Top FTSE headhunter rescued by rival after plunging into administration
A City-based boutique headhunter which won executive-level talent for a host of FTSE 250 firms and collapsed after pumping investment into an AI platform has been purchased by one of its competitors, Morning Wire can reveal.
6 Group, a global executive recruitment consultancy, purchased Savannah Group and its AI platform, MapX, in July after founder and director James Beazley saw the company for sale on an insolvency marketplace.
Beazley told Morning Wire he jumped at the chance to buy the firm having known them “for a long time”.
Savannah Group, which has recruited directors and executives for the likes of Starbucks, hospitality giant Fullers, Burger King, Aston Martin, and global cruise titan Royal Caribbean, collapsed into insolvency due “financial pressures”, according to the listing on the marketplace.
According to the executive headhunter’s most recent companies house filings in July 2025, its revenue plummeted by 20 per cent the previous year, falling from £15.6m in 2023 to £12.4m in 2024.
Meanwhile its debt spiked to £270,100 in 2024, almost 5.5 times than the year before.
Administrators had called for a quick-fire sale and asked for expressions of interest to be sent within 24 hours after the listing was published.
Beazley, however, told Morning Wire he “was super surprised” that the company had fallen into administration as it “was on the better end reputation and quality wise of London recruitment boutiques.”
“I was away on business and when I came back, I saw it on the insolvency marketplace and wrote to the insolvency practitioner right away despite it being past the deadline,” Beazley said.
6 Group’s UK arm focuses on headhunting for firms in the oil and gas industry, financial services, retail, legal, and infrastructure and transport, and Beazley said the opportunity “fell into our lap” after looking for targeted acquisitions as part of a two year growth programme.
The director, who founded 6 Group 20 years ago, said Savannah Group and MapX “wasn’t being sold cheaply”, but did not confirm how much the firm paid for the purchase.
Beazley’s firm purchased the company’s intellectual property, client base, and employees – including the engineering team for the AI platform which includes staff MapX had poached from Apple, Google, Nest, and OpenAI.
The headhunter confirmed that “all the clients have been maintained” which includes many which 6 Group “have worked with previously and currently”, making the acquisition “a pretty logical fit.”
MapX is ‘an absolute gamechanger’
Savannah Group began building MapX in 2019 to supposedly speed up the search process for top talent, later launching the tool for use by its consultants in 2022.
In a bid to move from being a more traditional headhunter to an AI-driven firm, Savannah Group said in a post on its website it launched MapX as a separate company after clients asked about using the tool themselves “to improve their in-house executive talent acquisition efforts.”
Beazley said the platform, which has compiled a list of “every senior manager and board director in the Western world” across 2m companies, “is an absolute gamechanger” compared to Linkedin or other talent searching platforms.
He added that the AI platform “is invaluable, and will help us grow our business more.”