Manchester finance entrepreneur Paul Cheetham-Karcz invested £1.4m in a new Liverpool base for his business Sedulo in 2021 and is now urging other business people to follow his lead. Tony McDonough reports
A Manchester businessman who invested £1.4m in a new Liverpool base in 2021 is urging other entrepreneurs to follow suit and come to the city.
Paul Cheetham-Karcz is founder of financial advisory specialist Sedulo. He had already established the business in Manchester, Leeds and London when, in spring 2021, he opened a Liverpool office.
Sedulo paid £1m for a lease at Exchange Flags in the city centre and spent a further £400,000 refurbishing the premises. Weeks later it announced the acquisition of 60-year-old Liverpool accountancy firm Wilson Henry.
Its team offered expertise in audit, taxation and corporate finance. Now, 18 months on, Sedulo employs a 40-strong team in Liverpool and has seen revenues grow by more than 30%. He says it now aims to double in size.
However, prior to the investment Mr Cheetham-Karcz said advisors had tried to dissuade home from coming to the city. They told him it was a “difficult market to crack”.
“We’ve been in Liverpool for nearly 18 months and have seen our revenues increase by around 30% to 35%, he said. “With the likes of Montirex we’ve implemented a plan for them to enter into the national and European markets next.
“It’s amazing but what I’m most pleased about is that our strategy has paid off. We were never going to come here and set up a two-seater office and say we’re a Liverpool-based business.
“We’ve put our money where our mouth is, created arguably the best office in the city, put on some cracking events and are working with some of the best consumer brands in the region – helping them obtain some ridiculous growth.
“If I go back to the beginning, everyone at the start was saying ‘don’t do Liverpool’ and ‘you’re a Manc in the middle of Liverpool and they won’t take well to it’.
“I disagreed and felt like we had to embrace the city in order for the corporate world to embrace us – and it’s worked. It’s a lesson to others, I believe a lot of people try to take from Liverpool and not give back.”
Over the last 18 months, Sedulo has run a Christmas toy appeal in 2021 whereby they delivered 2,000 presents to 200 children in Liverpool who were living in impoverished circumstances – a drive running again this year too.
The company built a playground for a school in Warrington in January who’d had the area condemned and gave out more than 6,000 pieces of school equipment to children who didn’t have the means to afford it.
Sedulo signed an initial 10-year lease to work from Exchange Flags and Mr Cheetham-Karcz added: “The next few years are all about growth and deeper levels of community work”.
“We now have 40 staff in Liverpool and we want to double in size to 80 in the next three years.
“We’d like to work with more fast growing clients in the city and execute their plans. It’s all about more people, more clients, more events and the same fun while going deeper with our community work.
“Now we’re embedded in we’ll be doing a period poverty campaign next year on top of the other campaigns mentioned. That’s an extra campaign aimed at teenage girls who can’t afford the products they need during the menstrual cycle.”