Greythorn & The FiveTen Group
In early 2006 I was contacted by Graham Palfery-Smith with an idea to secure private investment and acquire specialist recruitment businesses. This was the most exciting period of my career.
These businesses would be supported by a global IT framework that I would design, build and manage. The overall goal being to create a global ‘sausage factory’ where we can on-board a candidate in one country, facilitate training et al, procure necessary visas and other required documentation, then pop them out in another country to fill a vacancy.
After securing one-hundred-million pounds of funding and the same amount as an overdraft facility, we started a huge acquisition project.
The first company was Greythorn Recruitment Ltd. At the time of acquisition this was 189 people in 13 offices. At the end of my tenure, we were 750 people in 31 offices, spread all around the world.
The global IT system was centred in Hong Kong – the only reason being that HK was the only datacentre location globally that we could get ~65ms round trip times to every global office.
Eventually, we ran voice and data over SDSL links to local Internet providers, created secure VPNs to the datacentre and supplied apps back via thin client. The system worked so well that the remote apps loaded faster than local.
As acquisitions progressed, we consumed their IT staff and licences – adding them to a group MVLP (Microsoft Volume Licencing Programme), allowing licences to be ‘moved’ around the World in a follow the sun model.
Each and every member of my IT team was brilliant. But more than that, they were committed and passionate. They repeatedly demonstrated a level of drive and dedication that was second to none.