A company update from Co-Founder Craig Davies.
2021 was a record-breaking year for Orbis.
Taking a moment to recognise and celebrate the strides we’ve made in the past year, let’s note some key achievements of the company as a whole:
We have increased our headcount by over 100%, with 29 new colleagues joining us over the course of 2021, and we’ll be welcoming 8 more new faces to the team in January alone!
We’ve cultivated a collaborative, friendly culture of support that demonstrates the value of investing in great people. We continue to do so by fostering constant learning and growth and will be enhancing this with some new initiatives in 2022 for employee training and development.
In line with the growth of the team, we have committed to bigger office spaces in both London and New York, to support our growth and create a more comfortable and collaborative space for our team to enjoy. Maintaining the amazing culture we’ve created is not a top-down endeavour, it’s something we’ve created over time and is a collective effort to ensure we’re bringing in great people who will all take responsibility as we scale our teams.
As we continue to grow the company and onboard colleagues at various levels, our D&I strategy is more important to us than ever, and we’ll be focusing on specific goals in terms of this throughout 2022.
Diversity is one aspect of the wider business world that’s particularly exciting at this moment in time; huge challenges remain but progress can also be seen. Across our industry and beyond more businesses are focusing on diversifying their teams, and adding voices and perspectives to their table. A lack of diversity and non-inclusive practices are unacceptable in 2022, but more than this; homogenous workforces do not pave the way for progress, innovation, creativity and growth. This is a positive change to see both for our community and for us as a business that we’re looking forward to pushing much further this year.
Let’s take a moment, however, to recognise a D&I goal we already smashed last year; setting out to increase our female representation in the business to 30%, we went beyond. Across our team, we now have 35% female representation.
We know that female role models within a business are incredibly important, therefore we have focused on bringing onboard female leaders, as well as increasing representation at entry level.
The name Orbis comes from the word Global… It’s always been our plan to expand worldwide, and we ventured across to the US and into Europe in recent years. We continued to grow into new locations filled with potential, getting on the ground with offices in Nashville in 2020 and Miami in 2021!
Last year the company also saw a 50% increase in year-on-year revenue, generating reward and wealth for everyone in the business, in addition to a notable increase in our average fees and improved margin in terms of clients, bespoke engagements and retainers, and nearly a 100% increase in new placements. Once again a massive well done to the entire team for making all this happen!
In terms of focusing on achievements, it’s important to be critical and interpret the significance of each change specifically. When the lines all go up and the numbers grow bigger, we can pat ourselves on the back… but the true value of reflection comes from digging deeper. For instance, we look at the significance of our number of first interviews on the basis of the ratio of first interview-to-placement, defining the quality of our process, not simply taking numbers at face value.
We’re in a great position to kick off 2022 with the powerful platform that we’ve built, our plans are ambitious and exciting.
In 2022 we plan to double our company-wide headcount once again.
We’ll continue to diversify geographically too, launching offices in Austin, Glasgow and a location in California. That’s just a start! We’ve also got our eye on some other potential homes from home farther down the road.
Alongside Orbis, we’ve created fantastic brands in OV Search and Coex, which both have exciting plans to scale this year, with the support of our media platform Host.
We have an excellent and evolving business support team that is growing and will directly catalyse all of the aforementioned growth plans.
We’re getting bigger, sure. But it’s constantly getting better and being the world’s best that we really care about. Operating at scale and across different brands, in various cool locations, enables us to really optimize those relationships with the clients and candidates that we work so hard for.
The opportunity is there for all of us and we plan to reach and grab it with both hands.
