The real estate consultancy world is fast running out of partnerships. A handful remain, all resolute that they will never become anything else, until, of course, they do. Takeovers happen, different forms of ownership evolve. Change happens.
Montagu Evans is one of those few remaining partnerships that says it has no plans for change of ownership. It does, however, have plans to break free of the traditional view that many still hold about partnerships. And perhaps Montagu Evans.
Old? A little bit fuddy-duddy? Male-dominated? It is a firm that knows it was all of those things. But one that some fresh – and established – leadership has started to change.
Here, EG talks to a number of employees across the business to understand how Montagu Evans is evolving from a somewhat hidden-away partnership in Mayfair into a proud-to-be-different LLP in the heart of the Square Mile.
Montagu Evans, or Monties as it is affectionately known among its people, began its physical transformation into something different in 2019, when it decided to leave its home at 5 Bolton Street, W1, and establish a new base at 70 St Mary Axe, EC3, also known as the Can of Ham.
The space couldn’t be more different. And for many at Monties there was a fear that its strong public sector customer base would question what the consultancy was doing with its fees if it could afford the swanky new space.
The opposite has been true, says managing partner Rob Bower, claiming the space is actually winning them more business, with people taking the firm a lot more seriously. The firm’s most recent results offer evidence of this, with turnover up by 22% to £64.1m in the year ending March 2022 and all fee-earning departments recording revenue increases of more than 20%.
“The space and location has helped us attract and retain talent,” says Bower. “It has physically brought to life what we have been trying to do with the business: modernise.”
Out with the old…
Moving Montagu Evans away from its old image into something that looks, feels and operates more like a modern business is exactly what HR director Vicky Thompson has been tasked with doing since joining the company in 2019.
Arriving at Monties from legal firm Bird & Bird, she was well versed in the world of partnerships. What she wasn’t quite ready for in real estate, however, was the lack of diversity – not just in terms of gender, but in the cookie-cutter churn of surveyors from Reading University. That wasn’t to say Reading was churning out bad surveyors, it was just where everyone was coming from.
So since 2019 Thompson has worked hard to boost the number of women in the firm. Of its 99 partners, some 14% are now women – albeit it with just one (Jenny Rydon) a profit-sharing partner.
In 2020, led by Thompson, the firm invited an external consultancy to help it better understand the experiences and perceptions of women in the business. The result of that research was the development of a women’s leadership programme. A programme which Thompson says is not about giving women a “step up”, but is about retaining women in the business and supporting them into leadership roles.
The biggest challenge in real estate – familiar across all the surveying firms – is social mobility. Reading may well churn out female surveyors at the same rate as male surveyors, but their backgrounds are often eerily similar.
Thompson wants dissimilar so has set up a scheme where the business can go into schools within the boroughs it works in to engage with young people who might never get the opportunity to go to Reading. It is currently operational in four schools but has ambitions for more.
“The biggest challenge we have,” says Thompson, “is what does success look like? We have a diverse group [of grads/apprentices] coming through in September, but it is about bringing them the whole way through. It is the inclusion bit that says success to me, seeing that diversity though to senior surveyor, through to associate and through to partner.”
But she is confident that if anyone can do it, Montagu Evans can.
“I think that little old Monties has the opportunity to lead because we can be agile and we are doing it in our own way,” she says. “This is a cliché because one of our values is ‘be yourself’, but we are somewhere where you really can come and be yourself and thrive. It’s all about client service and having the environment where you can solve really complex issues through diversity of thought.”
Importance of self
Cliché as it might be, being yourself, being a bit different, working collaboratively in true partnership and having an entrepreneurial spirit, were themes that came up across all six Monties employees EG spoke with.
“Monties has this ethos of bring your whole self to work and I really love that,” says Kate Brennan, head of BTR. “It’s not just something we spin out to sound like a great place to work, but it’s that everyone has something they can bring to the table. Everyone has different life experiences and there is all this difference that actually makes us special.”
One of the changes the move to the Can of Ham brought about was the removal of silos, of departments sitting with departments. Teams that need to sit together to work sit together, they feed off each other’s ideas and conversations. They collaborate.
“We sit in neighbourhoods,” explains partner and head of planning Craig Blatchford. “Rather than all the planners sitting together, all the agents sitting together. So, for example, in the planning team, the commercial group quite often sits among the agents and development consultants who specialise in shopping centre repurposing or retail warehouse asset management. It helps those skill sets start up and then, as if by osmosis, you are starting to learn about things.”
“Walking around the office, there’s a vibrancy,” adds Brennan. “You can actually feel it. I know it sounds a bit naff, but you can feel the collaboration because it is that excitement, that engagement. It’s not a bunch of old men sitting in a room boring each other.”
Being different and breaking down the boring was exactly why Jenny Rydon, partner and head of the strategic advisory business, was brought into Montagu Evans. A non-surveyor, Rydon was brought in to utilise her management consultant skills and help Monties think differently about its service offer for clients.
She has become something of a role model for modern working at Monties. A reflection of how a business can flex and how its people can too. And how real partnerships are about trust, care and understanding.
Her story starts with a traumatic pregnancy. One in which her son arrived very early, on foreign shores. The business immediately came to the rescue, offering any and all support Rydon and her family might need. It has continued to do so since, enabling a profit-sharing partner to work in the way she needs to, so she can fulfil her job at Monties and her job as a parent of a disabled child.
For Rydon, collaboration is key in Monties’ transformation from traditional Mayfair-based partnership to 21st century advisory.
“In my role as leading strategic advisory I’m selling collaboration, so if we don’t operate in that way ourselves, I’m not giving a true perception, a true offer to our client base,” she says. “Collaboration is the buzzword of the day, but it is genuinely what we are trying to monetise. We have to build that into our culture and our blueprint.”
She adds: “There are some scary, clever people here and they need to be stretched. We need to give them opportunities to change our industry, and that’s only going to happen when we put them in a room together and throw a complex problem at them.”
Staying relevant
So is the new Montagu Evans the industry’s problem solver?
It certainly wants to focus on solving some of the biggest issues in the built environment, through using its key strengths of planning and development, says partner and head of rating advisory Josh Myerson.
“In terms of where Monties is moving to, it is recognising the contribution we can make to planning and development challenges,” he says. “Especially at the moment with properties reaching the end of their life, there is a need for change. How can we bring our skill sets and our services together in a genuinely collaborative way to help clients make the changes required to their real estate interests to survive, stay relevant and not get left behind?”
It is advice that Monties can give as it is advice it has lived.
“I think it is probably fair to say when you are inside Montagu Evans you see the change. I suspect our external perception lags behind the reality, and the move to St Mary Axe was very much a watershed moment,” says Myerson. “It was the moment we broke out and showed the reality of Montagu Evans. It was such a clear way of us demonstrating to the market that we had been on that journey for quite some time before but we were hidden in Bolton Street and it was all a little bit masked by an identity that probably fitted our old-school identity.”
For managing partner Bower, it is about becoming an agency that knows what it is about. That becomes the best at what it does. Commercially that is being one of the, if not the, leading planning and development consultancies in the UK, an agency that is just as comfortable telling its clients they shouldn’t do anything as it is advising on what business to undertake.
Professionally – and perhaps personally – it is about being a leading modern partnership, for its people and its clients.
“Partnership is at the heart of what we do. It all comes down to how the business is run, how people behave and how they are building trust,” says Bower. “And you can do magic things when you have trust.”
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
