A digital marketing company which lured some of the brightest brains in the business from Leeds back to Hull is bucking the trend again by expanding under lockdown with new recruits and new clients.
43 Clicks North opened its office at The Deep Business Centre in Hull in August 2019 with just five people and, as numbers grew, Managing Director Mike Ellis made the decision to find the company a new home all to itself.
The complications of Covid were such that by the time the company left The Deep in November 2020 it had a workforce of 12, all working from home.
But the recruitment continued, and by the time 43 Clicks takes the keys for its new office in the Old Town of Hull next month it will have 17 people with more on the way and a work-from-home strategy which is likely to take the complement of staff beyond the planned capacity of the building.
Mike said: “We’ve taken on five new people since we left The Deep, and four of those have joined since the start of this year. We expect to hire another two or three after we occupy the new building in April and we think we’ll be able to fit about 35 in there but with a rota which enables us to have a few more on the payroll.”
Two of the recent recruits have joined from other tech firms in Leeds and are likely to stay in their home city and work remotely. Others have relocated from West Yorkshire to East Yorkshire, as Mike and his colleagues did when they arrived at The Deep.
The expansion has been driven by the company’s success in securing deals with seven new clients since November. They have added to a mix of big regional brands and fast-growing local firms operating in sectors ranging from leisure homes to food supplements and with a shared need for digital marketing support including social media, SEO, paid searches and website design and build.
Mike said: “We came back to Hull to work and to build a digital community and we’ve surprised ourselves – we thought that 20 people would be enough and we would hit that level and stay at The Deep. But we found somewhere just for us because the business kept growing – with new business and up-sales we exceeded our turnover from last year in just over three months from our year-end in November.”
