Sale of Pell & Bales due to charity preference for 'boutique suppliers', says owner

26 May 2016 News

A Parseq Group spokeswoman has said that the company is looking to sell Pell & Bales due to the sector's preference for working with "boutique suppliers".

Parseq, a business process outsourcing firm which itself bought Pell & Bales in 2013, has confirmed that the agency and Pure Associates, another telephone fundraising agency, are to be sold by the end of next month.

A spokeswoman for the agency would not confirm how much the agencies had been sold for or the name of the buyer.

The spokeswoman said: "As part of our strategic review we asked charities what they wanted from a telephone fundraiser and found a preference for working with boutique suppliers because of their unique understanding of the sector.

"As a result we felt that Pell & Bales and Pure’s futures would be best secured outside of the Group, which will also allow us to concentrate on our core, more corporate proposition, of inbound voice and finance and administration services for the charity sector."

While the 2015 accounts for Pell & Bales have yet to be published, its last set of accounts for 2014 showed that the agency’s profits had fell by almost 80 per cent from £1.2m in 2013 to £267,000 the following year.

According to documents filed with Companies House, Pell & Bales has been operating in a corporate voluntary agreement – a way of structuring payment of debt that it owes – since 2011. The most recently filed iteration of the CVA shows that Pell & Bales renegotiated the terms of its agreement so that its creditor would receive 31p in the pound every month, a 4p per month reduction from the previous agreement.

Pure Fundraising, which was also purchased by Parseq in 2013, was in administration at the time and was subsequently wound up. However, Parseq continued to use the Pure brand, which traded as a division of its parent company.

Civil Society News understands that Parseq will seek to settle Pell & Bales’ outstanding debts in full before completing the sale of the agency.

The Pell & Bales spokeswoman said that the staff of the agency and Pure would be transferred across to the new owners, who had agreed that there would be no redundancies. The two agencies employ a total of 276 people, down from 314 at its last set of published accounts.

 

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