In any normal year, Earl Kendrick would have been celebrating our tenth anniversary this past January. But of course, the past year or so has been anything but normal. It’s been a tough time for us all, and I’m in awe of how people have risen to the occasion – from making such a success of the vaccine rollout to simply keeping the supermarket shelves stocked. Like everyone else, we had to make some changes to how we work at Earl Kendrick – some temporary and some more lasting – and I have to say I’m humbled by how my colleagues have stepped up to make things work.
As dramatic as the events of 2020 were, though, the past decade has been one of more gradual but no less significant change. When I founded Earl Kendrick in 2011, we were a small team with big ambitions. The world economy was slowly recovering from the financial crisis. The UK had a relatively new coalition government. Twitter and Facebook had only recently become household names. Nobody had any idea that the big shocks of Brexit and Trump were just a few years away, let alone that their significance would be ‘trumped’ again by a global pandemic a few years later.
Then as now, we were focused on providing the best possible building surveying services for our clients. We wanted to be a new kind of surveying business, one that put people at the heart of everything we did. So we worked hard to win the trust of a few key clients, before gradually taking on more, and growing our team to manage the expanding workload. At the same time, my senior colleagues and I were becoming acknowledged authorities in our fields, especially in residential property, and we established specialist businesses to deal with party wall matters, licence to alter, reassessment cost assessments and digital surveying.
Of course, there’s always a danger when a business takes on more clients that resources can be overstretched, especially when those resources are seasoned professionals who understand the particular needs of their long-term clients from hands-on experience. Relationships are not scalable in the same way as technical services. I’ve written before about the delicate balance between having a team that’s big enough to meet clients’ needs without becoming too big, which tends to mean a high turnover of staff and the loss of the personal touch that clients value so much.
What I called the Goldilocks solution is not so much about a magic number of team members as our team’s character and composition. In recent years, we’ve made an effort to consolidate our senior team and ensure all our projects are led by a director, which means our clients have a single and senior point of contact. We also rotate our team to give younger members opportunities and experience in different areas, and invest heavily in their CPD, so they can become the senior colleagues of the future.
In this way, we’ve managed to expand our business without compromising on quality, even opening new offices in Manchester, Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol and the Cotswolds, the better to serve clients outside London. And even before the pandemic, that geographical reach was complemented by technological connectedness, so we are able to provide many services wherever our clients are and wherever we are. That mean that when lockdown hit, we were able to move seamlessly to working remotely.
So as dramatic as the past year or so has been, we’ve coped by drawing on the achievements of the past several years. Through a combination of restructuring and recruitment, we’ve shaped a phenomenal team that has only grown stronger through lockdown. Of course, the pandemic has had an impact, and we have all had to work hard to make the best of the situation. As a reward for our team’s efforts, we’ve lifted restrictions on holiday allowance so our staff can take as much as they like provided they arrange cover with colleagues. And having missed out on an anniversary party in January, we’re planning to celebrate next year instead, with our inaugural EK ski trip.
Despite the particular challenges of the past year, when I look back on the past decade, I see plenty to celebrate. I’m really proud to have such a great team, who have an ownership stake in the business and are determined to drive it forward. So here’s to the next ten years!
Julian Davies, Managing Director at Earl Kendrick
