When growth starts to accelerate, most leaders focus on the obvious levers. More clients, more work, more people to deliver it. It is less common for that attention to turn to the team itself, and what happens to it when it doubles in size in a matter of months.
The reality is that hiring well and building a team are not the same thing. You can bring in a room full of capable, experienced people and still not have a strong team. That gap is one of the quietest risks in scaling a business, and it is easy to miss until something starts to feel off.
We recently sat down with Sanjay Mackintosh, founder and MD of Roretti, a public services consultancy specialising in local government. Sanjay spent around twenty years across the NHS, civil service and local government, including time at the Department of Health and the Home Office, before starting Roretti in 2019.
He is also a member of the Work.Life Leaders Circle. Over the past eighteen months, his team has grown from four desks at Work.Life to nineteen. That growth taught him something about the difference between hiring good people and building a team, and about where they actually comes together.
In the early days, Sanjay kept his hiring deliberately open. Rather than writing a tight job description and looking for someone to fill it, he looked for people he could build the business with.
As he put it, describing that early stage, “you’re trying to find people to help you define what that looks like, rather than me, from the outset on my own, saying here is what it needs to be, and therefore I need that person and you just do what you’re told.”
He recruited mostly from the public sector, on the logic that his team could say to clients they were public servants just like them, and genuinely mean it. It is a positioning many consultancies claim, but Roretti can actually attest to it.
He was also hiring for a particular temperament. Leaving a secure public sector job, with its pension and stability, to join a young business took a certain appetite for risk, and that was part of the point. What Sanjay wanted was leadership at every level, not just at the top.
As he told us, “Leadership for me isn’t a hierarchical thing. It is about positive risk-taking, trusting yourself, backing yourself, communicating well, and collaborating.”
The point is that a team of self-starting people, hired from all over the country, does not become a team on its own. Left alone, Roretti could have ended up a collection of talented individuals who happened to share an employer.
The thing that was missing turned out to be something Sanjay did not spot himself. His team did.
When they were together, it was usually online, at home, or on a client site. A client site, however useful, is somewhere you go to do the client’s work, not to build your own culture. Something was missing from the time in between, and it was a team member, rather than the founder, who named it.
“This wasn’t my idea,” Sanjay was quick to admit. “It was one of my team members’ ideas to look at workspace, because we felt like something was missing.”
His first instinct was the one most founders will recognise. As he put it, “are we going to do what founders do? Do we want to spend the money on that? How much is it going to cost?” It was a cost with no obvious return, for a team small enough that he could reasonably have talked himself out of it.
He decided to go ahead anyway. He treated it as a test of something he was learning to do more of, which was to trust his team’s judgement when they told him something mattered, even when he could not yet see it himself. As he told us, “if the team think it’s important and they have explained it, go with it. Take the risk. Make it happen.”
That is a small decision, but it says a lot about how a founder scales. The ones who insist every call runs through them often become the thing that holds their business back. Backing his team on something he was unsure about was Sanjay practising the harder discipline of getting out of the way.
What the team had been missing was somewhere to be together, without a client in the room or a screen in the way.
That sense of what was missing is now built into how Roretti works each week. Contracts were adjusted so that everyone is in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a rhythm the team shaped themselves. One Thursday a month is a pure team day, with people travelling in from around the country just to be in the same place. The other is given over to the business, a stock-take on where things stand and presentations on recent work, the more productive side of being together.
As Sanjay describes it, “this is our hub now, so that when more people join, they know that we’ve got core time in this place together.” People who live nearer come in more often. The point is less the desks and more the standing invitation to be in the room.
The value of that is almost impossible to measure, which is exactly why it is easy to underrate. As he told us, “it’s difficult to track the impact directly, because a lot of it’s on feel, and you have to do it to realise it.”
What it produces is the thing every founder is actually after. Set the days, create the space, and in Sanjay’s words, “people get to know each other, and people bond, and they do the things that most really high-performing organisations have.” A group of individuals becomes a team, in ordinary moments that cannot be forced or scheduled.
The surprise, for Sanjay, was that the benefit did not stop with his own team. It changed how Roretti was seen as a business.
He had not expected clients to want to come in. But some local authority offices are difficult places to spend a day, a few without air conditioning through this summer’s heat, and a central London space with working tech and a bit of a buzz gave clients a reason to come to Roretti. They started spending more time there than the team did alone, meetings topped and tailed with a lunch or a dinner. One or two now mention the location when they describe what working with Roretti is like.
“It’s actually helped with our brand, our business development,” Sanjay told us. Asked directly whether it had helped win work, he did not hesitate: “Winning and retaining.” For a consultancy pitching against firms many times its size, being taken seriously matters, and where you meet clients is part of that.
That same pull works on his recruiting, too. Candidates interview in the space, look around, and tell him plainly that it is the part they want. Asked what Roretti would look like without it, his answer was “we wouldn’t have the people we have.” The space he created for the team he already had was the first thing prospective hires saw of Roretti.
On the surface, Sanjay’s story is about hiring well and learning to let his team lead. Underneath it is another lesson that is easy to miss.
Great people do not become a great team on their own. They become one in the time they spend together, in the small, informal moments that are easy to overlook, and those moments need somewhere to happen. Sanjay did not set out to prove that. His team pushed him towards it, and the business he has now is the result.
To find out more about Roretti and what they do, visit the website here.
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