Caroline Gibson builds teams. When organisations are faced with the need to rapidly assemble a senior team, Caroline is the consultant they often turn to.

“What I do,” she says, “is network. When my clients need to build a management team, they call me in and I set up the team to get programmes underway – that might include digital people, communications, the whole skills spectrum. I tend to work on critical infrastructure programmes – these things need to happen swiftly”

Caroline is one half of Twenty Seven Consulting (27C) – her business partner Rebekah Ramsay, who we featured some months ago – is the other half of the team. “I’m the people side, and Rebekah is the process side,” says Caroline.

"Bramble is a brilliant pairing for us... working with you makes it simple & easy to buy the much needed services from niche suppliers like us"

The two met while they were working together 30 years ago. After they parted ways, Caroline spent some years working in Australia, recruiting specialist construction healthcare teams, including for the prestigious Sunshine Coast University Hospital. From there, she went to work in Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore where she built senior construction teams for the hotel and gaming industries.

After returning to the UK, she and Rebekah founded 27C, providing strategic consultancy to help organisations assemble teams. One problem they hit, specifically in the public sector, is that procurement rules can hinder the exact thing that their clients need: speed.

Bramble Hub provides the lubricant that the process needs. “Bramble is a brilliant pairing for us,” says Caroline. “ We are a small company with years of experience in helping the public sector build specialist capability, however, procurement frameworks make it very difficult for hiring managers to buy our services. Bramble is on so many framework platforms and working with you makes it simple & easy to buy the much needed services from niche suppliers like us".

And speed is not the only way in which Bramble Hub’s services can improve the process. By enabling small, agile partner businesses like 27C to serve the public sector, we bring significant cost savings. Caroline provides an example: “A specialist programme manager from a larger firm might be billed at £1,200 to £2,500 a day. We can supply people via our networks for under £900 for the same skill sets. Our model is different: we charge for our time, and we don’t inflate the recruitment fees.”

The 27C formula seems to work, and Caroline can quote endless testimonials. A Director at Defra attests:

“I’ve worked with Caroline and the team at 27C to rapidly expand two different capital programme teams. They quickly got to grips with our internal recruitment practices, kept moving candidates through the process and hugely supported me in growing my teams successfully. Caroline’s considerable experience within the construction sector in particular has been invaluable in getting short term technical resources in place”.