The Client
Ashton Fire

Ashton Fire was founded in 2019 as an independent, specialist Fire Engineering and Fire Safety Consultancy with strong ethical, environmental and social values. Focused on providing exceptional fire safety solutions for all types of buildings throughout their lifecycle.

From inception through to demolition, Ashton Fire’s team of highly skilled Fire Engineers and Fire Safety Consultants have extensive experience supporting clients in design, construction and occupation of buildings across all sectors.

The business prides itself in delivering pragmatic, realistic, expert fire safety consultancy, whilst adhering to a robust quality management system underpinned by their ethical, environmental, and social values.

Their principles of integrity and honesty feed through the core of their project approach to ensure they offer sustainable, proactive and dynamic solutions.

The Ashton Fire team have seen considerable growth in business and headcount over the past couple of years, starting initially as three founding partners to today, a team of over 70 people.


The Brief

SYLO Beyond|HR. first started working with Ashton Fire in 2021, providing the business with support under our ‘HR Scale up’ retainer. We worked closely with the Ashton Fire People Team to provide HR expertise and advice on several people related initiatives such as performance and growth, recruitment and ensuring all HR documentation was in place, compliant, up to date and forward thinking.

As this business has continued to grow, our support has also grown and adapted to help enable the business to achieve their strategic goals.


Our Approach

In the Autumn of 2022 our Business Strategy specialist, Luci Martin, worked closely with the leadership team to support them to shape a 3-year business plan along with a 12-month action plan. This has helped the team achieve clarity and focus on the business priorities.

Alongside this, our strategic and operational people support to the business ramped up so that we could better align ourselves with the business goals during this growth period. Lynsey Willis (Head of Client Delivery) has been working at senior level alongside the leadership team on Director level initiatives as well as leading on the creation of a People Plan framework, aligning this with the overarching business plan.

Rachel Browne (HR Business Partner) provided regular onsite support at their Bicester office, providing operational HR expertise to the internal People Team and Managers with a particular focus on recruitment. Specifically, we facilitated the introduction of an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to streamline and create more efficiencies when hiring, refining the recruitment processes and training Managers on effective recruitment and selection methods.

Our Lead Trainer, Andre Bozon, ran a successful workshop with the leadership team on Team Integration and Effective Communication and Michelle Beautiman (Talent Consultant) has supported the growth of our team by head-hunting for key roles.

With oversight on all client activity headed up by Sarah Stevens (Managing Director), our integrated approach and, the ability to draw on our expertise from within the wider team, has enabled Ashton Fire to progress with their ambition of growing the business.

Client Contact

Director - Business Operations Rachael McComish
The Outcome

What sets Sarah, Rachel and the rest of the SYLO team apart is their genuine commitment to our success. They are always available to offer support and go above and beyond to ensure we achieve our goals. Their professionalism, expertise, dedication to meeting our needs and reliability has made them an invaluable partner for us in our formative years as a business.