Well that decade went quickly! Looking back at ten years of Fellows and Associates.
Pete Fellows.
August, 2009. I Gotta a Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas tops the chart, alien segregation is an issue in Johannesburg in District 9, England win the Ashes and 10,000 Roman coins are discovered in Shrewsbury. It’s the last year the Labour party will be in government for a decade and the thought of leaving the European Union is not particularly on anyone’s mind. What is on everyone’s mind is the impact of the Great Recession, it has been almost a year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the future looks very uncertain. It was also the year that Fellows and Associates was born. I definitely didn’t listen to the advice that you shouldn’t start a business during a recession.
The first year was a huge change for me both personally and professionally. We’d just had our first child and after a few years working in an office in Leeds with colleagues, I had to adjust to working from home. When my wife went back to work, I had no company but the TV. The first year, given the general economic malaise, went really rather well. I had far more client loyalty than perhaps even I had anticipated with firms continuing to work with me despite the change of circumstance I thrusted upon them. I also enjoyed being able to work around the 2010 World Cup despite it clearly not being England’s best tournament. In fact, the first year went so well that I was in a position to move into an office and hire people to work for me. I had colleagues once again. There were genuinely Associates with the Fellows’.
In 2011 a second child arrived and we consolidated the business. Over time we’ve developed a speciality in unusual projects within the IP sector such as recruiting IP business development people in the USA, trainee attorneys in Mexico and UK firm representatives in Japan in addition to all the attorney recruitment we do within the UK. The market has changed during this period, and us with it, with an ever-increasing volume of retained search work. As the economy recovered, candidates became much scarcer and a proactive approach to sourcing became very necessary.
In 2012 we revamped the website for the first time changing our logo to its current form before another refresh in 2018. It may look like smooth sailing but even with a small team there is a lot of debate over new website design. A lot.
At Fellows and Associates we’ve thought it important to have an international strategy. Intellectual Property is a global community of attorneys and other professionals and we’ve always felt it was important to tap into that. As a consequence, my colleagues and I have travelled the world attending conferences, numerous times in the USA then Australia, Hong Kong, S. Korea, France, Germany and numerous other locations. We’ve won a variety of prize draws at exhibitor stands (including headphones, an iPod (yep that was a while ago) and a weekend in an apartment) and we’ve attended some amazing events – flying over Seattle in a seaplane, having dinner at the Palace of Versailles and watching fireworks over Sydney Harbour from Luna Park. Although one of my favourite memories is the ‘Disco Taxi’ in Dallas. If you were there at INTA that year (2013) and lucked out with a lift from that taxi, then you know. You know.
This year will be our first year exhibiting at AIPPI Congress in London. I look forward to having a chat with many of you at the conference and, as we’re exhibiting in our tenth year, we thought we’d have a selection of prizes to be won on our stand if you do pop on by.
I think we’ve punched above our weight in terms of building our profile in the sector, including being interviewed on INTA TV, hosting a panel at the INTA Annual Meeting, speaking at Queen Mary, University of London and being part of a panel at IP Inclusive Events.
Our salary survey, conceived by Emma van Opstal in 2011 and then expanded, developed and constantly improved by Michele Fellows in every year since has been very important to us. We believe that it has helped us develop a brand with integrity, that we are impartial, and therefore our advice is always constructive and unbiased. Michele and I very much appreciate all those that take the time to complete it each year and we hope it returns a great deal of value to those that do.
The salary survey and other research we’ve conducted we hope contributes to the dialogue within the UK profession as a whole – from potential under-representation of minorities and social economic groups within the attorney body to widening the discussion on mental health by providing researched data.
In 2018 we launched our sister company Fellows Finance, headed up by Rebecca Wood and building on my previous experience as a recruiter in the finance sector. Whilst a new business, Fellows Finance has quickly been able to build a brand and Rebecca has been making a name for herself in the finance sector if the amount of headhunt calls she’s getting is any judge (please don’t, you can’t have her and yes, I realise the irony, given what we do for a living).
For most of the time we’ve been around I’ve been accompanied by my highly capable associate Phillipa Holland. Phillipa has been instrumental in making the business what it is today, has been highly involved in every branding and most strategic decisions and has been key to us developing into new markets as well as providing superb service to those markets we already have. I should also mention Sienna and Louisa who made a significant contribution to the growth of the business.
It is, at times mind-boggling how long Fellows and Associates has been part of my life. It is the longest I have done any job for, albeit this is not a job in the traditional sense. It has given my family and I the life we lead, supported my children and at the same time hopefully we have been able to help hundreds of people achieve their career dreams, either by finding them a job or simply pointing them in the right direction (or in some case telling them to stick with what they have). For all of my clients I want to thank you for supporting us for all of this time, it has been a pleasure to work in this sector. I always feel that I am listened to, even when you don’t agree with me, and for a recruiter that’s incredibly important – we really don’t want to be a CV forwarding service, solving problems with well-constructed solutions is much more rewarding.
Pete Fellows is the Managing Director of Fellows and Associates. He has not aged a day – not a day – in the last ten years.