Darling Associates looks to more than double in size

Darling Associates has unveiled plans to significantly increase its staff numbers and regional profile with the acquisition of existing firms – the first of which will see it opening a Manchester base.

The practice, which has close on 90 staff in offices in London and Poland, has bought Wilmslow-based Architect-CT, which has headcount of around 30, and plans to move the business 10 miles north to Manchester.

董事总经理克里斯•达林表示，该公司还在考虑在爱丁堡和西南部设立办事处，以期在未来五年内将员工人数增加到200人。

“Our business has been doing extremely well over the past couple of years, and we wanted to keep our foot on the gas,” he said.

Darling Associates’ most recent annual accounts, published in July last year, reported turnover growing 26% to £6.31m in 2016-17. The firm saidpre-tax profit was up 52% to £1.53m.

“To get into a local market, you really must be there. They don’t want to deal with people who are commuting up and down on trains,” Darling said.

“我们在布里斯托尔、埃克塞特和普利茅斯都有现场项目，它们都是价值4000万英镑、6000万英镑和8000万英镑的项目，所以我们有足够的工作流程来证明这个工作室的可行性。这是我正在积极关注的问题。而在爱丁堡，我认为会很有趣。”

In relation to Architect-CT, Darling said the hotel and hospitality specialist was being bought “lock, stock and barrel” from director Paul Brook, who was expected to remain with the firm over a two-year transition period before retiring.

“They’re in two sectors that we’re not really in, so it gives us diversity and it gives us geographical diversity,” he said.

“The studio’s doing really well at the moment. We don’t want to come in and radically change anything. But gradually over the two-year period the businesses will be brought together so we’re all running as one consistent team.”

However he added that a Manchester base would give Darling Associates a platform to develop its mainstay residential and office offer in the north west.

Darling said he believed hitting a staff headcount of 200 over the next few years was a “reasonable objective” that would give the practice the capacity to handle the workloads it envisaged.

“With this acquisition we’ll be 120. I don’t see why we couldn’t over the next three to four years push that on to 200,” he said.

“Once you get to that kind of size as a practice you tend to have a greater momentum and you have a proportionately higher profile as well.

“At that kind of level you have the ability to do a huge diversity of projects. We’ve got several projects in excess of £200m, but they’re sucking in 20 people each. For a practice of our size, that’s a big proportion on one project.

“I’m an ambitious person, and I want to go forward and see where we hit our ceiling.”