LISTEN: Thirty days on from announcing its partnership with US-based Lee & Associates, Gerald Eve is on the hunt for more collaborations.
Simon Prichard, senior partner at Gerald Eve, said the company will be looking at the America’s, South America, Europe and Asia. “We would like to bed in this relationship [with Lee] and get deal flow in the next 12 months. But Canada is an important market that needs to be looked at… it’s a vanilla market and we should be there.”
Prichard said Europe is somewhere Gerald Eve would like “greater penetration and coverage, so that will be a focus over the next 12 months.”
He added that South America is relevant but “It’s challenging. I’m not sure we would open there, but it’s an interesting and evolving market.” Meanwhile, he said expansion in Hong Kong, where the company already does work, would also be on the cards.
“We will seek to look at groups that are similar to us and Lee,” said Prichard.
Of the Lee & Associates arrangement, Prichard said: “This is a smart way of doing business for both sides because there’s commonality and culture and there’s relatively little financial exposure to both groups.
“Clearly the deal is about revenue. We can dance around that and pretend it’s about other things but for both parties we want revenue.”
Explaining why Gerald Eve was the right fit for Lee & Associates, chief executive Jeffrey Rinkov, said: “We are a local market expert with national coverage and we find the culture that Gerald Eve has and the network they have built through the UK and Western Europe to be very similar, both in their entrepreneurial spirit, in their market coverage and their expertise in local markets in many countries.”
