AddingValue has announced a 24 per cent increase in gross revenue with events business ‘continuing to bounce back’ for the year ended March 2011.
Founding partner of the Twickenham-based agency, Randle Stonier, said the result was some way off the 80-90 per cent growth the company aspired to when it was first established five years ago, but was "decent " given the current market conditions. The company posted abbreviated accounts with Companies House this month.
“We’re certainly going to be in the region of 25 per cent growth for the current financial year as well,” he said. “If we can keep 20 per cent as a guide year-on-year we can’t complain too much.”
Looking ahead, short lead times continue to make planning difficult, he said, but business is starting to come through. “We’ve just in the last two weeks signed a new project that we don’t get the benefit of until 2013, but if we retain everything we’ve got then we’ll have 15 per cent uplift already on gross income for 2013. There are new projects out there to win and some are quite sizeable.”
Another confirmed project includes a 500 person conference for the Milton Institute, a philanthropic organisation established to drive thought leadership around foreign policy, education and healthcare.
“We executed the project for the first time this year at the Heron Tower near Liverpool Street station. It was the first time the event had taken place outside of the US and we took over six floors of the building, creating a village. There was a very eclectic mix of people there: the German finance minster, the former prime minister of Pakistan, the chief executive of WPP, the oil magnate T. Boon Pickens and Lord John Brown. It’s quite a gathering.”
The agency has also recently taken on two new members of staff, bringing the headcount up to 22, and would like to expand further but is restricted by its current offices.
“We’re pretty much bursting at the seams and really need to move onto the next stage of our development but that requires us to take on a property two and half times that of what we’re already in with a corresponding increase in rent and rates and I’m terrified of doing it,” Stonier admitted. “In the short term we’ll stay put until I feel ballsy enough. We’re optimising all the technology to ensure remote working is possible and the troops understand the situation.”