The Growth Company
Acquisition of Winning Moves
HURST Corporate Finance advised The Growth Company’s consulting arm GC Insight on the acquisition of Birmingham-based business support, research and evaluation firm Winning Moves.
Role
AdvisorService
BuyingSector
Business ServicesBen Bradley, corporate finance partner, and Isabelle Bennett, corporate finance executive, worked on the transaction with Paul Simpson chief financial officer at The Growth Company and Simon Hooton, managing director of GC Insight.
The Growth Company is an award-winning social enterprise with a mission to enable growth, create jobs and improve lives. The buyout bolsters GC’s growing consulting offer and will help to strengthen its infrastructure and growth across the UK.
GC established a consulting offer in 2021 with the acquisition of research and consulting company ekosgen.
Winning Moves and ekosgen will continue to trade independently and, together with The Growth Company, under a new brand ‘GC Insight’, offering clients their combined breadth of services from its pool of 40-plus consultants for research and advisory work.
The combined team will help organisations and partnerships to plan for the future, secure investment, improve their impact and demonstrate the benefits they generate.
GC Insight delivers creative thinking on new solutions, service design for efficient delivery, technical help to secure funding and planning approvals, advice on operational performance, and economic and social impact evaluations.
Founded in 1995, Winning Moves offers two core services. It delivers support to more than 100,000 businesses in the UK and overseas to drive growth and performance.
Its client base includes local and national government departments, publicly-funded organisations and international organisations including the United Nations and Enterprise Ireland.
“We’re excited for the next chapter at Winning Moves. With a strong history of working collaboratively with GC, we’re confident that together we will be greater than the sum of our parts. Our existing customers can be assured that we are similarly aligned with GC regarding values and ethos, and I’m sure they will be delighted with the enriched service offering this acquisition will bring about.”
Simon Hooton, managing director of GC Insight, said: “This is the culmination of many months of work and builds on GC’s commitment to create a compelling commercial consulting offer with purpose.
“Winning Moves has a really strong reputation in its core markets and a very capable team of researchers and advisors, which we want to grow. GC is committed to supporting the Winning Moves team to realise its potential in our social enterprise model alongside the rest of our GC Insight team.”
“Together GC, ekosgen and Winning Moves aim to be a market-leading team that helps economic development organisations and businesses improve their impact and more effectively demonstrate the benefits they generate.
“This investment allows us to deliver creative thinking on new solutions, service design for efficient delivery, technical help to secure approvals, advice on operational performance, and impact evaluation to measure value for money.”
