David Evans, CEO of business consultancy Grass Roots, explains why he decided to put down roots outside London.

David Evans, CEO of business improvement consultancy Grass Roots, explains why he decided to put down roots outside London.

In 1984, the components of Grass Roots, the business I’d founded four years earlier, were spread from London to Leeds. I took the risk of borrowing a large sum of money on a personal indemnity and brought everything together at a country house in Hertford.

At the time, the conventional wisdom was that staying out of London for a services business such as ours was akin to staying out of touch. How wrong that was. We have remained headquartered in Tring, and thanks to a lot of hard work and determination from our staff, we have grown from a turnover of £11 million when I took that decision to almost £300 million today.