Q5 celebrates fifteen years of remarkable growth, expanding from a small team in London to over 300 people worldwide. With eight offices across the globe and significant community impact through the Q5 Foundation, we look forward to continuing our mission of building healthy organisations.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
This month, we celebrate fifteen years in business following an impressive period of growth.
Over the last decade and a half, we have expanded from five founders working in a converted basement in London to a team of over 300 people, based throughout the UK and overseas. This period of exponential growth has seen us build out our operations to include eight offices across the UK, Australia, North America, and the Middle East. We recently celebrated our 15th anniversary at Wimbledon AFC with Q5ers and their friends and family, a fun-filled day with circus acts, football tournaments, and socialising.
Watch our video below:
Since our inception, we have been engaged by some of the biggest brands and organisations across the globe and now serve 150 corporate clients each year. In addition to working in the commercial sector, we have also invested in social impact through the work of the Q5 Foundation.
Set up with the vision to give back to the communities in which we operate, the Foundation works across four key pillars:
The Foundation set up the award-winning ‘Pop Up Consulting’ initiative in 2020 to serve not-for-profits and small community-based businesses that were profoundly impacted by the pandemic. Since then, the initiative has supported over 150 organisations pro bono, and our consultants continue to volunteer their professional expertise to those who cannot otherwise access consulting services.
While celebrating the success of the past fifteen years, we are looking to the future where we’ll continue working towards our purpose of “building healthy organisations to propel people, economies, and society forwards.” We have recently invested in a specialist “Analytics Hub,” based in Smith Square, London, which interrogates clients’ organisational data (with their permission, of course) to provide insights on how to be more effective and efficient. We have also developed an AI-assisted platform called “Org Maps,” which assesses the performance of a company’s roles, work locations, and structures/spans and layers.
Now with two offices in North America, in New York and Houston, as well as two in the Middle East and Australia, we are also looking to expand further in the Middle East and Asia over the next two years.
Olly Purnell, co-founder and Managing Partner, commented: “Fifteen is nothing really, when you consider McKinsey is in its 90s and BCG in its 60s. But there is an infectious energy here, a spirit of determination that marks every Q5er out. I’m very proud of the phenomenal team effort that has taken an unknown brand to market, successfully over quite a period of time, whilst remaining resolutely independent. Those business leaders who know us well, routinely use us, time and again, as they know what they get from us: excellent organisation design and the foundation stones for a high-performing leadership team. The secret ingredient to our team’s success isn’t much of a secret – since day one, we have been relentless in focusing on the power of “We” over “Me”. I would like to thank our clients and, of course, our team of Q5ers who work so hard for them every single day.”