Spartan Crew has expanded its reach in the Midlands, with the launch of a new regional hub in Birmingham.
The project, led by Commercial Director, Paz Brennan, aims to target the thriving nationwide exhibition and entertainment market beyond the reach of its London HQ as the UK moves out of all COVID-19 restrictions.
Staff are currently being appointed for the new office, conveniently located nearby Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, less than one and a half miles from New Street Station. “With the upcoming Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and a host of major events happening in the city, we felt we could no longer ignore the possibilities,” said Brennan.
Not familiar with sitting on the sidelines, Spartan Crew assembled its market research and commenced work on acquiring an office and training area. According to Brennan, another draw is the proximity of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC), which hosts several exhibitions featuring both prospective and current clients. “Many of our current clients have a large presence in Birmingham, so we wanted to offer a more favourable solution,” he explained.
The Steward Street office will follow a similar blueprint to Spartan Crew’s London headquarters, incorporating a crew training area as part of the facility. This ensures consistency to its production of improved crewing solutions, with a commitment to health and safety, performance and compliance.
However, it hasn’t been the easiest of journeys to get to this point. “We had a huge crew shortage at the back end of last year,” Brennan stated. “With a lack of confidence in the industry, many crew, across all sectors in the industry, had gone on to work in other industries. This posed many challenges in terms of recruitment and training. We had to step up to the challenge, offering a more robust training programme. As a result, we can train 10 crew at a time, which we do twice a week in London, and once a week in Birmingham. With this comes more administration so we took on more office staff and space to meet demand.”
Spartan Crew’s new venture will allow the company to not only offer multi-site crewing solutions to keep up with current demand, but also extend its services to new clients. This includes a larger reach across the UK along with a bigger roster of crew should it need to increase crew in either region.
This article originally appeared in issue #269 of TPi, which you can read here.
