When draughtsman Geoff Lloyd opened an office above his father’s shop in 1978 he had no idea that his business would one day go global.

Alongside work pal Bryan Sullivan, the humble entrepreneur created Northenden Engineering Services (NES) to place friends into job roles.

After making commission on the placements the pair quickly saw potential in doing it full-time, setting up their own firm.

A year after starting the modest Northenden branch the ‘natural salesmen’ moved to Altrincham – where the business is still based today.

NES Global Talent supplies workers to the oil and gas sector

The booming business

Forty years have passed, and while Lloyd is still a shareholder in the business, it now has a new leadership team in place.

Suited and booted and ready to talk recruitment, I meet with a new pair of trailblazers – chief operating officer Simon Coton and his financial counterpart Steve Buckley.

Coton is a shining example of how to get on in the business, having joined in 1995 two weeks after graduating from Aberystwyth with a law degree.

He said: “I first joined NES in the low oil price environment of the mid-1990s, at the time we were one of a number of oil and gas staffing providers servicing an industry which was stabilising following the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, and looking for the best talent to help it meet global demands.

“We have certainly seen great change over the intervening decades with both politics and economics shaping the oil landscape, many competitors merging to survive and technology providing both opportunities and threats to the industry.

“I am proud to say, however, that NES has grown and thrived in this time, facing the challenges of the day head on and expanding both our capabilities and the industries we service to ensure we continue to deliver exceptional talent wherever it is needed.”

The Saudi office of NES Global

A global reach

Buckley, from Swinton, picks up this thread discussing the global reach of NES.

“We have 45 offices in 28 countries now – including Houston, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.

“When we go to these places they ask where Northenden is and we say it’s in Manchester.”

The passionate 50-year-old Mancunian, continues: “When I joined the business 11 years ago it was still very UK-centric but they started to dip their toes into global expansion.

“This was made easier on the back of oil and gas but we also operated in other sectors including power and life sciences.

“Now I would say we are a global business with a UK head office and the whole culture, ethos and mentality of the business has changed as well.”

With hubs all over the world NES Global Talent has placed 125 different nationalities into 91 countries. Even CEO Tig Gilliam is based in New York.

However, despite their international credentials, Manchester is described as ‘the heartbeat of the operation’ by the pair as it houses all the vital head office functions.

How does it work?

The USP for this recruitment firm is that they only recruit high-level specialist roles, or put bluntly, ones that are hard to find.

Described as ‘white collar’ engineering, they recruit for roles such as project engineers, design engineers and construction managers.

Average pay rates for this type of worker is around £500 a day, on a global scale, but they can go up to £1,500.

NES currently has 9,000 contractors working for them.

Coton says: “We have had contractors that have worked for us for 20 years, some of them stay a very long time and follow us around the world.”

To find the best talent and place them into roles the company relies on word of mouth as well as social media sites, such as LinkedIn where they have a reach of 250,000.

Buckley explains: “Our contractors are our best ambassadors, they could go to a competitor, but if we service them, pay them right and on time and look for the best opportunities for them they are going to recommend us.

“It used to be all about databases, which is still important, but now there are many more routes to market including utilising your network and social media.”

Who are their clients?

NES supply staff into some seriously big clients, the most notable being oil and gas company BP.

They also deal with the likes of American multi-national Exxon Mobil, Baker Hughes, Shell and Norwegian-based oil services company Aker Solutions.

Outside of the sector they also have contracts with manufacturing giant Siemens and chemical producer BASF.

The choice to diversify the sectors they supplied staff in to came after the 2013/14 fall in oil price.

Buckley said: “Before that date we were dominated by oil and gas but very quickly we had to diversify.

“In the last four years we have pursued a very successful diversification strategy.”

Part of that has been to take over other specialist recruitment companies that already deal in other areas.

“We have done six acquisitions in the last five years and a lot of them have been in other sectors,” continues the finance man.

“The most recent one was in life sciences, which is a real area of growth for us and one that we want to explore further.

“We have a very tight strategy, we look at many businesses but we want to focus on those that fit our culture.

“It’s a bit like a jigsaw really, we have geographies that we are not in and both oil and gas and non-oil and gas disciplines that we want to be in so if it ticks those boxes we will look at buying them.”

Coton points out that it is also about finding businesses who are supplying candidates of the same calibre.

NES Global offices

The business model

Interestingly, NES operate on mainly contracts-based appointments. This means that they place people into roles, pay them for the length of the contract and then invoice the client with a margin.

It is a smart move on several levels, as former Oxford man Buckley explains.

“The beauty of contract is that you build up a book so you place a man or a woman for 12 months and every month you get money from that. It’s great recurring income.

“If there is a downturn, like we saw in oil and gas, then permanent recruitment dries up because people stop recruiting, but a contractor book carries on, and if anything people switch to contract-based work because they still need people.”

However, in order to cover the cost of paying thousands of contractors each month they needed strong financial backing.

This came in 2012 when they were bought out by US-based AEA Investors, a New York fund.

