Most 16-year-olds have strong personalities and values, boundless energy and are stubbornly determined about what they want.
And so it is for us. Having celebrated our 16th birthday in 2009, we can look back at our exciting formative years with a little nostalgia and heaps of pride knowing we have firmly kept to our values, stuck to what we are good at, and certainly achieved our goals.
Stopgap's success started with a set of strong and definite values and it is these values which enabled an idea, two women, one computer and a borrowed desk in a friend's office (thanks Skidmore Turnbull Design!) to grow into the innovative, international, multi-million pound business success Stopgap is today.
The idea of Stopgap was dreamt up by Claire Owen in 1993. The company had two aims: to challenge the recruitment industry's reputation for bad practice and bad service and to run a company that looked after its staff - and just look how we've grown!
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As well as being nominated for the Best Recruitment Firm Website, we won Best Medium-to-Large Recruitment Firm to Work For in April’s Recruiter Awards for Excellence! We also extended our Web 2.0 offering, launching our LinkedIn group for marketing professionals and our branded Twitter accounts.
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We've ditched the hyphens from our URL, so you can now find us at www.stopgapgroup.co.uk, or www.stopgapgroup.com.au much to the relief of everyone who has to spell out our web address and emails on the phone!
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Web 2.0 took off in a big way within the recruitment industry, with a demand for up-to-the-minute information. We focussed on our online presence this year and now have hundreds of roles across several key marketing recruitment websites and constant job updates on our own site - the Stopgap Group is reaching more people than ever.
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Never given to resting on our laurels, we acquired Courtenay HR in February - same great values and service for the HR community.
We launched new names from September, as Stopgap was no longer reflecting all the kinds of recruitment we cover. So, welcome Stopgap for freelance, RightStop for permanent and Fitzroy for senior search, selection and interim.
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Stopgap Directors expands to launch a new executive search arm whilst the company as a whole grew to almost 100 people. Our Markeing Employer of the Year survey gained in stature and we held our first awards event for the great and the good in the industry.
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Received the very exciting news that we had come 10th in the Sunday Times 50 Best Small Companies to Work For tables. But it gets better - we came 6th in 2005 plus won Best For Leadership two years in a row... how proud are we!.
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It was with much excitement and enormous pride that we celebrated our 10th Birthday. It followed our official launch of the permanent offering which is already going from strength to strength.
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Moved into 10,000 sq ft of brand new office space giving us the room we need to expand what we offer into some new and exciting areas of business.
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We exceeded our financial expectations and achieved a £21m turnover. We did this with a staff of only about 50 people, including our first Operations Director.
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In April Stopgap Directors is launched to answer the need for senior marketing talent and in September we established our first overseas office - Sydney, Australia.
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We hit the £10m turnover mark and by this, our 6th year of trading we had handled over 10,000 briefs.
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The HR Consultancy was born to explore how we could help companies, not only recruit, but then retain the one thing that was essential to their success - their people. After 4 years of operating we decided to focus on our key business of recruitment.
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We saw a real growth in demand for freelancers and increased the number of our placements by nearly 300% over the previous year. By the end of '97 approximately 2,500 people who we had found freelance work had between them worked a total of 105,000 days.
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We needed more space so we bought and moved into Fitzroy House with 16 staff - eight of whom are still with us today.
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We started working with Peter Makin to create a totally bespoke database operating system. Today it holds details of over 100,000 individuals, 1.4 million call records (increasing by about 700 each day), 187,000 pieces of correspondence and 93,000 invoices!
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We moved to Richmond and employed our first member of staff (she left us last year to be a full-time mum following the birth of her second child).
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Claire Owen founds Stopgap, the UK's first specialist freelance marketing agency and was joined on day one by Gaynor Egan who remained her business partner for five years.
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