Kevin Perrett's farewell came with a change in the ownership paperwork. After four decades leading PTS, he would leave the daily running of the business on 1 April 2024. The UK company would move into an employee ownership trust. His colleagues would inherit something more consequential than a leaving speech: a business whose future was being placed in their hands.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. In 1990, Perrett had led a management buyout that made PTS independent. Thirty-four years later, he was helping arrange another change of ownership, this time as he stepped away. Buying a company and leaving one are usually treated as opposite achievements. His career invites a more interesting reading: both decisions concerned who should have responsibility for the work.
The dates are tidy. The intervening story is considerably less so. It includes an international consultancy built from London beginnings, outside investment, acquisitions, a financial crash and a willingness to revise a staffing policy he had once held firmly. A founder's character is easier to see in those decisions than in a polished photograph. Especially in the jobs he chose to refuse.
A contract he declined
Perrett once turned down a contract that would have required twenty additional employees. His concern was what would happen to them when the contract finished. A project could produce revenue today while leaving the business with a payroll it could not support tomorrow. The refusal makes a small but revealing episode in a career often measured by geographical expansion.
He preferred a skilled employee core and colleagues prepared to challenge him. Before 2008, PTS used an employee-only delivery model. The crash forced a change: demand fell, bad debts exceeded £1.5 million and the company laid off nine per cent of its workforce. As growth returned, contractors helped it manage fluctuating demand; some subsequently became employees. Perrett's concern for permanent staff survived, but the mechanism changed. Loyalty and flexibility had to occupy the same office.
The additional hires a declined contract would have required.
Before the skyline
PTS began in 1983 within Shoralplan, an interior construction business. Its early speciality was telephony consultancy, particularly for overseas banks establishing London headquarters. It is an origin with very little theatrical glamour. A bank needs to move in, communicate and operate. Someone has to work out how the technology fits the building, preferably before the desks arrive.
That setting helps explain the sort of company Perrett built. Technology and property were already sharing a practical problem. A building could look finished while its occupants still lacked the systems needed to work inside it. The consultancy occupied that gap, where architectural completion and operational readiness are different events. The client might admire the entrance hall; the telephone still had to function.
In 1990, Perrett led the buyout with ten employees. PTS's independence came through people already inside the organisation taking ownership. The episode would eventually acquire an echo in his succession plan, although the two arrangements were distinct. A management buyout and a trust holding shares for employees are different structures. Their common thread in this story is the proximity between the people doing the work and the people responsible for the business.
A client crosses the desk
One of Perrett's connections offers a more personal view of international expansion. Andrew Green had spent five years as a PTS client at Swiss Re in London. After that project finished, Perrett approached him about becoming the company's managing director for Asia-Pacific. Green initially worked from Singapore, then moved to Tokyo at the end of 2008.
There is an agreeable reversal in recruiting the person who has been on the receiving end of your service. Clients see a consultancy under conditions a job interview cannot reproduce: a live project, competing demands and the consequences of decisions. Green brought corporate real estate experience and a chartered surveying background. The appointment put knowledge of the client's world into the regional leadership of a technology consultancy.
By May 2010, Green was describing an Asia-Pacific team of more than 130 people. Those figures belong to that moment, rather than to today's organisation. They nevertheless give substance to the overseas ambition. An international business needs people close enough to understand a project's setting. It also needs leaders who can connect that setting with experience elsewhere. Green's move shows how one professional relationship became part of that wider network.
The map keeps acquiring dots
Japan was part of PTS's expansion during the 1990s. Australia followed in 2008, alongside a wider network spanning the Americas, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. A City of London practice had become a business that followed work across borders. The modest pleasure of adding another location to a map can conceal a large administrative undertaking.
Former PTS marketing manager Beverley Eggleton recalled constantly adding dots to the company's global map. Updating the list of cities and countries, she remembered, was among Perrett's favourite activities. It is a colleague's recollection, and a wonderfully specific one. Growth had a visible form: another name, another dot, another place where the firm was working.
