‘A breath of fresh air to clients’
◆ Rosemary Gallagher meets Craig Hutcheon, finance sector recruitment and consultancy services specialist, who is building an innovative business on his three pillars of deals, people and insights
As Craig Hutcheon’s career in finance progressed, he experienced first-hand how difficult it could be to find qualified and experienced people to fill various roles, such as senior accountancy positions. But rather than accept this as a perennial problem, Hutcheon, a chartered accountant, decided to do something about it.
He co-founded Hutcheon Mearns in Aberdeen in 2015 to offer recruitment and consultancy services to the finance sector.
The firm added an office in Dundee in 2021 and Edinburgh in 2023. It has increased its headcount to around 60 people and now focuses on three key areas: deals, people and insights.
Hutcheon Mearns recently moved to a new office on Coates Crescent in the Scottish capital where it has signed a five-year lease. The firm has its eyes set on further expansion across the Central Belt, including the prospect of a physical presence in Glasgow.
Hutcheon began his career at KPMG, where he says he enjoyed the variety that came with being seconded to other departments and companies, such as Wood.
One of the partners left KPMG to go to oil and gas services business Reservoir Group, and Hutcheon decided to move to join him there to take up the position of group finance controller.
He recalls: “My role was to help integrate all the businesses that were being acquired by the group. We made about 30 acquisitions across the world. In 2013, we were bought by ALS. I had been approached by private equity companies about potentially coming in as a chief finance officer in one of their portfolio businesses. But I had always wanted to set up a business and decided to do it. One of my former colleagues at KPMG had already gone into business on his own, in a different kind of market, and we decided to come together.”
Hutcheon expands on the challenge his business was aiming to tackle. “There was a lack of options when you had a resource problem in the finance market. Accountants tend to be risk averse and stay in the same place for a long time.
“This also means there isn’t a huge temporary market for qualified accountants. There wasn’t one company that serviced accountancy teams across the board with a full suite of resource solutions.”
Hutcheon adds: “We launched the business having never done recruitment before, so we didn’t have any kind of preconceptions of what the process should be. We created everything from scratch based on our experiences of being candidates or clients in the finance world.”
They augmented Hutcheon Mearns with a team of highlyskilled accountants who had worked in both practice and industry and could go into clients’ businesses to fill relatively short-term gaps in finance teams, for example, if someone was on maternity leave, or the company was growing quickly.
They added a full “virtual finance” outsourcing offering to Hutcheon Mearns, before teaming up with a former colleague from the Reservoir Group who was working on the creation of a corporate finance business. This is how the firm came to have the three pillars of deals, people and insights which Hutcheon believes make it unique.
He adds: “We’re supporting clients in these different ways and that’s never been done by one business before. We’re always trying to solve problems and identify areas that are likely to cause issues in the future.”
Hutcheon Mearns now has one of the biggest deals teams in Scotland outside of the “big four”, and works on global transactions, with a number of live negotiations taking place across the Central Belt.
Its insights offering is helping companies with such projects as digital finance transformation.
Last March, Hutcheon Mearns Real Estate was created to offer commercial property expertise during mergers and acquisitions.
“We have a lot of crossover between clients who will use us in different ways,” says Hutcheon.
This approach is clearly paying off, with Hutcheon saying the firm has invested in infrastructure which can accommodate significant growth, with its offices currently running at about 50 per cent capacity. It has also more than tripled its revenues and staff numbers since 2016.
“We’ve got an ambitious five-year plan and are looking to quadruple our revenues and headcount,” says Hutcheon. “We’re also working on other ways in which we can support our clients, by getting the right people into the right spots.”
He emphasises that Hutcheon Mearns has an agile approach and, as part of its expansion drive, it is open to approaches from individuals with an idea that could be a suitable addition to its business.
“We ask things like, does this have synergy with our business? Do we have the same values and risk appetite? We take all these things on board, and if someone has an idea we can look at supporting it,” he explains.
Hutcheon concludes: “Our key ambition is to continue to offer innovative solutions to our clients. We want to take our services into new territories where we can be a breath of fresh air to clients.”
We’re working on ways in which we can support our clients, by getting the right people into the right spots