| | By Mick James
It’s an ill wind that
blows no-one any good,
and for project and
programme management
specialists Moorhouse
Consulting there’s a
silver lining even in
the credit crunch.
“We’ve outgrown our
current offices and are
moving to new ones,”
says founder and chief
executive Dom Moorhouse.
“We’ve outgrown this
office and would have
moved before, but 18
months ago the London
commercial property
market was not so good.”
A proposed plan of
the new offices is
proudly displayed on the
wall of Moorhouse’s
offices, with all sorts
of intriguing features,
although I wonder
whether the table
football will make it to
the final cut.
“It’s a good place
and a good project,”
says Moorhouse. “It’s an
example of the way the
consulting group also
develops the future of
the business.”
The firm is only
moving round the corner,
to stay in a sweet spot | |
|
| | in the back streets of
Westminster, where many
of the firm’s clients
can be found.
“In fact we want our
office to be a place our
clients can use as well,
if they are in London
and want to have a hot
desk, or arrange a
meeting,” says
Moorhouse.
His company is now
five years old, and has
established a name for
itself in project and
programme management,
which it has recently
begun to underpin by
entering and winning
some prestigious awards.
Although Moorhouse
has large private
clients such as BT, it
has long had a public
sector “skew” and
recognises a threat in
that many firms which
had previously not been
rivals will now be
aiming spare resources
in that direction.
“The public sector
will become more
competitive, but the
procurement challenges
are formidable,” says
Moorhouse and he is
hoping that the length
and depth of the firm’s | |
| |
| | the counterforce is all
these financial
securities, the whole
pause in globalisation,”
he says.
“We’re still
recruiting. In some
regards we are small
enough and specialist
enough to think we can
duck the macro trends.”
Those macro trends have
however caused an
increase in applications
for Moorhouse, but the
increase in supply
hasn’t necessarily eased
the “war for talent”.
“Before Christmas we
were getting 50
applications a month –
since Christmas it’s
peaked at 150 a month,”
says Moorhouse. “Our
application-to-hire
ratio used to be about
100 to 1, now it’s more
like 150 to 1 – there
are more applicants but
it’s more effort to
filter them.”
Moorhouse adds that a
lot of people
“self-select” out when
they realise the tempo
the firm works at.
“It’s very important
to us to maintain the
dynamic and the
narrative of the firm,” | |
|
| | he says. “If someone if
off the beat it stands
out a mile.”
This is vital because
of Moorhouse’s
“get-in-and-get-out”
philosophy. “We’re not a
big firm that’s going to
land and expand,” he
says. “Increasingly, the
savvy client finds that
distasteful. Our size is
in that sense a positive
for us because our
provenance is the same
talent pool but we don’t
have the resources to do
that to them.”
While this may also
mean that the firm lacks
what Moorhouse calls the
“surge potential” of a
big consultancy, this is
not where its strengths
will ever lie.
“The negative aspect
of size is when you go
to some of these large
framework exercises, and
it’s either a service
scale issue or a ‘no-one
got fired’ situation,”
he says. “Our sweet spot
is around the
three-to-four person
team, we have had blips
on that and gone up to
10 but even in larger
accounts the
three-to-four person
team is the real | |
|
| | expertise will now stand
it in good stead.
“We have breakfast
seminars, which have
always been
well-attended and we
genuinely enjoy running
them,” he says. “But
recently attendance has
shot up, and if you look
round the room there are
people who are running
some of the UK’s most
ambitious projects. So
much so that the [Office
of Government Commerce]
recognised the level of
our attendees and asked
to come and present.”
Like many of the
consulting firms I have
spoken to, Moorhouse saw
a freeze in spending
towards the end of last
year which has now
thawed somewhat, with
the firm achieving its
highest-ever utilisation
in February.
“Outsourcing has
definitely still got
some energy to it, in
terms of cost reduction
pieces around where
people are looking at
mission critical but
non-core activities, but | |
|
Previous Page 
