Fast-growing digital marketing firm Performance Horizon is determined to become a global leader in the US and Asia Pacific but insists it will stay true to its Newcastle heritage.
Performance Horizon provides enterprise SaaS (software as a service) platform for scaling partnerships and has repeatedly been recognised as one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies.
Founded in Newcastle in 2010, it now operates across four different continents.
The firm was last month presented with the Overall Judges’ Award at the fifth annual Northern Tech Awards, acknowledging its key role in driving innovation both in the Northern region and on a global scale.
“We’re a Newcastle company but one with a truly global reach and what’s exciting to us is that we feel that the award was recognition of that,” chief marketing officer Jim Nichols told BusinessCloud.
“We’re important to Newcastle and to the region but we’re also having an impact on how businesses compete globally.”
Nichols says the company, which currently has 190 employees across 11 offices, has always been strong in the EMEA region but has in recent years rapidly scaled up its presence in the US and Asia Pacific region.
“Our big mission right now is to continue to expand in the US; we believe that succeeding here is an important part of being a global partner network,” he said.
“Over the last year we’ve almost doubled our staff in the US and we have doubled the team in Asia Pacific.”
Nichols said there are currently no plans for opening additional US bases and that Performance Horizon will instead focus on growing its existing offices in San Francisco, New York and Baltimore.
Despite its aggressive expansion in the US market, Nichols says the company’s Newcastle headquarters will always be an important part of its business.
“Just over 50 per cent of our employees and half of our executive team are still in Newcastle,” he said.
“Ultimately the partnerships space is increasingly an international business and as a result we simply need to have staff on the ground in a variety of locations.
“There are more marketing dollars in the US and our business has to reflect that, but at the same time Newcastle will always be the spiritual heart of the company.”
Nichols acknowledged that finding people with strong tech backgrounds can be particularly difficult in the North but said it’s a challenge that every business faces.
“I think if you talk to any company based anywhere they’ll tell you that finding tech people right now is a challenge – whether they’re based in Silicon Valley or in Newcastle.
“One of the great things about Newcastle is that the employees we do hire do tend to stay longer than other cities so that’s a big positive for us.
“Just over half of our employees are in Newcastle so clearly we’ve been successful in recruiting but it is a challenge.”