David Taylor catches up with Ninety Four Group founder Adam Green to get his reflections on the ‘whirlwind’ of MIPIM as a first-time attendee, prospects for the rest of the year, and why exactly he named the two-year old company the way he did… 

Hello, Adam. How are you? 

I'm well, thank you. I'm back after two weeks - I've had a week in MIPIM, which is our first as a company and as an organisation. And then the week following, I went to on a ski trip with my fiancé and some friends. So, it feels like it's been a huge two weeks. 

So, you're back out of a suitcase into normality! 

Exactly. I had the first night of my own bed again last night, which was incredible. 

So, before I ask you a little bit about the firm that you front, what were your perceptions of MIPIM as a first timer? 

I enjoyed MIPIM. As you know, and as you've worked with Emily Wilson before - Emily joined me in January this year as our head of partnerships, to really focus on pipeline and growth for the year, moving forward. And not just this year, but into the future. Her big thing when she joined me in January was: how much thought that I put into MIPIM? My answer, if I'm brutally honest, was very little... 

Why? 

...I think I, or we as a practice, have won quite a lot of work over the first two years, and I was somewhat blinkered into just delivering as opposed to winning work and looking bigger and broader. And I think it was Q3/Q4 of last year where I had the realisation that the small team of deliverers that we have at the moment can't do everything, and getting Emily on board has been the first step to really push that as a as a major piece and part of the practice. I'd heard of MIPIM, know of MIPIM, but it wasn't something that I prioritised, just because I felt as though there was so much in London I'm not doing, first and foremost, without hopping on a plane to the South of France to do it there. But we were very pleasantly surprised with the week, really. It was a whirlwind. It was very full-on. Emily was very good at filling my diary up from Monday morning at 9am through to Friday lunchtime. So, it was great. I think I must have told my life story about 50,000 times, it feels, that week, but did bump into lots of great businesses, organisations, characters and everything in between, really. 

Do you think you won work there, potentially? 

I think we've got the opportunity to win work there. I think this period is actually the most important period where we're back in the UK, we're back in London, and we now need to follow up meaningfully with everybody that we did have good conversations with out there, of which there was many. I know it's cliche, and everybody says it, but you do have months' worth of conversations squeezed into two or three days. There is something about having everybody prioritising that same element of their business and their work and their priorities on that week to try and unlock conversations that would have taken us, you know, weeks and months of coordination here in London to get to Hounslow, for example, or to get to Tower Hamlets meaningfully, or whoever it may be. Yes, it was all squeezed into a day or two days or three days, which is super beneficial. And, yes, we will be returning again next year. So, I think that tells us that it has been a success. But we do regret not hosting our own event, which we will put some more time into next year, because that will be super valuable also. 

So please retell your life story that you mentioned you told many times at MIPIM! Tell me about the firm, first of all, Ninety Four Group. Why is it called that? I'm presuming it wasn't set up in 1994. I think you were set up only a couple of years ago? 

Yes, exactly. I started Ninety Four Group in the late summer of 2023. It was always my goal and my dream, if you like, to run my own practice, be my own boss, and take all the good and bad of everything I'd seen in my career to date and put my own spin on it, and improve the bits that I thought could have been done better, and take the bits with me that I thought were done really well. So, I set up Ninety Four Group, which is a project, programme and development management consultancy, based out of Farringdon in London. It's named Ninety Four group because I was born in 1994... 

Gotcha. Wow! Okay. Makes me feel old! (laughs) 

It's not any more detailed than that! (laughs) It was surprisingly hard as a first task to name the organisation. I remember sitting at my kitchen island thinking, what do I call it? I wanted it to be something that was unique to me, but equally, didn't necessarily do it, or tell you exactly what it did on the tin, so that as the industry moves and flexes in the future, we've got the ability to move and flex with it, and perhaps take on other disciplines, or perhaps take on, yes, slightly different sectors within the business. Therefore, I landed on Ninety Four Group. So, yes, 2023; so, this summer, we'll be three years old. 

You've got about 15 live projects, as far as I understand, across resi, commercial, education, regeneration, retail, hospitality. Tell me more. 

We've currently probably got a little bit more than that. We've probably got 17 or 18 live projects. We peaked probably closer to 20 schemes. When I started the practice in 2023, I relied heavily on the black book that I'd generated over the 10 years of my career previous to that. I really went on a bit of a journey to meet as many people as possible who, firstly know me, know the work that I did previously, and I felt that I could add benefit to their world. I started off by trying to sell my own time, first and foremost. As a consultant, all we do is sell people's time. So, I thought, I'll focus on selling my own first and see where that gets me. So, in the back end of 2023 we did a little bit of work with the NHS, which was great, and which got me some early cash flow and my first meaningful client. Then we also did a little bit of work for a small London retailer, doing some fit-out work, which was great because that added another sector and another string to our bow quite quickly. And then in the late November, December of 2023 we got an opportunity with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to look after some of their education programme, which involved both new build schools and extensions to existing schools. That was really our first “meaningful-meaningful” client, whereby they had a big pipeline of capital delivery work, and we were in a position to grow and bend and adapt to the needs that they had at the time. In the Q1 of 2024 we had the three school schemes income from summer that year, we'd won a substantial amount of work with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which varied across public realm, through to social housing, through to extra care housing. We had healthcare centres. We had a whole mixed variety of schemes and sectors that comes with working with local authorities. And that was the start of our journey as a practice to grow a team, which is now the seven of us that we are today – and hopefully come the end of the year substantially larger. 

We're just coming up to time. Can I finish with your view on the state of the market and optimism, or otherwise, for the rest of the year? It is a common question I ask of many people, to get a kind of handle on where we are, given world events and so on? How are you fixed? 

I'm super-optimistic, certainly about London at the moment. I mean, coming off the back of MIPIM, spending a lot of time around the London stand, I think we've got a whole host of reasons to be optimistic. The construction industry, as you'll know, David, is full of ups and downs. I think inherently we live in an environment that forever needs maintaining, forever needs improving, and therefore, you've got to put yourself out there and put yourself in an environment to work with the clients that you want to work with. And that's what we're focusing on. I think there's plenty of people, organisations and clients that are building and developing, and we want to align ourselves with those in a good position to do so. 

Brilliant. Well, best of luck with it all. And no doubt I'll bump into you next year's MIPIM, if not before. 

That would be great, David, thank you. 

Thanks Adam.