A personal note from Mary Ewen, Founder of MJV Consulting, marking a decade of supporting businesses across Sussex, Surrey and London and looking ahead to what comes next.
Most small businesses don’t make it to five years. Reaching ten means you’ve navigated the things that break most people: the difficult hires, the economic shocks, the moments when everything had to change overnight.
We know, because we’ve been in the room for many of them.
In June 2026, MJV Consulting turns ten. When I launched the business back in 2016, the goal was simple: to build something that businesses in our community could genuinely rely on. Not a faceless HR function. Not a pile of policies gathering dust in a drawer. Real, practical support the kind that helps business owners deal with the people challenges that actually keep them up at night.
A decade on, I’m incredibly proud of where we are. And this felt like exactly the right moment to pause, reflect, and say a few things that have been on my mind.
Thank you to every client who trusted us and continues to trust MJV Consulting with their HR strategy
None of this happens without the businesses who took a chance on us, especially in those early years when we were still finding our feet. Every client we’ve worked with from the startup founder in Horsham hiring their very first employee, to the established business in Brighton navigating a complex restructure, to the scaling recruitment and executive search company in London in need of their first HR System has all shaped the consultancy we are today.
What strikes me most when I look back isn’t any single moment. It’s the sheer volume of positive outcomes we’ve been part of. Businesses that came to us in a moment of crisis and left with the confidence and structure to handle whatever comes next. Teams that were struggling and found their footing. Business owners who stopped dreading the ‘people stuff’ and started getting on top of it.
If you’ve worked with us at any point over the last ten years: thank you. You’ve been a genuine part of this.
The relationships that have shaped our business
When I look back at the last decade, what I value most isn’t the contracts or the case studies. It’s the relationships.
Building MJV Consulting from Horsham and growing our presence across Sussex, Surrey and London has meant being part of something genuinely local. The connections we’ve made through networking with business owners, fellow advisers, and the wider professional community across the home counties have been invaluable, both personally and professionally.
Good HR is built on trust. And trust, in my experience, is built in rooms at events, over coffee, in conversations where people feel they can speak freely. That’s something you can’t replicate online, and something I’m grateful we’ve invested in consistently.
Growing as a family business
One of my proudest achievements over the last ten years has been growing MJV as a genuinely family business and building a team whose combined expertise means our clients get far more than just HR advice.
Jeff Villis leads our Health & Safety provision, ensuring our clients have the workplace compliance and risk management support that goes hand in hand with good people practice. Claire Cross heads up our Wellbeing offering an area that has never been more important for businesses trying to retain and look after their people. And then our latest recruit, Ewen Bonnyman, joined as our Business Operations Lead and HRIS Implementation expert, ensures that everything we deliver is joined up, consistent and genuinely client-focused.
Together, we’re able to offer something that most standalone HR consultancies don’t always achieve: a joined-up service that covers the full picture of what it means to look after people well in a business.
To Jeff, Claire and Ewen: thank you. What we are building together is fantastic.
A decade of HR & Employment Law change and what it’s taught us
Ten years in HR consultancy means ten years of watching employment law evolve and helping clients keep up with it. From GDPR and changes to IR35, to the significant reforms now rolling out under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the pace of change has never really slowed.
And then there’s everything else. A global pandemic that rewrote every assumption about how work works. Economic pressures that forced businesses to make painful decisions. A job market that has shifted dramatically, with employee expectations higher than ever and the cost of losing good people rising year on year.
Through all of it, one thing has remained constant: the business owners who handle these challenges best are the ones who have good people around them. Not just legal cover, its, genuine counsel, from people they trust to give them the honest answer, not just the one they want to hear.
That’s what we’ve always tried to be. I’d like to think, after ten years, we must be doing something right.
What’s next for MJV Consulting?
Our tenth year isn’t a moment to stand still, it’s a springboard to the next ten years. We’re continuing to develop and deepen our core services to make sure we’re genuinely leading from the front when it comes to HR, Health & Safety and Wellbeing support for SMEs across our region.
We are looking forward to building upon our relationships with Breathe HR and Cezanne HR as our HRIS platforms of choice. This is an exciting space and with technology developments, we plan to keep MJV Consulting at the forefront of that change and leading the way in our corner of South-East England.
As part of that, we’re increasingly focused on bringing valuable insights directly to business owners — not just through the work we do one-to-one, but through events and sessions that help you stay informed and ahead of the curve.
Our next webinar is a great example of that. On 8th July 2026 at 11.00am, we’re hosting a free webinar alongside our partners at Breathe HR. It’s a practical session designed for business owners and managers and it’s a chance to get up to speed with what’s changing and how to respond. Details can be found here.
What won’t change is the thing that has always defined us: practical, personal HR support delivered by people who genuinely care about your business and the people in it.
Here’s to the next chapter and to all of you who’ll be part of it.
