Martin Anderson launched Lemon Contact Centre having started out with a reclaimed, £40 PC operating from a room above a garage. It now employs more than 100 people providing 24/7 call handling services to a range of sectors.
What was your first job (and what did it pay)? My first job was as an apprentice technician at Comcast, which later became NTL and then Virgin Media. I was paid the princely sum of £6,000 a year, which wasn’t bad for an apprentice in 1997 and allowed me to buy my first ‘sports car’, a black Toyota MR2. Apprenticeships back then weren’t the massive beast that they are now, and there wasn’t many outside of the classic trades like plumbing and electrician. They were also a little bit out of fashion as the Labour government encouraged everyone to head off to university but I managed to get in to telecoms right on the eve of the dot com boom and it was a fantastic time to learn. I did three years, rotating through departments every six months. I ended up as an engineer working in the network operations centre, which gave me my first taste of a contact centre and I guess set me down the path to where I am now.
Read more: 10 questions for Helen Baker of Accenture
