena as a big growth area for us.