Monday Interview: Andy Roe, Joint CEO of Hortor

A rapidly growing strategic resourcing consultancy business which has made a global impact now wants to make its presence known in its home county of Yorkshire.

Hortor, based in the Platform building in the centre of Leeds, was founded in Horsforth by Andy Roe and Andy Nicholson in 2014.

Although it has only been trading since spring of 2015 the firm’s headcount has already soared to 160 people and it recorded a turnover of about £11m in May of this year. The business, which now also has offices in London, Costa Rica, the USA, is expecting a group turnover of £15m to £18m by May next year.

Hortor expects its total headcount to be nearing 200 by this Christmas, and is looking to expand significantly within its Leeds city centre base in the next 12 to 18 months.

Roe has a professional background in financial services, retail and business process outsourcing. For the last 20 years he has worked for big organisations, including Littlewoods, Capita and the mail order firm Otto. His last corporate role before founding Hortor was as Managing Director of Capita Customer Management.

Roe said 85 to 90% of Hortor’s activity so far has been overseas, stressing he would like to see the business engage more with Yorkshire-based firms in future.

“We’ve invested heavily in G-Cloud 11, the framework that allows you to work with central and local government,” he said. “And we would like to do more work with local government, we don’t do much of that at the moment.”

He attributed Hortor’s success partly to the fact that he and Nicholson both originally come from outside the industry and are well aware of the challenges their clients face.

“Also, we’re an international business with opportunities across the world, there’s no country we won’t look at,” he added. “Next year we’ll be opening four more offices across Central Europe and the Middle East.

“We are agile and can respond quickly. If someone asks us something in the morning, we’ll have an answer for them by the evening, or if not then, by the next day.

“As the two guys who run the business, we’re accessible to everyone who works here and that’ll always be the case. We’re in it for the long-term, we provide an extremely good service and we are quite innovative with our solutions.

“We always look at what new services we can offer our clients, and as a business, what new clients we can get.”

Hortor works with a range of industries including IT and telecoms, financial services, government, consultancy, retail and utilities, offering managed services as well as recruitment and specific project management contracts.

Roe said one of the main issues the company faces is recruiting people with the right talents, which is why the firm has launched its own graduate training programme.

“We’d struggled to find the right people in Leeds and Yorkshire so we decided to develop the talent ourselves,” he said. “We’ve just taken on two graduates in Leeds and we’re about to take on seven more in London.

“In the next year we will recruit another 10 to 12 graduates in Leeds. We’ll offer them a structured programme and train them in the way we do business. We’re not a traditional recruitment agency and we’re looking for people who can fit in with our culture.

“We’ll need to hire another 50 to 60 people in Leeds in the next two to three years, and expect our London office to grow on a similar basis.”