Our 2025: Birmingham and the road to a hundred
Confidence returned in 2025 the way it usually does — gradually, then all at once. Through the first quarter the market still felt tentative, a continuation of the patient mood of 2024. Then, somewhere around the spring, the tone changed. Boards that had spent a year saying "let's wait" started saying "let's move," delayed hires unfroze, and the pipeline that had built up quietly over the slow months turned into real mandates almost overnight. It was our busiest year yet, and it arrived faster than we expected.
We opened our fourth office, on Cornwall Street in Birmingham, and rode the recovering market to 1,517 placements for 261 clients. The team reached ninety-six — within touching distance of the hundred we had long said would be the right size to serve four cities properly without losing the senior-only character that defines us.
Birmingham: the office we opened best
By our fourth opening, we had learned how to do it. Birmingham benefited from every lesson Manchester and Edinburgh had taught us: hire a small senior team who already know the market, resist the urge to grow it too fast, hold the standard from day one, and let partners from the other offices seed the culture in person. The result was our smoothest launch by some distance. Birmingham was winning quality mandates within weeks and was already ahead of where Edinburgh had been at the same age.
The choice of city was, again, about substance. The Midlands has a large and under-served market of mid-market businesses, professional-services firms and manufacturers-turned-technology-companies — exactly the kind of employers who want a serious search partner and have too often had to import one from London. We could be the local firm that also brought national reach. That proposition landed quickly.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Offices | 3 | 4 |
| Team | 81 | 96 |
| Placements | 1,048 | 1,517 |
| Clients (cumulative) | 214 | 261 |
The road to a hundred
We have always said that around a hundred people is the right size for this firm — large enough to cover four cities and six specialist practices with genuine depth, small enough that every consultant is senior and every partner still knows everyone's name. In 2025 we got to ninety-six, and the approach of that milestone forced a useful conversation: growth, for us, has a ceiling on purpose.
Most firms treat headcount as a number to maximise. We treat it as a constraint that protects the product. The moment you have to hire juniors to keep growing, you stop being a senior-only firm — and senior-only is the entire proposition. So as we neared a hundred, we started planning to grow up rather than out: deepening each practice, investing in research and client services, and getting better at the work rather than simply doing more of it.
A recovering market is the easiest time to abandon your discipline, because growth is suddenly cheap. Holding the line at "senior only" when you could hire twice as fast is the discipline that actually defines the firm.
Five years in
We crossed 3,800 lifetime placements during the year. Our 18-month retention rate held at 86% — the number we care about most, because it says the placements stuck, that we put people into roles they were still thriving in a year and a half later. Candidate satisfaction held at 93%. And, five years on, through a pandemic, a boom, a slowdown and a recovery, we had still never charged a candidate a single penny.
That last fact is the one I measure the firm by. It would have been easy, at almost any point in five years, to introduce a small candidate fee and improve the margins. We never have, and we never will, because the moment a candidate owes us money our advice is no longer clean — and clean advice is the whole business.
What five years changes, and what it doesn't
Reaching five years and near-a-hundred people changes a firm in ways worth being honest about. I no longer personally run most searches; my job is now to protect the standard rather than to demonstrate it on every desk. Decisions that used to be a conversation between two people now need structure, and structure, handled carelessly, is how the soul of a small firm leaks away. Guarding against that has become the central part of my role.
What five years hasn't changed is the thing that matters. The test we apply to every mandate — is this a role we can fill with someone genuinely right, presented by someone genuinely senior, advised honestly and charged only to the employer — is exactly the test we applied to the forty-one placements of 2020. The firm is thirty times bigger and the test is identical. If we ever lose that, we will have become just another agency with a nicer office, and the whole point will have gone.
2026 is our sixth year. We will reach a hundred people, and we intend to spend the year getting better rather than merely bigger. If you're hiring, or thinking about your own next move, get in touch — a senior consultant will come back to you within one working day.
When I started the firm in a rented room in 2020, "ninety-six people across four cities" would have sounded like someone else's business plan. What still surprises me is how little the day-to-day feels different from that first year. The searches are more senior and the offices are further apart, but the actual work — understanding a client's real need, finding the few people who genuinely fit, being honest with everyone about what's possible — is exactly what it was when it was just me and a phone. We got bigger by refusing to change the part that mattered. That, more than any number in the table above, is what I'm proud of five years in.