In fact they have just completed a refinancing deal in May where they went out to the market and raised more than $200m from 20 institutions. This includes some UK firms, as they are supported out of Manchester by banks RBS and HSBC.

Asked about the impact of having strong backers, the CFO says: “Being part of AEA means that we have great terms and we are not just reliant on one lender, so there is good flexibility there.

“It also means if we spot a brilliant business that we want to buy we can move very quickly.”

All of this adds up to a strong financial performance with NES expected to pull in £900m revenue with year end in October. This equates to £45m EBITDA.

Although there’s no resting on their laurels, as they forecast: “We want to get to $100m profit very quickly.”

And it’s not the first time people are taking note of their potential.

Business of the Year Awards

A winning firm

In 2012 NES Global won the Manchester Evening News Business of the Year Award for best large firm.

This meant a lot, especially to local lad Buckley.

The Man City fan said: “It was great because we tend to win awards that are recruitment specific so to go against other big businesses and come out on top was incredible.

“We are a Manchester-based company, and as long as I’m here that won’t change, so you couldn’t win a better award than from the Manchester Evening News.”

So with all this success and progression are they wary of competitors catching them up – especially with being more reliant on open data sources like LinkedIn?

Buckley admits that there are a lot more recruiters out there now because there are low barriers to entry.

“If you wanted to set up a small, local, niche recruitment company in the UK you can do fairly easily”, he says.

“However, the beauty of where we are now is that there is significant barriers to entry of the global markets because you have to have the capacity and funding.

“Of course, we do have competitors, three or four global ones and a few based in the North West but when you look at all the facets of the company – particularly our capabilities – we are number one in the sector by some distance.”

There is clearly a certain way that they go about recruitment too.

Staff at NES Global Talent

What does it take to work in recruitment?

Passionate about the sector Coton said: “To be a successful recruiter you need hard work, have perseverance, and the ability to listen to and fully understand all of the other key people in the recruitment process, whether that be the client, the candidate or a line manager.

“A recruitment consultancy can do more harm than good if they do not represent their candidates in the correct way, and we recognise that we are only as good as the talent that we represent.”

To ensure that their staff continue to represent them well – 40 years and counting – they take special care when recruiting into their own business.

The COO says: “Our product is our staff, so the investment in that area, in training and development, is massive.

“Our sales force is the biggest driver of growth so we need to get it right.

“We take a lot of graduates and people who have done sales or recruitment in a less lucrative sector who are looking for something more professional or high end.”

NES Global celebrate 40 years in business

NES Global in 2018

Today, NES Global Talent has 750 staff across the world, with 154 of those based in Manchester.

This is up from 125 last year and includes 32 who have done 10 years service or more.

Buckley adds that they recruit a lot of local staff from around Greater Manchester too.

“They are local North West-based people but because we are a global business it opens up opportunities that they may have only dreamt of.

“People who have grown up here in Manchester can suddenly find themselves working in Dubai.

“We have global systems so my payroll manager, who’s from Macclesfield, can easily go work out of Singapore or Perth, Australia.

“I think there is a lot of personal satisfaction in seeing staff develop and those who might join us straight out of school eventually living the ex-pat lifestyle in places around the world.”

Coton picks up on this point: “That is a key part of the culture, the ability to develop, and people join us and progress to take on senior roles at a relatively young age.”

With the anniversary in mind, I ask them to elaborate on the culture of NES and why it works so well.

Leamington Spa native Coton said: “We are very honest and very open – it’s a non-political organisation.

“It is a real meritocracy, people are given a great chance to develop and succeed and that’s incredibly important.

“We really want to make it a great place to work.”

This includes an annual glitzy awards ceremony where staff nominate 16 winners including best employee and best salesperson.

The firm flys in around 100 people for the event which they believe drives real value in terms of staff motivation.

“We have a work hard, play hard ethic. It is a good place to work and we try to reward people for longevity,” finishes Coton.

The future

Naturally, that leads to the question what’s next?

“We want to become a true multi-sector global staffing company, that’s a key part of our vision” says the COO.

“There will be more investment into life sciences, renewable energy and chemicals which are related sectors where the skills are quite similar.”

Turning to tech they say the advancements have mainly been focused on systems and support but that innovations around apps and chatbots are being explored.

“From a front-end perspective, we have just invested in a new management information system, which is a lot more high tech because we know you have to invest to stay ahead of the times.”

However, despite fears around cyber security, which they are combatting with an on-site team of specialists, the truth is that they believe recruitment is still a people business.

“While we may use technology as best as we can to make our processes more efficient we don’t see recruitment as an industry that’s going to be taken over by technology,” Coton explained. “You can’t lose that personal touch, basically.

“A high amount of work goes into paying and invoicing, we are paying 9,000 people every month and that’s where the technology comes in and that’s where we have invested the time. But a lot of what we provide our clients can only be gleaned from an actual conversation.”

It’s great to think that 40 years on from those humble days, they may have a global team, working in a bigger marketplace and be on track to make tens of millions of dollars – but they still have to hammer the phones day in day out just the same way their founders did all those years ago in Northenden.