Celebrating ten years New York office

We started with a small client base in New York, coming from the businesses I was serving from Charlotte, that were located in the North-East. Having complete trust in our model, the majority of other clients I was the Kummerer / Caretaker for, stayed in Charlotte to be serviced by Charlotte partners. We built a stable foundation for Steve Cooper to take over as managing partner in Charlotte and freed me up to turn to the new challenge in New York.

We leased some space at the end of 2013, thanks to the negotiation skills of Michael Hayes. The support of the firm, ensured I never felt like I was on an island, although literary we were. We took over a few existing R&P USA clients that preferred local service. This helped us build the foundation, so we could hire and build our team.

The first years were tough but having the financial support of our partners and the worldwide firm, allowed Will and I to focus on the task at hand: building our local presence and growing revenue.
One of the significant early challenges was rent expense, as a percent of revenue, which requires a certain level of revenue to be adequately covered. It is worthwhile to note our square foot cost of rent is 3-4 times our other offices in the U.S., however, since we creatively use our space, we generate 3-4 times revenue per square foot, so as a percent of sales NY falls in line with the other US offices.

Our business development activities greatly contributed to our growth, both Will and Gerhard Schneiders had a significant impact, additionally, our other business developers played a critical part. As business grew, I poached Jens Kaufmann from the Charlotte office, to lead our BPO practice. Since I hired him originally in Charlotte, I think in this case poaching is ok. No one expected our BPO practice to be significant given our fee structure, but Jens has exceeded all expectations by growing BPO to about a third of our revenue. His success resulted in him becoming Equity Partner in the US in 2019.

To further expand our leadership team, Birgit Kretchmer, who we enticed away from another German firm in NY, became Equity Partner in the USin 2020. We have since added 6 Associate Partners that have contribute greatly every day to our growth and success.

Where would you see the next frontier for Rödl Langford de Kock?

The US Firm leadership is continually evaluating, exploring, and expanding to the next frontier, so I would leave that to them to respond, but as far as the North-East… Boston and Philadelphia are next up, we are now building remote local teams on the ground with the intention to open physical offices in the near future.