A cadre of directors has left the IT recruiter Spring group to form their own breakaway company.

John O’Sullivan, Jon Butterfield and Michael Bennett previously ran Best International, which Spring bought for £7.5m in 2003. Best was at the time the largest privately owned IT recruiter in the UK.

With Andy Lord, formerly Best’s northern regional director, they have formed a new agency, ReThink, based in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue.

The team negotiated departures from Spring early this year with a plan to get funding, naming, branding and set-up done within four months.

ReThink now has three offices – its London headquarters, plus two bases in Bristol and Manchester.

The new agency has around 35 staff and has plans to grow to 60 by the fourth quarter through acquisition and organic growth.

Butterfield said: “The earn-out was finished and there was an opportunity to build another organisation very quickly and with some good people.

“The split was amicable but Spring was not the sort of company I wanted to work in long-term.

“A large number of people who were formerly at Best said they wanted to give it a go. It was a bit like The Blues Brothers – we were putting the band back together.”

ReThink operates in the mid-market of IT recruitment and takes on IT workers as employees, trains them up and then contracts them out.