Gabriel Erinle is in what he calls “full founder startup mode”.
A veteran of Allied London who celebrated his 50th birthday last year, he can be found in the offices of his startup GAME FM – Go A Mile Extra Facilities Management – from Monday to Friday. And often on Saturdays, too.
Based on John Dalton Street, the business has scaled quickly since launch, with Erinle saying the team has grown to 38 core staff following seven additions in the last couple of months.
This is despite only being founded in June 2024, with the startup also securing £1.24m in contracted work in its first 12 months.
Culture building
GAME FM’s culture is rooted in Erinle’s own “non-traditional journey” through the industry – one where he started by doing the same frontline roles his teams now do.
“I’ve been a cleaner, been a security guard, I’ve worked on maintenance,” he tells BusinessCloud.
“I just remember some of the not-so-nice interactions I had whilst I did those jobs.
“I remember thinking to myself that, if and when I ran my own business, I would never treat people like that.
“I don’t try and run the business with hierarchy.
“I like to aim for a ‘round table’ culture – open, informal and supportive.”
Part of the journey
Erinle is quick to note that facilities management isn’t just about cleaning, security, concierge and maintenance – it’s about first impressions.
Long before a visitor meets the person they’ve come to see, they’ve already formed a view of the building based on the people they pass on the way in.
He explains: “You go into an office building and you might see a cleaner, a maintenance engineer, you might see the concierge or the security officer.
“A lot of these interactions might determine how good your day is.
“I’m big on good human interaction. There’s a lot of desire for human interaction and good human interaction, not just any human interaction.”
A blueprint from Spinningfields
Erinle’s move into entrepreneurship wasn’t a jump into the dark.
In many ways, he says, he’d already been doing the job, just within someone else’s structure.
Working across complex estates and regeneration projects gave him a lot of freedom and it suited the way he thinks.
“Everything was exciting, everything was challenging. I love solving problems,” he says.
“[At Spinningfields] we really pioneered placemaking in Manchester.
“I led an in-house FM model that grew to around £6m in annual service value.”
Growth whilst maintaining standards
GAME FM’s second year is set to show £1.5m revenue, with a target of £1.7m in year three.
However, growth so far has been deliberately controlled.
“Year one and year two we’ve predominantly just focused on Manchester because we wanted to control the quality of the operations,” Erinle explains.
“We didn’t want to compromise ourselves by chasing contracts.
“The next step probably is to expand the footprint to places like Liverpool and Birmingham on the radar. That’s going to be the challenging piece.
“A lot of the contracts are quite price sensitive – it’s a race to the bottom.
“We are different from others in our industry. I don’t believe in paying the minimum wage – we are living wage employers.
“I only want to work with people who share similar values with us.”
Where tech fits
Erinle sees tech and AI as tools to help teams work smarter rather than a replacement for people.
“Facilities is one of the things whereby AI and tech makes the tasks more efficient rather than replacing them entirely,” he said.
Automation has its place, he adds, pointing to the scrubber-dryers already roaming around airports and supermarkets – but it still can’t do the ‘fiddly’ jobs.
He continues: “They can do wide areas, but they can’t do detail… not yet!
“There isn’t a robot that’s going to clean skirting boards and dust off cobwebs, or tidy a desk.”
ASCEND
Even with prior leadership experience, Erinle says there’s a big difference between running something within a wider group and being the person carrying everything as a founder.
“There were a lot of things about being a solo entrepreneur that I just didn’t know,” he says.
He highlights areas like governance, strategic planning, building a board and thinking about longer-term options such as acquisitions.
Joining GM Business Growth Hub’s ASCEND Scale Up Programme has helped fill those gaps through workshops and through being around other founders dealing with the same realities.
“It’s quite isolated being your own boss – you sit in your own head a lot,” he explains.
“Having access to 25 other founders, some of the solutions have just been available to me through conversations with my fellow cohort.
“You also have [ASCEND lead] Kellie [Noon] helping you, who is constantly asking you if you need to meet people.
“She’s been invaluable. You get access to all these things from one place and I don’t think you get that anywhere else.”