Senior Partners Review:

Last year was good for Davis Langdon, but this year has proved to be even better. However, it is not simply a case of celebrating the growth that has occurred in the business – we are working in a buoyant market. Growth is, in fact, well down our list of priorities, which will always be headed by service quality and that is the main focus of this Annual Review. What we mean by service quality is explained by Richard Baldwin in the article ‘Services with a Service’, which introduces a series of conversations with clients that give a real flavour of how we deliver.

The important thing for us about great results is that they energise the organisation to raise the bar for the next stage of the firm’s development and, certainly, they accelerate our evolution that this year has been exhilarating. Our growth has been 26% and our numbers have increased by 20%, so allowing for inflation we have managed to keep pace with our rise in turnover.

But it has meant that we have had to work harder at maintaining the Davis Langdon way of working. We have thus stepped up our induction, leadership and development programmes, each of which benefit from client input. Over the last year, we have invested over £2m on around 3,000 days of training.

Investment in our systems also continues to rise. The roll-out of our new operating system, Pinnacle, has improved our task management, enhanced our Best Practice guidance and made our collective knowledge and current innovations more accessible. £10m has been spent on IT in the last 3 years, and there is more to come with SAP to be rolled out in the Spring of 2008.

The quality of our workplaces is also rising and we will soon have 75% of our people in newly-fitted-out or expanded space. Our investments in people, IT and buildings are described more fully in the articles by Jill Pett and Jeremy Horner. I am confident that clients will feel the benefits of these investments in the forthcoming year, and I know that there will be no slackening of our obsession with client service.

We are always seeking to outperform the market and our competition wherever we choose to work and the merger of our Scottish operation with the leading consultancy, Mackenzie Partnership, is a good example. We now have 150 people in Scotland and the critical mass to deliver our service lines and specialist advice in all the major markets.

We have been warning for some time of the impact of emerging markets, and they are now really starting to bite. Alastair Collins’ article on Global Procurement offers some insights on this continuing trend, with examples of how our international network of offices is becoming increasingly important to our local delivery.

Rob Smith
London, November 2007