Brian Hamill saunters into Imprint’s swish Sheraton Street headquarters in swanky Soho in exuberant spirits. He’s been celebrating Europe’s Ryder Cup victory over the Yanks and soon begins recounting why he’s an authoritative voice in the recruitment sector, rather than the Irish rugby legend or superstar golfer he once dreamt of becoming.

Brian Hamill saunters into Imprint’s swish Sheraton Street headquarters in swanky Soho in exuberant spirits. He’s been celebrating Europe’s Ryder Cup victory over the Yanks and soon begins recounting why he’s an authoritative voice in the recruitment sector, rather than the Irish rugby legend or superstar golfer he once dreamt of becoming.

After leaving university and cutting his recruitment teeth with Hays, the business graduate found a liking for the thrill of the recruitment world and decided to strike out on the entrepreneurial path at the precocious age of 24. He founded the Walker Hamill agency in London in 1988, with backing from fellow Irishman Pierce Casey, currently a director of Alchemy Venture Partners and formerly Apax Partners director.

‘My friend Pierce funded it as a start-up with £50,000 and Apax on board as private equity backer,’ recounts Hamill. From small acorns the business grew into a search and selection agency with international reach and a top-notch reputation for delivering quality candidates to blue-chip clients.

‘By 1998, we had built up a business we were able to sell for £28 million,’ Hamill recalls. After it was sold to London- and Dublin-listed Marlborough International, Hamill was appointed to the board, where his duties covered scoping out international acquisitions and managing operations in Europe. However, the entrepreneurial bug soon bit once more and he threw off his Marlborough shackles, leaving in September 2000 to set up current endeavour Imprint.

Bright idea

‘By late 2000, I had already begun thinking about how I might set up something new,’ he recalls, ‘probably a buy-and-build venture. And after considering various options, I decided that we would need a good currency, not only to buy businesses but also to attract the right people into the group.

‘So, we decided to take the public company route through a friends-and-family placing of £1 million, involving Jon Moulton [Alchemy Partners’ managing partner] and a bunch of other people that Pierce and I had met in the past.’

Imprint began trading in the summer of 2001, having already listed on AIM in May 2001, and it’s not an exaggeration to say this was a bold move. Imprint was the first start-up recruiter on AIM. Hamill tirelessly led the flotation, outlining his vision to the City’s great and good, who readily warmed to his convincing message.

‘We said to them, “Come in on a sector that has not traditionally covered itself in glory and we will build a multi-tiered recruitment group,” achieving this by creating strong, lasting partnerships with clients on a global basis. The institutions loved it,’ he recalls. All seemed to be going well, then 9/11 struck.

Aside from wider political and social impact, ‘the market just fell off a cliff,’ recalls Hamill. ‘The banks stopped hiring and there was a knock-on effect in the corporate world. Between September 2001 and 2002, we were burning through cash and losing £400,000 a month. At one point we were down to just five or six weeks’ money, and our cash and share price were at an all-time low,’ he remembers.

As well as tight cash management, the key to surviving those dark days was, ‘very good communication with our investors. Thankfully, our customers started to come back. We had managed to successfully keep the company alive throughout the worst market in living memory.’ Institutional investors were impressed and haven’t hesitated to back Hamill’s strategy since.

Figures for 2002 reflected the woeful market conditions, with Imprint suffering losses of £1.2 million despite scoring top-line growth. But the company turned a corner in 2003, managing to post its first annual profits by taking a further share of recovering markets.

Calendar year 2004 saw Hamill preside over a 230 per cent profits push to £1.25 million on £7.9 million turnover and, in a transformational 2005, pre-tax profits skyrocketed by 262 per cent to £4.5 million. Recent half-year figures showed that good times continue to roll, with profits powering north by 125 per cent to
£4.2 million. The company’s terrific rates of organic growth have been supplemented by some canny strategic acquisitions.

Hamill has built Imprint into that ‘multi-tiered’ global recruiter he promised from day one, servicing blue-chips from Tesco and Vodafone, financial services giants Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, to Ernst & Young and Deloitte. Imprint’s array of brands – WoodHamill, Imprint Search & Selection, Accreate, ECHM, Morgan McKinley – means it can cross-fertilise clients between its brand and markets.

Hamill says it undertakes detailed candidate research for its clients and is keen to increase its number of top-tier preferred supplier agreements. ‘Our business model is all about having more than one brand so we can have greater penetration into our clients’ world. I believe that we are the only one doing top-to-tail recruitment with a shared service platform – that is, common shared service functions and systems,’ he boasts.

Onwards and upwards

This pride is justifiable given Imprint’s staggering recent financial success. Indeed, the share price has rocketed by more than 700 per cent since the summer of 2003, valuing the business at £110 million, a figure that could soon double.

‘We think our model will support a business twice the current size. We already have good organic growth rates, but we want to grow our market value to £200 million over the next six months. In order to do that, we are looking for a substantial acquisition,’ Hamill teases.

Imprint already operates in Asia (Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong), and beyond the UK into Europe, and he says the French and German markets have strategic appeal.

Indeed, no part of the globe appears to escape Hamill’s radar. He recently blazed another trail by making inroads into the Middle East through the acquisition of Ingram, one of the United Arab Emirates’ top recruitment firms. It’s a deal he claims will give Imprint a strategic foothold in the buoyant Dubai and ‘Gulf Cooperative Community’ markets.

‘First mover advantage there is key,’ says Hamill excitedly, ‘and we are the first of the listed players in our particular industry to go into Dubai, though Michael Page has now opened there too. There’s so much growth to come in Dubai and to sustain that growth, the region will need to bring in people from outside.’

Acquiring Ingram will provide new routes to market for the 400,000 candidates on Imprint’s database and Hamill gets the whiff of huge opportunity once more. He expects rival firms to follow Imprint’s lead. ‘Dubai is the world’s biggest building site and the Middle East is developing as a financial centre thanks to the rise of “petrofinance”, with all the big investment banks now moving there.’

Considering his experience, who better than Hamill to forecast the fortunes of his sector? ‘Traditionally, the recruitment market goes in seven-year cycles,’ he elucidates. ‘The period 1994 to 2000 was a great time and now we are about three years into an upturn, so as far as you can predict these things, I don’t think the market will go down next year.’

Having Hamill at the helm, with sector insight like that, is a key reason why Imprint has so successfully made its mark.