Aligned yet unique

Libby Stonell sits down with Hewshott founder Peter Hunt to discuss how the company – particularly in Australia – plans to continue growing while staying true to its roots

Can you tell me a little bit about Hewshott’s inception?

Hewshott started in 2002, and everybody says to me, where did it come from? What does it mean? Hewshott is a tiny village within the Surrey/Sussex/Hampshire borders in southern England. Hewshott House is set in 35 acres and the family that inherited it were asset rich but cash poor at the time, so extra income came through renting out parts of the estate, so my (now) wife Katie and I moved into a wing. We decided to start a new company, and thought “why not call it Hewshott?” I registered it as a company name shortly afterwards, bought Hewshott.com, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We started off as Hewshott Media, and then Hewshott Associates, followed by Hewshott International, which is when we opened in Singapore. In 2022, we had a big rebrand and repositioning, so now we’re just Hewshott.

How did Hewshott come to branch out?

In 2005, we won a project in Singapore for a German investment bank that set off an avalanche of work there.

Two years later, we won another project in Hong Kong for a different bank and, again, more work followed. By then, over 70% of our global revenue was coming out of APAC, so we moved back to Australia in 2009 and supported both offices. In 2010, one of our clients asked us to handle a big project in Mumbai and that’s how the Indian office started. After four new offices in five years, consolidation was needed but, in 2021, the long-overdue American office was launched. As far as the future is concerned, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m not really one for standing still for too long. I’d like to see if we can increase our footprint just a little bit more, but only provided we don’t risk losing what makes us unique. I want to maintain that personable, friendly, responsive feel that is Hewshott worldwide.?

Can running multiple offices be challenging??

Yes, but it’s made easier because all of us are rowing in the same direction. We’re really fortunate that all the directors are firmly aligned with our vision?– everybody’s got a really good North star if you like. I think as the business has grown, we’ve ensured that whoever joins us shares that vision. We could expand into two or three countries tomorrow, but we need to find the right person first?– people are the most important part of our business. Being independent is fundamental to our makeup?– there’s nobody sitting on our shoulders saying “you’ve got to do it this way”. We’re free to make the decisions that we want to make in the best interest of the project outcome – nothing more, nothing less.

What do you offer the Australia/New Zealand market that other consultants don’t?

We’re a fairly modest office in Perth, a relatively small city in comparison to the rest of the region, and ANZ has plenty of very good consultants that operate here. Sometimes we lose against them, sometimes we win?– that’s just the way it is as there’s enough work for all of us. But where I think we possibly are different to the majority of smaller independent consultants, companies of our size and our orientation, is that we have in-house IT and acoustics consulting experience and capability. In 2024, we will have chalked up 15 years of doing that in Australia.

How do you keep up to date with AV and other technologies?

If I go back to my first ISE in Brussels, there were three major things to look at: video, audio and control. You could do the whole show really well in the two or three days and come out full bottle, knowing what’s going on. Today, I barely scratch the surface and I find it quite frustrating. However, Hewshott is 30+ people across the globe and all attend the tradeshows too, so there’s always somebody who is going to be an expert in one of those many fields. It means there will always be somebody who’s passionate about one part of our technical landscape, so that knowledge is available in-house to every member of our team.

How important is sustainability to Hewshott?

It’s important. Covid was a really terrible experience for everybody, but the green shoots that have emerged from that are people realising that you can deliver large, complicated projects remotely without ever having to get the team together physically in the same space. And from a consulting point of view, those barriers falling away opens massive opportunities because it means that we don’t need to be in Sydney to deliver a project there. And it’s not just us – our clients are doing the same thing, with one project in Sydney having major stakeholders in Singapore, Bangkok and London. Spending all that money, boarding an airplane, spewing out loads of carbon, all for a three-hour meeting. Why would you do it?

Does Hewshott’s sustainability extend to suggesting greener solutions to clients?

Clients are increasingly going for the six-star building rating. While three points are available for acoustic compliance, there’s nothing for AV – yet. I think something should be there that encourages and recognises things like equipment going into standby automatically when not being used. Most of us do that anyway, but it’s not something which is measurable or recorded – it’s an opportunity missed.

Another thing that’s coming up, which I think is often overlooked, is the discussion around modern slavery. Most of our clients are Global 500s who are signed up to various modern slavery legislations around the world. We research and report on products, solutions and services where there could be an abuse of that process in the supply chain. We have a duty of care to make sure that they’re looking at decisions with their eyes wide open. A consultant’s role is to bring full understanding to their purchases, but we know it’s their choice. We’re not there to make decisions for them, but we are there to inform and empower them to make decisions for themselves.?

Does Hewshott have a current focus or area of growth?

The convergence between AV and IT continues to simmer. Opportunity lies in having those discussions within the IT space, because we’re still not quite there yet?– convergence is still converging. There are two distinct challenges involved in this?– the first being that AV in IT will be oversimplified, due to a lack of understanding of the nuances of audio, light and video. The other challenge is the lack of deep knowledge of IT by the AV market, although those gaps are definitely closing. However, people will need to get used to these gaps and find a way to help close them. We have a dedicated IT person in our business who had no prior exposure to AV but could communicate with IT managers in our client base as an equal. Once our IT resource had exposure to the AV market, the confidence in the client base went up and the IT doors opened. It takes effort.