Green Park

16 November 2011 | By Colin Cottell

Just over five years ago, Raj Tulsiani and Steve Baggi left their makeshift London offices, at that time a back bedroom, and jumped on the 137 bus from Clapham to Sloane Square. From there it was on to the City to visit a potential client.

It was hardly an auspicious start for two men, who only months before had left the relative security of successful careers at Penna Interim to set up on their own interim search company, Green Park.

Despite the lack of business cards, proper office or database, not only did the bus trip result in their first placement, it was also the start of a journey that this year saw the firm ranked second in Recruiter’s Hot 100. With a turnover of £21.6m in 2010, and gross profit per employee of £181,529, the two founders are confident that turnover will reach £45m-£50m in the next three to four years.

As with many recruiters, entrepreneurialism, ambition and a belief that they can provide a better service for clients run deep in the two men. “We wanted to create something that would represent our own values and what we thought a recruitment company should look like,” says Baggi, whose main focus is on growing the executive search side of the business. “It was also about empowerment and having the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively based on what customers say.”

It has become a bit of a cliché, of course, that recruiters put customers at the heart of everything they do. But in the case of Green Park, there appears real substance. The firm reports an impressive customer satisfaction rating of over 98%, with 68% of its business coming from repeat satisfied customers. And during the conversation at Green Park’s offices in London, meeting the needs of customers is never far from the two men’s thoughts.

“You have to link staff compensation to feedback from customers,” says Tulsiani. “We have a discretionary bonus scheme that tends to pay out in upper quartile, but for every period people understand what they are expected to achieve in terms of customer satisfaction percentages,” he explains. “We are relentless in pursuing soft data from customers,” he adds.

Developing staff is another of the co-founders’ recurring themes. In practice, this means taking the behaviours of its high performers and sharing them through coaching and mentoring to the rest of the organisation. These behaviours are honesty, authenticity, ability to build consultative relationships, the pursuit of excellence and humour.

“The training someone gets here in their first year is significantly more than anywhere else I have ever seen,” he adds. Indeed, unusually for someone in such a senior position, Tulsiani himself spends two day a week working with staff on their development, including one-to-one support, role plays, accompanying them to meetings and feedback. “We have moved from a star team [with only a few high perfomers] to a team of stars,” says Tulsiani.

Creating more innovation around our customer solutions, and watching our people grow because that is most fun

Baggi’s philosophy

The company also makes extensive use of coaching, for example, to help its consultants to build credibility with senior executives of client organisations. The focus is on building on individual strengths, he explains. “The big thing is that now we have got a really clear idea of how we want people to develop here. Not only does that help them, it helps the firm progress too,” he adds.

While Green Park has enjoyed impressive growth, Tulsiani says this has only been sustained by being prepared to make changes and sometimes difficult ones at that.

After realising the company wouldn’t reach its targets for 2010-11, the two founders created a new partners board, made up of the chairman, the chief financial officer, three heads of department, as well as Tulsiani and Baggi. The board is responsible for much of the operational decision making, and although Tulsiani admits it was difficult for the two people who founded the firm “to get out of the way”, he credits the board with more thorough, rigorous decisions. One decision was to approve a budget for coaching themselves and key staff. “I thought it was excessive, but it has been tremendous in increasing levels of staff engagement, directly leading to customers spending a lot more money with the company,” says Tulsiani. The company has also worked hard at tapping into demand from its customers for widening the talent pool for interim and senior executive positions, says Tulsiani.

Looking to the future, there are plans to increase staff numbers from 37 to 40 by Christmas. The company also hopes to open branches in Birmingham and Manchester within the next 12 months. “We don’t want to be a ’one location, one geography, one service line’ business,” he says, adding that they are also open to joint ventures.

After a period of flat trading in the next year to 18 months, during which the firm will bed in new staff, Tulsiani expects the following two to three years to be one of maximising profits. While much of the company’s work comes from the public sector, he remains confident that even if spending is slashed as a result of cutbacks, there will still be ample opportunities to grow the business.

If all goes well, a memorandum of sale for what will by then be a £45m-£50m company will follow. Be that as it may, it is clear the two have already come along way from the 137 bus and that London back bedroom.