That recollection gives a human scale to an otherwise rather abstract ambition. A map makes distance look manageable. Each additional point also means local relationships, people and delivery responsibilities. Perrett's eventual succession arrangements would acknowledge those local teams directly. By the time he announced his departure, the offices outside the UK were wholly owned by their local management teams.
Money for the next stretch
In October 2013, PTS took an £8.7 million investment from Business Growth Fund in exchange for a minority stake. The business expected revenues of £40 million that year. Perrett had reached a stage at which the pace of organic development was constraining what he wanted to do. New money would help expand the services and places in which PTS could support clients.
The plans included North American expansion, development of the STARS accreditation platform and acquisitions relevant to the business. At that point, around thirty individual staff shareholders owned PTS. The arrival of institutional capital therefore added another participant to an ownership story that had already been unfolding for more than twenty years. Rob Pinchbeck became chairman.
Perrett's explanation of the partnership stressed patience. He wanted an investor whose timescale matched the company's ambitions, rather than a hurried route to an exit. Money can accelerate a plan; it also comes with expectations about the destination. His public comments suggest he was paying attention to both. For a consultancy built through long relationships, the question of how quickly to grow could hardly be separated from the question of how to remain recognisable.
Learning from familiar partners
PTS acquired Tokyo-based audiovisual consultancy Media Access Group in 2015. The deal followed its 2011 acquisition of Mark Johnson Consultants, which had brought audiovisual expertise into the business. The expanding range of disciplines made the old telecom description increasingly narrow. Offices needed networks, audiovisual systems and security to work together, even when the specialists responsible for them spoke different professional dialects.
Media Access Group was already a familiar collaborator. Perrett pointed to years of working together and the quality of its services in Asia-Pacific. Its founder, Strings Kozisek, likewise described established relationships between the teams. The acquisition grew from a partnership tested on projects. Both sides knew rather more about one another than a set of presentation slides could reveal.
Green's recruitment and the Media Access Group deal are different events, but they share a practical feature: familiarity preceded the formal commitment. A client became a regional leader. A collaborator became part of the group. The pattern offers a useful way to understand Perrett's expansion without inventing a grand personal doctrine. Some of the next steps began with people whose work was already known.
Who gets the next chapter?
Succession occupied Perrett and his fellow shareholders for years. They explored alternatives before settling on employee ownership for the UK business. Internal legal and finance teams worked with external advisers, while staff were kept informed. A change that could look abrupt from outside had a longer preparation inside the company.
The new trust board brought together Perrett, employee representatives, another former shareholder and an independent trustee. Its planned quarterly meetings with the company's directors gave the arrangement a continuing mechanism for oversight. The ownership change had to become something people practised after the announcement, through representation and decisions as well as documents.
Companies House records fix part of the handover to a precise date: Perrett resigned his directorships at PTS Consulting Group, PTS Consulting (UK) and PTS Holdings (UK) on 31 March 2024. He remained a director of PTS EOT Limited, the trust company. That distinction matters. Daily leadership passed on; responsibility within the ownership structure continued. A founder can leave an executive position while retaining a different, more bounded duty to the organisation.
Boots off, connections intact
Stephen Edward took over as UK managing director. Perrett's announcement placed confidence in his successor and the new management team, while retaining a global role as custodian of the PTS brand. It was a departure organised around continuity: local ownership overseas, collective ownership in the UK and a new person leading the trading business.
The farewell also had a lighter detail. Perrett described his announcement as his first LinkedIn post in sixteen years. After the responses arrived, he thanked people for their kind and funny comments, messages and invitations to catch up. Corporate succession had generated a rather sociable diary. Four decades of work had left him with an organisation to hand over and people to see again.
His departure from daily management did not end every professional connection. PTS Mission Critical Engineering has subsequently identified him as its non-executive director, acknowledging continued guidance from the group's founder. The shape of his involvement had changed. The underlying question remained familiar: how to let other people lead while preserving what they had built together. For someone who once bought the business with colleagues, that is a fitting place to leave the story.