Company culture proves key to the success of rapidly growing law firm

Marc completed Help to Grow: Management at the Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, in 2024, alongside the company’s Head of Conveyancing Rebecca Robinson. 

“The course content helped us recognise that getting a structure in place to maintain our high standards was the crucial next part of our journey. 

“It made us sit down and go, ‘Okay, we sort of know what we think our culture is but let's actually do something about it. Let's map it and let's live and breathe it, and make sure we're not just popping it in a drawer once we’re done and forgetting about it.’ 

“Now, it literally runs through the middle of our business. It drives our recruitment, it drives our policy making, it drives how we handle our clients. It’s our absolute everything.” 

As a result, the company has seen increased staff retention, and recruitment has become easier. Headcount increased from 18, when they started the course, to 37. 

“We're quite picky over who we get into the business and will actually say no to quite a lot of people who are highly skilled, but we just know wouldn’t be a cultural match. 

“Before, because we were growing so fast, we were taking on people who, although they had the skill, wouldn't really meet or match our culture, and I think we really suffered from that. 

“Since doing the course, we’ve really established ourselves as a business with proper structure, policies and planning, with a senior leadership team in place who make key decisions.

Prior to the course, the rapid growth placed a lot of pressure on the Evolve team, something which Marc says Help to Grow: Management has helped to address. 

“We lost a lot of good lawyers because we weren't doing the right things in the business - simple things like capping the number of cases people were assigned.” 

Since the course, the company has carried out a fee-mapping exercise which has resulted in them increasing fees, enabling them to take on less work but improve their margins. 

The work is paying off as the company was recently named the best firm in the UK for Mental Health and Wellbeing at the Modern Law Conveyancing Awards, for their work in supporting their staff.  

“We've been able to lower the caseloads, so the team are feeling happier, but we’ve also been able to drive up performance against KPIs in the business too.” 

It wasn’t just the team workload that changed. Since completing the course, Evolve has also created two new roles in its leadership team, a Learning and Development Director and an Operations Manager. Both were filled by promoting people within the business, providing development opportunities for existing staff. 

There are also plans underway to create a new support services team to take some admin tasks away from the core legal team, allowing them to focus on the work that helps to process cases more quickly. Recruitment will begin in January 2026 and the business will expand into neighbouring office space to accommodate the additional staff. 

 As for the longer-term future, Marc is keen to build on the company’s reputation for developing its staff, by creating a training academy for junior lawyers who want to specialise in conveyancing.  

Marc says one of the most valuable aspects of the course was helping the business to understand what help it actually needed. As a result, they were able to appoint an external consultant shortly afterwards to help them drive some of their action plans forward – such as mapping out the client journey. 

“I don't think we would have started that if we hadn't been on the course. So, I would say the biggest thing we took out of it is the realisation that we didn't know what we didn't know.  

“I guess, like a lot of businesses, you get to a point, and think ‘we need help! But we don't know what help we need’. Help to Grow: Management really helped us get to grips with that.” 

For Marc, much of this learning came not just from the course curriculum itself but from the connections it provided with other businesses. 

“Just sitting in the room with everyone who had different experiences, and listening to how they were able to grow their businesses and the challenges they had faced was so valuable. 

“Being able to engage with the other people on the course, and the tutors, was a real highlight. I loved all the case studies as well. They were so helpful in understanding how we could really drive our business forward and how we could allow our people to flourish. I went away and researched all of them and tried to really learn from their stories.” 

Financially, growth has been steady over the last few years. Revenue rose from £1.5m in 2023 to £1.95m in 2024 and is projected to hit £2.5m by the end of this year. Net profit has increased in line with revenue but remained at around 20% year on year due to the amount of money being reinvested back into the business. 

As well as helping to train the conveyancers of the future, Marc is keen to be at the forefront of how the industry as a whole is changing. 

He has set up a new separate company called FlowRidge, working with a firm in India to look at how AI and other new technologies can be used to help make conveyancing businesses more efficient by speeding up core administration services. 

When it comes to recommending the course to fellow business leaders, he has no hesitation. 

“I loved it. I thought the format of the sessions and the group discussions were brilliant. Even if you feel like you are an experienced entrepreneur, you can still learn a lot. I genuinely loved going and I was gutted when it finished.” 

Find out how the Help to Grow: Management Course can further your business here.