Grant Morris

From Black Tie Balls to Faxed CVs

Grant grew up in a nice part of London in a family that was not wealthy, and he describes himself as entrepreneurial out of necessity from a very young age. The events came first, then club promoting at some of the best venues in the city while he studied for a law and politics degree. He decided quickly that he did not want to be a lawyer, and equally that he did not want to be running parties for 18 year olds at 40. His business partner from those days, now living in Los Angeles, went on to do extraordinarily well. Grant notes it with a shrug rather than regret.

A contact got him into legal recruitment on the strength of the law degree. He stayed just over a year under his first boss, Frank, a man he still occasionally speaks to. Then came IT recruitment in the late 1990s, when CVs went out by fax and the pre dotcom market was, in his words, a license to print money. He did extremely well. Next came a detour: an online lingerie business for his girlfriend at the time, whose family had been in the trade for generations. Investment was offered, the dotcom bubble burst, and they opened a physical store instead. There are boutiques to this day. After two back to back turnaround contracts, Grant started his own business from the back of that store. Elite had existed before him. What it became did not.

Everything From the Shop Floor to the Boardroom

The structure Grant has assembled reads less like an agency and more like an ecosystem built around one industry. Temporary staffing covers shop floors at Harrods, Selfridges and the boutiques. Retail operations handles permanent hiring from sales assistant up to retail director, where the executive division takes over. Head office and corporate carries specialisms in buying, merchandising, wholesale, technical production, design, finance, HR, supply chain and digital marketing. Executive search sits in a separate business called Etana.

A training academy that began as an internal capability has grown into a business in its own right, working on client experience, re engineering and the selling ceremony alongside leadership training and culture work. From there came business consultancy: partnering with brands on growth, change management, advisory, search and interim. Grant argues the model beats the strategy houses on one specific axis. A Bain or a BCG will give a client whoever is on the bench. Elite reaches into what he calls the largest network in this industry in the world and finds the person built for that exact problem.

The credibility rests on staffing. Almost everyone in the business has worked in the field they recruit for, and the international teams add language and genuine local knowledge across Europe, APAC, the Middle East and the US. Boutique depth, global reach.

No Name on the Door

Grant has never had a coach or a mentor, and says he probably should. What he did have were partners. Martin, his first business partner and a former investment banker, is the person he credits with getting things off the ground at all. Without him, Grant says, it would not have happened. Frank gave him his start in the industry. Beyond those two, the people who inspire him are the ones he works with directly rather than anyone he worked for, largely because he has worked for very few people.

That shapes how he runs things. His name is not on the door, and he has no interest in being a megalomaniac about it. There is no glass ceiling in any business he has been involved with: people can become shareholding directors and own part of what they create. Some who would have stayed rank and file recruiters elsewhere are now multimillionaires in their own right. Grant has also been a non executive and advisor to startups and turnarounds, and has taken several businesses from launch to sale, but Elite was never built for an exit. It was built as a brand.

The US is the unfinished chapter. Business there is good, but the operation is still small relative to ambition. His reason for entering the market was blunt: the firms he saw were doing it badly. If a poor operator could put 200 consultants on the ground, he reasoned, there was room to do very well.

Where AI Helps and Where It Stops

Grant is invested in the technology, not just opining about it. He is involved in a couple of AI startups in fashion and UX. His own business runs a ChatGPT style CRM for search and has automated CV formatting that used to eat hours. He is also clear eyed about the limits: the fundamental constraint right now is data quality, because AI is only as good as the underlying records on a CRM or ATS. Cleaning that data, he says, is essential, and the vendors selling the dream do not always deliver the reality. His business partner Steve, in an IT recruitment company that has cycled through a lot of tools, has seen the same gap between theory and practice.

In luxury, Grant does not see replacement. Volume hiring and some blue collar categories will be automated, and the large model providers may well build their own recruitment arms to do it. But understanding a client at DNA level, and being the person they actually enjoy working with, is not a workflow. Relationships alone will not keep you in the room, he adds, because you still have to deliver the person. Both halves have to be true.

His sharpest argument, made recently in an article, concerns the steep reduction in graduate recruitment in the UK. He considers it a serious mistake. Hand all the grunt work to AI and you lose the nuts and bolts of your own business. In ten years, competitors who kept hiring people on day one will have staff who understand the ins and outs of everything, while the firms that cut will be shopping externally as their veterans retire. The right response, he argues, is not fewer graduates but higher expectations: give them AI and ask for ten times the output. His concerns about the technology run wider, from energy consumption to containment and weaponisation. Humans, he observes, have always traded long term damage for short term efficiency, and somehow tend to come out the other side.