Over the last two decades the office has amassed a magnificent legacy of built work and made a solid contribution to our business and the city. Alongside the projects, we have built a really great team in Derby who are an asset to the business.
It is perhaps obvious that we are a very different business now to the one that opened the Derby office. We were just over 20 people then and now we are almost 80. It was our first office outside of Nottingham and represented a big step in expansion and ambition at the time. Since then we have expanded to Leicester, Birmingham and London. The economy has changed many times since 2003 and the pandemic reshaped the way we work and the way our clients work. The blend of our projects has shifted from small and medium regional jobs to medium and large scale national work.
The Shareholders have concluded that operating an office in Derby, whilst being a great asset to the business in the past, has run its course. The clients that we initially came to Derby to work with have moved on and the post-covid world no longer demands quite so much localism. The Midlands remains an important location for maber and one in which we will continue to grow our market share. Like many businesses we have made changes to post pandemic working practices and adopted hybrid working, so it seems sensible for us to consider the changing requirements of our physical office space.
By focusing on our two larger East Midlands office bases, along with our London and Birmingham offices, we believe we can better support our clients and allow teams to thrive and collaborate across all regions. We will also continue to explore markets and potential bases that are further afield, such as Bristol, Brighton, Manchester and Edinburgh.
The conclusion is therefore to close the Derby office on 3 November 2023.
We value the team in Derby very highly and whilst the office location is redundant our people are not – we are keeping all of our current Derby based staff in the maber family and they are joining either our Nottingham or Birmingham studios. We see this as an opportunity to create a new energy and bring new skills to compliment existing teams – which will in turn inherit new projects and have the chance to reorganise with new talents on even more effective grounds.
So after twenty years in Derby we are declaring “mission accomplished!”