Our 2022: Manchester, and momentum
In May 2022 we opened our second office, on Hardman Square in Manchester. It was the right call, and if I'm honest it was slightly overdue. By the start of the year a third of our northern placements were being run remotely from London — competently, but at arm's length — and a market as serious as Manchester's deserves people who live and work in it, not a firm that flies in for the final interview. Opening there was less a strategic masterstroke than an admission that we owed the North a proper presence.
The results followed quickly. We made 386 placements across the year — very nearly treble the previous year's total — for 96 clients, and the team reached forty-four people. It was our steepest year of growth so far, and it happened because a real office in a real market unlocked demand that had always been there.
Why Manchester
We looked hard at the options before committing. Manchester won for reasons that had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with substance: a deep and growing base of technology and professional-services employers, a genuine finance community, and — crucially — a talent pool that was tired of being treated as a satellite of London. Good people in the North West wanted a search firm that understood their market on its own terms, paid attention to regional salary realities, and didn't assume everyone secretly wanted to relocate south. We could be that firm.
The Hardman Square office started with a small senior team, deliberately. We did not parachute in twenty juniors and hope. We hired a handful of experienced consultants who already knew the market, let them build their desks the way we build everything, and grew from there. Within months the office was winning mandates London could never have serviced properly.
Two cities, one standard
The real risk in opening a second office is not cost or logistics — it is drift. The moment you have a location the founder can't see from their desk, standards start to negotiate with themselves. A shortlist gets a little longer here, a candidate conversation gets a little thinner there, and before long "the Manchester way" and "the London way" are two different things. We were determined that would not happen.
So the rule was absolute: every Manchester consultant we hired was senior, every search ran the same way regardless of postcode, and partners moved between the offices constantly so that the culture travelled with the people. A candidate in Salford got exactly the same senior attention as one in the City. That principle — one standard, wherever you are — became the template for every office we have opened since.
| Measure | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Offices | 1 | 2 |
| Team | 26 | 44 |
| Placements | 124 | 386 |
| Clients (cumulative) | 47 | 96 |
By the end of 2022 we had made over 550 placements in our short life, and not one candidate had ever been invoiced. The model was no longer an experiment.
The mood begins to turn
For all the momentum, the closing months of the year carried a warning. The market was still hot, but the quality of the heat was changing. Interest rates were climbing, funding rounds were getting harder, and the boardroom conversations we were having started to carry a note of caution that had been absent for eighteen months. You could feel the mood beginning to shift from "hire everyone we can" to "hire only who we must."
For a firm built on the honest, considered shortlist rather than sheer volume, a cooling market is not necessarily bad news — it tends to reward exactly the discipline we'd insisted on from the start. But we ended 2022 knowing that the easy years might be behind us, and that 2023 would test whether our model held up when the wind was against it.
What the numbers hid
Trebling placements in a year looks, on a chart, like a straight line up and to the right. Inside the firm it felt like nothing of the sort. A firm growing that fast is a firm constantly one bad month from breaking something — a rushed hire, an overstretched consultant, a client who slips through the cracks between two offices. Most of my energy in 2022 went not into winning work but into building the unglamorous scaffolding that lets a firm grow without cracking: proper handover processes, a research function that could feed two offices, and a partner group that met often enough to keep the culture coherent across two cities.
I mention this because the year-in-review format tempts you to present growth as effortless momentum. It wasn't. It was a year of deliberate, sometimes anxious infrastructure-building, dressed up by a set of numbers that happened to look easy. The lesson — that you invest in the plumbing before you need it, not after — carried directly into how we opened Edinburgh and Birmingham later.
Two cities, forty-four people, and a set of principles that had now travelled two hundred miles north intact. If you're hiring in the North West or anywhere else, get in touch — a senior consultant will reply within one working day.
If there is a single sentence that captures 2022, it is this: we proved that our model was portable. The worry with any values-led firm is that the values live in the founder and evaporate the moment the founder isn't in the room. Manchester was the first real evidence that ours didn't — that a consultant two hundred miles away, whom I saw in person only every few weeks, would instinctively make the same call I would about a lazy shortlist or a bad-fit mandate. That portability is what turned a good London firm into a genuinely national one, and it is why the two openings that followed felt like repetition rather than reinvention.
