Recruitment specialist Brightwork celebrates five years of growth with record profits

Scottish recruitment specialist the Brightwork Group has marked its fifth year in business with record turnover and profits and a new boost in job numbers as it reels in major new clients.
 
The group, based in Glasgow and Edinburgh with offices in Aberdeen, will post a record £24m in sales in the year to December with after tax profits up to £750,000. It has increased its staffing from 13 in 2006 to 38 now, with another six likely to be taken on to handle increased volumes from a deal with an online retailer.
 
The figures are a satisfactory birthday present for group managing director Anthony Knight and group chief operating officer Charles Turner, who created the company out of an MBO from the multi-national Hudson Group.
 
With chairman Brian Williamson and backing from Clydesdale Bank, they transformed the old industrial division of Hudson into a full-service, cross-sector agency which now supplies up to 1500 workers a week to blue chips and SMEs.
 
Anthony Knight said: "When we forecast in 2006 that sales would exceed £20m in five years, we thought to ourselves that it was verging on the outlandish. To have exceeded it is remarkable - and very satisfying."
 
Knight, originally from Bedford, and Turner, from Lanarkshire, were under no illusions before the MBO that the Hudson outpost in Scotland was being marginalised and, in their eyes, reaching the end of its shelf life.
 
But neither of the businessmen, both of whom have decades of experience in the recruitment sector, had any inclination to seek out another corporate environment. So when they were offered the chance to bid for the business, they jumped at it.
 
Turner said: "It was a long-established, profitable business with a good cost base and an excellent client portfolio. The purchase cost was in seven figures, but the funding environment in 2006 was entirely different and the banks were just about falling over themselves to lend to us."
 
Knight and Turner, both of whom have been through several recessions and are attuned to the cyclical nature of the sector, initially adopted a holding position to consolidate and safeguard key clients and staff.
 
Turner said: "The corporate structure before the MBO had acted like a drag anchor on us. Decisions which needed to be made quickly could be referred to a regional manager, then London, then someone in Europe and eventually all the way to the US.
 
"A good piece of local business which we had generated could become loss-making because of the weight of corporate overheads."
 
But their freedom from the constraints of Hudson's global corporate structure soon encouraged a vigorous but complementary growth strategy. Brightwork was already a big player in the blue collar space and began to diversify into professional, technical and managerial, creating a new specialist recruitment arm in 2008.
 
Core markets are now in the drinks industry, on the back of the boom in whisky sales, and distribution and supply. Knight said: "The temporary employment market has always been more resilient and robust than the permanent, although we expect that to pick up as Scotland continues to buck the UK economic trend."
 
Both men cite a glut of employment law and continually changing regulations as a major hindrance to growth across UK business.
 
Turner added: "It is a common complaint across all business sectors that governments seem to view themselves as impotent if they are not continually legislating. The drip-drip effect creates uncertainty, which is the great enemy.
 
"The recruitment sector is already heavily regulated by bodies such as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which often offer quite contradictory advice and instruction."
 
Turner and Knight now take the view that Brightwork is as well positioned as it can be to withstand further recessionary tremors. It is now debt free after three years in which they ploughed all profits back into the business.
 
And they have now set a new target of £60m sales within the next five years. Knight said: "Oddly enough, this time it doesn't feel at all outlandish."