‘Our experience is that clients are resourceful and ever adaptable’ JOE CLEARY
ACTIVITY 2023 was another successful year for RBK, with strong fee growth in all our core areas. Our business consulting, transaction advisory, and taxation services continue to be our most in-demand services for new client enquiries as we continue to expand our client reach in Ireland and internationally. The firm maintains our ethos of providing a responsive, personal and hands-on service to our clients, particularly family-owned businesses, to help them in dealing with the challenges and opportunities in their daily business dealings.
RBK’s corporate finance team, led by partner Chris Ball, has experienced strong demand for their services over the last number of years. Following a targeted process to appoint Aidan Heavey as Director of Corporate Finance to lead our Dublin team, we followed that with a successful recruitment campaign to fill a number of senior corporate finance positions, primarily in our Dublin office.
The buoyancy of Ireland’s transactional support services market underscores our team’s expansion. We are fully resourced with an experienced team of specialists, which has added to our capacity and knowledge base, to meet corporate finance requirements of our existing client base and an increasing demand led from referrals and inbound enquiries.
OPERATIONS Recruitment and retention of staff is a key challenge for RBK and indeed for our profession. This issue has been ongoing for the last number of years, though we are seeing some signs of improvement.
We place a strong emphasis on having a good work/life balance and have a successful hybrid-working model in place, which is proving to be a win for the firm and popular with our staff.
WORKPLACE Over 70 of our Dublin employees recently moved into the newly built Termini building in Sandyford Business District in south Dublin. The new office has high environmental credentials, including building energy consumption of 30% less than a standard building, 64% green roof to promote biodiversity, a rainwater harvesting system, and fitted solar panels to offset energy demand.
The superior ESG credentials and the modern office environment have encouraged a greater in-person presence in our Dublin office than before. We also consider it to have had a positive effect on talent attraction and is helping to expand our team as we recruit. As a training firm, we take on over 30 graduates each year and find that they thrive when working in a supportive learning environment in the office as opposed to working remotely.
OUTLOOK Rising costs, challenges in the hospitality sector, housing crisis, Ukraine, and recruitment challenges all continue to dominate the business narrative, but our experience is that clients are resourceful and adaptable. The trend we are encountering with clients is that of a cautious optimism.