2024: A Milestone Year for Ashdown Phillips & Partners

We made subtle changes to our leadership structure, with Andrew moving from MD into the CEO role with an increased focus on our forward-looking strategy and the future needs of the commercial property industry. Kate Phillips has moved into a newly created COO role to develop our processes and help us run an even-tighter operational ship as the business continues to mature.

This year Andrew and Kate have invested time in visiting everyone around the business to talk about our company strategy. This has enabled us to truly explore and cement what we wish to achieve, and we have agreed on five core strategic objectives:

1. Attract and retain the best people

2. Be class-leading in our service delivery

3. Be highly respected in the market

4. Lead on ESG

5. Manage risk

Dare To Be Brilliant, the customer-service training initiative we launched in 2016 widened further last year and saw us train 60 people in total, many of whom were new starters. With 34 promotions in total through the year, we have continued to develop and grow talent from within. We have just launched a new learning and development platform which will help us focus even more on training our team in the year ahead. Our commitment to paying at least the Real Living Wage now extends to all new service partners; in our last reporting period, 90% of people employed via third-party service partner contracts were paid at least the Real Living Wage and we aim to improve on this further across our entire supply chain.

Looking after our people enables us to continually improve the quality of our service, and getting “brilliant basics” right is the most important thing. We continue to receive positive feedback from clients about the quality of our team’s work, which is much appreciated, and our people are gaining wider industry recognition through award nominations for outstanding displays of leadership, management, innovation, ED&I initiatives, ESG and social impact. We were delighted to be shortlisted for six accolades across Property Week Awards, ESG Edge and SCEPTRE (shopping centre) awards.

We made big progress in Design for Management and now have over a million square feet of projects in hand. This work ranges from large base-build projects, re-developments and major refurbishments right down to smaller-scale capex and service charge projects, whilst offering broader support on achieving BREEAM and WELL pre-certifications.

Having been engaged from the design phase through to current management, we were delighted that the JJ Mack Building in Farringdon achieved an ‘Outstanding’ BREEAM rating. With a score of 96.42%, it is the highest-scoring building in the UK in its category – quite an accolade!

As well as helping our clients achieve ESG goals, by helping them identify and deliver energy and cost-saving innovations, we are committed to sustainability and community support internally too, achieving the Planet Mark Certification for the fourth year in a row with significant reductions in our own emissions as we move closer to being a net-zero company. We also raised thousands of pounds for charities including Alzheimer's Society, Healing Little Hearts and Macmillan Cancer Support.

And we don’t just help charities! In a heart-warming turn, our Estate Facilities Manager Dan Holsburt was able to rescue a baby fawn that had fallen into a lake at The Connection in Newbury - our best-performing social media post of the year!