Savannah Group administration: what happens to live searches and candidate processes

Savannah Group Limited, the UK executive search and interim firm, is in administration. Companies House records the company (number 04527016, incorporated 5 September 2002) with status in administration, and its registered office now given as the address of FTS Recovery Limited in Milton Keynes.

Clients with searches underway and candidates part-way through a process are the people with the most immediate questions and the least information. This page sets out what is on the public record, and what those two groups can reasonably ask.

What is on the record

Rachel Ennis and Marco Piacquadio of FTS Recovery were appointed joint administrators on 15 July 2026. The administrators have stated they are considering options related to the firm's existing mandates and client relationships, with the objective of maximising recoveries for creditors.

The financial background was reported by City AM from Companies House filings: revenue fell 20% from £15.6m in 2023 to £12.4m in 2024, and debt costs rose to £270,100, close to 5.5 times the prior year. The business was listed for sale on insolvency marketplaces together with MapX, the AI talent platform it had built from 2019 and launched publicly in February 2023. We recorded the insolvency and sale listing on 4 July, before the administration appointment, on the signal record for that event.

If you have a search underway

A retained mandate is a contract, and in an administration it is an asset the administrators assess alongside everything else. Their stated objective is recovery for creditors, which is not the same objective as completing your search. Three questions settle most of the uncertainty, and all three are for the joint administrators appointed on 15 July 2026 rather than for your former consultant: whether your mandate is being continued, assigned to a buyer, or closed; what happens to fees already paid against work not yet delivered; and who now holds the candidate longlist and the assessment material generated for you.

The third question is the one most often left until last and matters most. A search in progress is a live pipeline of named people, most of whom are in confidential conversations they have not disclosed to their current employer. That pipeline does not pause while a sale process runs.

If you are a candidate mid-process

You are entitled to know who is now processing your personal data and on what basis, and to exercise the same rights you held before the appointment. Since 15 July 2026 the correct contact for that is the administrators at the company's registered office, not the individual consultant you were speaking to, who may no longer be with the business.

Ask where your process stands, whether the client has been told the search is disrupted, and whether your details are part of anything being offered for sale. A candidate longlist is data, and in a sale it travels with the asset unless someone asks the question.

The pattern behind this one

Firms in our sector are not immune to the cycle they report on. Across the current signal window (2026-03-20 to 2026-08-13) we hold 677 restructuring signals, 146 of them in EMEA, and the restructuring cluster tracks them by market as they land.

The specific shape here is worth naming, because it recurs: a services business funding a multi-year technology build while its core revenue contracts. MapX ran from 2019 to a 2023 launch, against revenue that fell 20% in the year to 2024. Building a product business inside a people business changes what the leadership team has to be good at, and the capability question usually arrives later than the investment decision does. That is the same read we apply on transformation mandates generally.

Where we sit

MitchelLake runs board and executive search across the same UK and European market, documented across 246 delivered mandates and our board practice. If a search of yours has stalled mid-process and you want it picked up, talk to us and we will tell you plainly whether we are the right firm for it.

We have no involvement in the administration and no commercial interest in its outcome. The facts above are drawn from Companies House, the appointed administrators' notice and contemporaneous reporting, all linked. Where they are updated, this page will be.