FAMILY business Russell Taylor Holdings has been named as the UK’s fastest-growing privately-owned recruitment company.

The Bromborough-headquartered engineering, logistics, and construction recruiter has topped the 2019 FAST 50 list announced by leading industry media outlet Recruiter and compiled from detailed analysis by a major global finance house.

This research by Clearwater International reveals that Russell Taylor Holdings, originally set up as a father and son operation in Wirral and now with a multi-million pound turnover and more than 400 staff, has achieved a compound annual revenue growth rate of 145.6 per cent over the three financial years ending December 2017.

However, its outstanding success in driving this growth has been attributed to two vital factors – its family values and workplace culture.

Chief executive Ben Russell said: “The past couple of years have undoubtedly been the most challenging in our history yet we have constantly stuck to our ideals centred on everything we believe in as a family-run business.

“From day one when there was just me, my father Peter and wife Claire working out of a spare room at home, our vision of running a reputable recruitment company giving unrivalled service, staffed by a happy and fulfilled workforce and committed to the local community, has never wavered.

“As a result, our turnover has increased to a figure we could only dream of in those early days when we set up the business in 2005. To top the FAST 50 list is a remarkable achievement and one of which we are all immensely proud.”

Russell Taylor Holdings, whose head office is on Riverside Park, has subsidiary companies of Russell Taylor Group, Recruit Right, Nexus People (formerly Transline), NMS Recruit and Assist Resourcing, spanning a range of sectors covering engineering, construction, industrial, commercial, transport, logistics and distribution.

The group employs around 407 staff and in 2017 had revenue of more than £91m.

Although much of the company growth can be attributed to acquisitions of blue-collar recruiter Assist Resourcing UK in January 2017 followed by the acquisition of labour procurer Transline four months later, the years in which there were no acquisitions saw expansion at an annual rate of between 15 and 20 per cent.

Wth no further acquisitions planned, Ben says he is confident that revenue will rise to a projected £165m this year, having achieved £125m sales in 2018.

Describing the reasons for the success of the business, Ben continued: “A lot of our success is because we are like a family business rather than a corporate. It is a family mentality rather than a very faceless corporate structure.

“The beauty of having five separate limited companies rather than one enormous company is that we can afford to be a little bit less corporate.”

Ben is particularly proud of the company’s staff turnover rate which, excluding the two 2017 acquisitions where some redundancies had to be made because the companies were “inflated in size”, stands at only 7 per cent, with staff staying with the company an average of around nine to 10 years.

As to why staff stay, Ben says it is simply down to treating them well: “We pay well, we bonus well, we develop and train, we support staff and we treat them like adults.”

As someone who didn’t do A-Levels or go to university, Ben is also a great believer in work-based learning as a way of developing people’s careers, favouring a grow-from-within approach. The company also runs apprenticeships across its various businesses, providing a source of “fantastic candidates” with many going on to become linchpins of the business.

The UK recruitment market is the largest in Europe, with around 39,000 recruitment agencies operating in the country.