Cobalt at 25: Quite a lot has happened since 2001
In 2001, Tim Rowe and Adam Walker founded Cobalt in London, taking a lease on something resembling a cupboard just off the Strand, quickly filling it with a band of merry surveyors turned recruiters, and setting out to build a market-leading built environment recruitment business. I’m not sure whether either of them imagined that, 25 years later, we would be looking back on a story involving multiple continents and brands, and considerably more office space, but it’s safe to say it has been a jam-packed quarter century.
Manchester followed London in 2003, and in 2008 Cobalt Germany was launched in Berlin. Starting an international expansion in 2008 took a certain amount of conviction, and that willingness to back good people and pursue an opportunity has been a recurring feature of the Cobalt story. New Zealand and the UAE followed in 2009, Düsseldorf in 2010 and Frankfurt in 2011.
Then came a particularly busy 2012, when four new offices in one year made for some interesting diaries, and Cobalt had travelled quite some distance from its London beginnings.
Germany continued to expand rapidly, with Stuttgart opening in 2017. That same year, Tim and Adam handed over the reins to an entirely home-grown executive leadership team and Cobalt was named International Recruitment Company of the Year by APSCo. It was a proud moment, recognising both the business we had built and the people who had grown with it. Of course, a proper account of the last 25 years needs to include the places we left as well as the ones we opened. New Zealand spun out to become an independent Kiwi business in 2021, and we ceased having a physical presence in the UAE and Singapore. Those chapters belong in our history too, along with the great people who worked in them. Building a business involves making decisions about where to invest and grow but also recognising when to change direction.
Meanwhile, new opportunities were opening up. In 2020, we launched Cobalt USA in New York, which has since become an important part of the group and a business with enormous potential. Valdivia launched in Frankfurt in 2021, and in 2022 we made the first of a number of great hires in South Africa. Comanos followed in Bremen in 2023, taking the group in an exciting new direction through recruitment and managed services for the renewable energy sector.
What began as one business in a small London office has become a group with specialist expertise, international reach and opportunities that Tim and Adam could hardly have fitted into their original business plan, assuming they could find room for one in that first tiny office!
Of course, the dates and cities only tell part of the story. Behind each opening was someone winning the first client, persuading talented people to take a chance on a new business, or delivering the sort of service that meant clients came back, and candidates recommended us to their friends and colleagues. Multiply that by 25 years, across different markets, languages and specialisms, and you begin to get a sense of what our people have achieved. There has also been plenty of fun, enduring friendships and a number of stories that are probably best left out of the anniversary blog.
That gives us a great deal to build on. The US offers considerable room to grow, Comanos is evolving rapidly, and our most established businesses bring the expertise and relationships to develop further in the markets they know so well. Our task now is to turn that potential into lasting success, working more closely across the group, developing our people, embracing the speed of technological change, and continuing to earn the confidence of our clients and candidates. More on that in December, when we launch Cobalt 25.0.
To everyone who has helped build Cobalt, past and present, and to everyone who has trusted us with their critical hiring needs, their career, or both: thank you. You have given us plenty to celebrate at 25, and plenty of reasons to be ambitious about what comes next.
And to Tim, just look what you started.
