Realclients. Realnumbers.

James Chase had a strong reputation and a steady flow of inbound and referral work, but no proactive outbound function. New conversations only happened when a vacancy reached the open market, which meant competing against three or four other agencies on the same brief. They wanted a way to start hiring-manager conversations before roles were advertised, without taking consultants off their billing desks to do it.

Mentis stood up a forward-signal layer in week one. Rather than monitoring job boards, we tracked the events that create technical hiring demand before any role is scoped: systems integrator contract wins, vendor partner announcements, funding rounds, platform go-lives, and senior tech appointments across the sectors James Chase recruits into. Experienced operators ran tailored outreach under the James Chase brand, and qualified meetings were booked straight into the team's calendars with weekly reporting so leadership could see the pipeline forming in real time.

• 6 qualified hiring-manager meetings booked in the first 30 days of build
• Consistent 4 to 6 hiring conversations per week sustained from month 2 onward
• First mandate signed within 6 weeks of the engagement starting
• Reduced reliance on inbound and referral channels as the primary source of new business

New business came almost entirely from referrals and repeat clients. It had worked, until the funding environment for housing associations tightened and the pipeline slowed with it. The founder was doing business development personally, squeezed between compliance work, candidate vetting, and existing client servicing, with no consistency. Generic recruitment lead-gen agencies had been tried, and their outreach landed badly in a sector where CQC standards, safeguarding, and trust-built relationships matter more than volume.

Mentis treated business development as a function to be built, not a campaign to be launched. We set up signal monitoring across Apex's target market: new supported housing scheme approvals, local authority commissioning announcements, registered provider expansions, and senior leadership appointments at housing associations. Experienced operators ran tailored outreach under Apex's own brand, holding genuine conversations with scheme managers and operations directors rather than sending templates. Qualified meetings were booked straight into the founder's diary, with weekly reporting so the founder always knew what was in play.

• 5 qualified meetings per week, consistently, from month 2 onward
• 4 new housing-provider clients signed within the first quarter
• 9 new terms of business agreements signed in the same period
• Founder's time shifted from cold prospecting back to closing and operations

Volonté operated across three quite different markets: healthcare consultancy, commodity trading, and investments. Each had its own buying signals and decision-maker profile. New business came through trusted introductions and referrals, especially between Istanbul and London. That worked for known relationships, but left a large universe of qualified prospects entirely uncontacted. The team had no scalable way to identify a healthcare operator about to scale internationally, a buyer entering a supply contract cycle, or an investor opening a fund mandate.

Mentis built a multi-channel signal layer tuned to Volonté's three businesses. For the consultancy: senior healthcare leadership appointments, regulatory announcements, and start-up funding events in target geographies. For trading: commodity tender notices, supply contract renewals, and procurement-team changes at buyer organisations. For investments: fund-launch announcements and mandate disclosures in the niche sectors Volonté serves. Experienced operators ran tailored outreach under Volonté's own brand, in English, Turkish, and Romanian where needed, with messaging that matched each business line's specific buyer.

• 12 to 15 live in-market signals surfaced per month across the three business lines
• 7 qualified introductions per quarter to consultancy, trading and investment partners
• Roughly £210k of pipeline value attributable to Mentis-sourced conversations in the first quarter
• Time from signal to introduction averaging under 2 weeks, against a referral cycle measured in months