With a track record of 60% revenue growth and customer satisfaction, Mûve plans to broaden its footprint, aiming to be a Top-5 UK conveyancer this year, two years ahead of plan. Chief Operations Officer, Adam Gamage-Brooker and newly appointed Chief Revenue Officer, Paul Coleman, who brings significant sales and marketing experience from leading UK telcos and start-ups, discuss Mûve’s rapid growth and its challenges. Scaling up involves expanding their legal team and customer-centric departments such as ‘Tele-Sales’ and ‘Relationship Management’. Here, Sri Lanka’s labour market becomes crucial, highlighted by both Gamage-Brooker and Coleman during this interview.

Tell us about Mûve and its journey – what makes the company stand out?

Gamage-Brooker: Only seven years into the industry, Mûve is now among the Top 10 conveyancers in the UK, traditionally an outdated and inefficient industry. Simply put, whenever a property changes ownership, conveyancing is involved.

Historically, UK conveyancing firms faced constraints due to limited local expertise and resources. Mûve disrupted this by leveraging technology and talented young professionals in Sri Lanka, providing excellent and efficient services at competitive rates.

Mûve’s revenue rose by 70% last year, with similar growth expected this year. This success is attributed to Mûve’s partnerships with Estate Agents and Mortgage Brokers, direct-to-consumer digital marketing, and performance that consistently outpaces the UK average exchange time by 4 weeks. We are proud to be recognized by customers with a TrustPilot score of 4.5 and over 4000 reviews.

Mûve differentiates from other digital conveyancing firms in two aspects. First, during the stressful period of buying or selling a house, a customer’s primary want is to be guided and listened to. Conveyancing fee levels have become so low that it is very difficult to achieve this along with the cyclical nature of the industry. Second, the use of technology such as digital signatures, automated workflows, dashboards and workspaces, and a digitized compliance process reduces the pain of the client experience, as well as makes our employees as efficient as possible. Our Colombo operation employs over 300 people, with an additional 70 in the UK. Our two Colombo offices handle most legal work, supported by an expanding team of support functions. This customer-focused, primarily Sri Lanka-based angle allows Mûve to compete like no other UK conveyancer.

What challenges confront your business in the UK?

Coleman: The pandemic and associated lockdowns disrupted property transactions. Despite recovery signs, a financial crisis looms due to political and policy issues, with rising inflation and interest rates. Mûve is thereby enhancing marketing efforts to attract new B2B partners and explore alternative B2C customer acquisition strategies like telesales, building resilience.

How about obstacles in Sri Lanka?

Gamage-Brooker: While Sri Lanka’s economic crisis impacted Mûve, our largest ongoing challenge is hiring swiftly and curbing talent emigration due to local uncertainties. Despite offering competitive performance-related pay and striving to be a preferred workplace, hiring and retaining skilled employees at the necessary scale poses difficulties. Sri Lanka is experiencing a knowledge-based worker brain drain; however, if you wish to be compensated well, build a rewarding career, and stay close to home, Mûve allows you the opportunity to stay in Sri Lanka.

You’re looking to expand your customer-facing teams – so why work at Mûve?

Coleman: Despite technology digitizing aspects of conveyancing like identity verification and contract signing, the human element is crucial. Property transactions, inherently intricate and emotionally charged, are among life’s most stressful events. Our competitors struggle to replicate our delivery model in Colombo, where passionate individuals are readily available to assist customers.

Working in an international company from the outset, our sales and relationship management roles enable direct engagement with UK customers. Traditional Sri Lankan sales roles, often in insurance, finance, or digital fields like travel, are exposed to local and global market shocks, affecting job stability. The UK housing market, though fluctuating, holds considerable growth potential. Mûve offers opportunities for those thriving in target-driven, high-pressure, customer-facing roles to engage in varied transactions, where prior experience isn’t required.

Ultimately, we are looking for individuals excited about sales, and who enjoy communicating and managing relationships

What does the future look like for Mûve?

Gamage-Brooker: In the next five years, Mûve anticipates a fivefold increase in case volumes, tripling our team size and becoming a top 3 UK conveyancer. Despite this growth, we will maintain our entrepreneurial spirit, keeping customer satisfaction as our ultimate metric. Directors will continue getting on client calls, and we will continue to improve our processes from the ground up. We may be a corporate, but we’re not a conventional one, now nor in the future.