Ten years, one castle, and a lot of small archers

DT Economics turned ten this year, and we marked it with a weekend away day at Muncaster Castle, on the Cumbrian coast. Partners, the team and some of our Senior Advisors were there, and we invited families along too, babies and toddlers included.

Ten years ago, David Thomas started the firm with a simple conviction: that it should be possible to build a specialist economics practice without the backing of a global giant behind it, and that a smaller firm could still do work of the highest calibre. A decade on, that conviction has held, and this year felt like the right moment to pause and celebrate it.

 

Welcome to Ravenglass

We based ourselves in Ravenglass, a small village where three rivers meet the Cumbrian coast. People have been getting on with things here for a very long time. Roman soldiers manned a fort a mile up the road, and Muncaster Castle itself was later built partly from its stone. There is something grounding about reflecting on where the firm has come from in a place that has watched empires, markets, and castles come and go and simply carried on.

What the away day looked like

The itinerary combined the kind of reflection you would expect from any ten-year milestone with activities that worked for a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old in the same afternoon.

We had a proper firm session: looking back on ten years of work across regulation and disputes and looking forward to where the practice goes next. It was good to do that in person, in a room with people who had lived through the growth rather than just read about it in a slide deck.

Then we went outside. Archery, axe throwing and a go at crossbow shooting filled the rest of the weekend, run by instructors well used to a wide range of ages and abilities. Watching one of the partners take his turn at the hand axe, while his young son cheered from a safe distance, was a good reminder that we are all more than our day jobs.

Muncaster is also known for its owls and birds of prey, and the flying display was a highlight for children and adults alike. In the evening we had a sumptuous dinner in the castle with Peter and Iona Frost-Pennington, the current owners, who talked us through the family's history and its ghost stories. Muncaster has a long-standing reputation as one of the most haunted castles in England, and among the stories is that of Tom Fool, the castle's official jester in Elizabethan times, said to still make his presence felt centuries later. It was a proper storytelling evening.

Why this matters, beyond the fun of it

There is a genuine business case for this, not just a sentimental one. Firms that treat family as something to be managed around work, rather than something that exists alongside it, tend to lose good people at exactly the point their expertise is most valuable: mid-career, often around the years when caring responsibilities are heaviest. A ten-year-old consultancy that wants a long future ahead of it has to think about that now, not later.

It also reflects something about the kind of firm we want to be as we grow. Specialist economics consultancies live and die by the depth of relationships between colleagues, since the work is collaborative, technical and often high-pressure. Those relationships are built as much in the gaps between formal sessions as in the sessions themselves, and a weekend where the whole team and their families are together on the castle grounds tends to produce a different, warmer kind of gap than a hotel bar after a conference.

Ten years in, DT Economics is bigger, more established, and busier than it was at the start. What we wanted to prove to ourselves this year is that it can also stay the kind of place where bringing your family to the anniversary party is simply what you do.

Here's to the next ten.

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Chiara Garbellini is a Principal Consultant at DT Economics. She is a regulatory economist with expertise spanning telecoms, digital platforms and payments, advising network companies and regulators across the UK and internationally.