Frank Recruitment Group has added nearly £50m to its turnover last year after a host of international openings boosted its income.
The Newcastle-headquartered firm, which specialises in finding niche talent for tech firms, saw its revenue jump from £180.4m to £227.9m during the year ending November 30 2018.
Much of the firm’s growth was attributed to its new office openings, with the firm’s CEO and chairman James Lloyd-Townshend adding that the US had performed particularly well.
Explaining the growth, Mr Lloyd-Townshend said: “Our ethos hasn’t changed one bit. We’re still committed to finding great people great jobs working with niche IT.
“We’ve massively amplified our presence in Europe and the United States, which has meant those areas are performing very, very well for us. I’m proud to say we’ve got almost 20 locations around the world now working with our global customer base.
“The technologies we’re specialising in and the markets we’re covering are also in a great place. Azure and AWS have really taken off as platforms recently, and Salesforce, NetSuite and ServiceNow are continuing to just get bigger, better, and more dominant, which means that the markets we’re operating in are incredibly healthy and there’s more demand than ever. It’s a great time to be in tech recruitment.”
Despite the huge increase in revenue, Frank Recruitment Group’s profit figure fell due to expenses relating to the new office openings.
Operating profit across the group fell from £14.8m to £14.3m, while profit after tax dropped from £13m to £10.1m.
Mr Lloyd-Townshend said: “We made substantial investments in 2018, including opening offices in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cologne, Denver, Irvine, Munich, Tampa, and Warsaw whilst continuing to expand our presence in our other global offices.
“This accelerated expansion saw our headcount increase significantly in the last year; up from 1,200 in 2018 to now almost 2,000 people, so with that level of investment naturally we expected to see a slight dip in operating profit.”
At the time of the accounting period, Frank’s growth had led it to add 129 staff members to its workforce, taking its total headcount to 1,281. The increase led to the firm’s staffing costs jumping from £52.6m to £64.8m.
