Celebrating 5 Years of CRE With A Rooftop Bash

Introduction

Five Years, And A Reason To Look Up

Anniversaries are easy to let slide. There is always a busier week coming, always a reason to move the date, and a business that spends its days solving other people's problems can get to the end of a year without ever stopping to look at its own.

We decided not to do that this time.

Five years is a genuine marker in telecoms. It is a crowded market, it moves quickly, and plenty of providers who were around when we started are not around now. Getting to five years with the clients, the team and the reputation we have built felt worth saying out loud.

So on Friday 14 August, we took over the rooftop at Wagtail London and invited everyone who had a hand in it.

The Night

A Rooftop In The City, And The Best Office View We've Had

Wagtail sits right in the middle of the City, with a rooftop terrace looking out over St Paul's, the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie and the Shard standing over all of it. By some distance, it was the best office view any of us have had.

The whole team came. So did our clients, our partners and a good number of family members and plus ones, which is exactly how it should be - the people who put the hours in and the people who put up with the hours, in the same room. Calvin, Ryan and Elliot were there for the full evening, which meant a lot of conversations that never happen over Teams.

Canapés circulated, the bar stayed busy and the terrace filled up as the light went. There is a particular half hour on a London rooftop in August, somewhere between the sun dropping behind the buildings and the skyline lighting up, when everybody stops talking and just looks. We got that half hour.

Then the music started and the evening changed gear. A resident DJ, a terrace that turned into a dance floor without anyone announcing it, and the sort of photographs that will be quietly deployed at every opportunity for the next twelve months. Clients dancing with the account managers who look after them is not something you can put on an agenda. It just happens when you get the room right.

Clients dancing with the account managers who look after them. You cannot plan that.

The Five Years

What Changed Between Then And Now

We will keep the origin story short, because the interesting part is the distance covered.

Calvin, Ryan and Elliot met working at a traditional telecoms company. They were good at their jobs, but increasingly uncomfortable with how the industry worked: customers locked into seven-year contracts they did not fully understand, "integration" that meant basic click-to-dial, and price rises every April. So they left and built CRE from scratch - the name comes from their initials - around one question: why does it have to work this way?

Five years on, the answer has taken shape.

We specialised. Rather than being a generalist provider to everyone, we chose one industry and went all in. Today CRE Group works exclusively with estate agents, because it is the market where getting phones right makes the biggest difference to the business.

We built the integration properly. We hold direct integrations with the major agency CRMs - Alto, Reapit, Street, Loop, Rex, Dezrez, MRI, Jupix and more - so an agency's phone system and CRM finally work as one thing. Calls bring up the right record, log themselves and transcribe straight into the CRM.

We went further than integration. CRE Connect, our AI call intelligence platform, now comes included with every phone system we supply - transcription, summaries, sentiment analysis, missed call reporting and action items for every agent.

We earned our place. The team has grown to around 50 people. We are the recommended telecoms partner to some of the most respected names in the industry, including The Guild of Property Professionals, Fine & Country, Kerfuffle, ICG and LonRes, and a Propertymark Industry Supplier. And we stay whole of market, so we recommend the right system for each agency rather than the one we happen to sell.

None of that was the plan on day one. It came from listening to agents, solving the next problem, and then the one after that.

What It Meant

Why We Did It This Way

We could have marked five years with an email and a cake in the kitchen. Plenty of businesses do, and nobody would have complained.

We did not, because the milestone is not ours alone. Every client who took a chance on a young provider, every partner who backed us before we had the track record, and every person who joined the team when we were still explaining who we were - they are all part of the five years. Celebrating that over a laptop screen would have missed the point.

Five years down. The next five started on Monday, and we quite like the idea of raising the bar on the venue.

Thank You

To Everyone Who Got Us Here

Thank you to every member of the CRE team, past and present, for the hard work that got us here - none of this happens without you. Thank you to the clients who trust us with the systems their business runs on, and to every partner who has grown alongside us. And thank you to the plus ones and families who came along on the 14th, and to Wagtail for a terrace that made the whole night feel like an occasion.

Here is to the next five.