Smyle Group, home to agencies Smyle, Pumphouse and Smyle Moving image, is reporting a record year, with a 21 per cent increase in turnover up £3m to £17m for its financial year ending 31 March 2017.
Operating profit remains steady at £1.5m, with increase limited by a series of investments including a 25 per cent increase in staff numbers, bringing the total workforce to 70 staff across the business.
And the investment is set to continue and includes the launch of an office based in Florida in the United States.
Smyle Group’s first US footprint has been supported by its UKTI Creative taskforce membership and is the first overseas office for the Hertford and London-based agency.
The decision to expand Stateside, the agency says, is prompted by a number of new and fast growing accounts over recent years which have resulted in half of the business’s core clients being North America based.
Smyle Group adds that it has also been asked to deliver operationally in the US over the last few years, so explains it was a natural progression to set up a satellite office there.
The Smyle Group office is based in Tampa, and will focus on supporting closer links between US and EMEA customer relationships.
Rick Stainton, Smyle Group’s MD comments: “This an exciting next step in Smyle’s mission to be the best creative agency in our industry. We believe it will offer our clients and account teams a better way of working - bringing them closer together, gaining deeper insight into what they need from us and encourage better links between US and UK operational requirements.
“This is essentially a start-up project that we will evolve and refine over the next 12 months. We need to learn how it should best develop from feedback from clients and our US office staff, so we are keeping a flexible approach that doesn’t pretend we have all the answers from Day 1.”
