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Cass Allen turns 25
As we celebrate a successful 25 years in business, our founder Patrick Allen reflects on how it all started.
The seeds of the company were sown over a long lunch with some clients. They were going through a massive and rapid growth phase and were complaining about the difficulty of finding reliable consultants that they wanted to work with. They discussed what their ideal consultancy firm would look like and it struck me that their idealised firm chimed very closely with how I thought consultancy firms should be run.
The fundamental ethos of such a firm could be summarised as “clients may not understand the technicalities of a consultant’s specialism, but they certainly know whether they are getting good customer service”. In other words, the firm should be run around client needs and not the firm’s. There’s nothing particularly new here, but there was definitely a gap in the acoustics industry for such a firm at the time.
My lunch companions wondered why I hadn’t started my own firm, and so the idea of Cass Allen was born.
Customer service is easy when you’re working on your own and have control of everything, but how do you keep the same company ethos when taking on staff and growing the company? Here, a principle of Richard Branson helped me out. He said there’s no secret to exceptional customer service, just employ nice people.
This is something we have always strived to do, taking the view that you can always train staff to become excellent at acoustics, but you can’t train staff to have excellent personalities.
This approach seems to have been successful judging by the sustained growth we have achieved year after year throughout our first 25 years. During that time we have been delighted to work on interesting projects for valued clients, many of whom have been with us from the early days of the company.
I am hugely grateful to those clients who have trusted us to advise them and the many wonderful colleagues who have shared this journey with me. Most of the senior staff have been with the firm 10 years or more, and I know that the firm is secure in their hands. I look forward to the next 25 years!
