By Santokh Saran and Prabjot Kandola, Co-Founders, Merlins Group
We were the engineers in the room
Before Merlins Group was anything, before the Companies House filing, before the website, before the first client, we were the data and software engineers sitting inside other people's businesses, shipping the work.
We met as engineers. We learned our trade the same way most engineers do: writing pipelines that nobody outside the team would ever see, debugging the integrations the business depended on without realising, building the dashboards that quietly ran somebody else's Monday morning. The unsexy work. The work that actually makes a company run.
That's important context, because everything we do now at Merlins Group comes directly from what we saw in those seats.
Our day jobs taught us what "enterprise" actually looks like
At places such as Birmingham City Council, we worked as Data Engineering Specialists on enterprise programmes, the kind of work where the client is a household name, the project deck has fifty slides, and the system you're touching has been alive longer than you have.
People assume that companies of that scale must have everything figured out. They don't. We watched enormous, well-funded organisations move slowly because their data lived in too many places. We watched smart teams burn weeks on reports that should have taken minutes. We watched million-pound transformation programmes get derailed by something as basic as nobody knowing which version of a customer record was the right one.
That experience was the first crack in the assumption we'd both walked in with, that the big players must have it all sorted.
Birmingham City Council showed us the public-sector version of the same problem
From there, both of us spent time at Birmingham City Council as Data Engineering Specialists, the largest local authority in the UK, serving over a million citizens.
The council is full of brilliant people genuinely trying to do important work. But the operational reality was familiar: legacy systems, scattered data, manual processes patched together by individuals who had become single points of failure. Reporting that should have informed decisions instead held them up. Talented public servants spending their day fighting the toolkit instead of doing the work they were hired for.
We weren't there to be critical. We were there to fix things. And we did. But every project we delivered also confirmed the same uncomfortable thought: if this is the state of play here, it's the state of play almost everywhere.
Debt collection agencies showed us the most unfiltered version of it
Then came work in debt collection, an environment that, for engineers, is genuinely instructive. The margins are tight. The data is messy. The regulatory pressure is intense. The volume is relentless. There is nowhere for bad systems to hide.
That was where we saw, in the rawest form, what happens when a business depends on systems it doesn't quite trust. Decisions made on stale data. Compliance work done twice because no one was sure the first version had captured everything. Hours of human attention spent on things a properly built pipeline would have handled silently.
Between the three worlds, global consultancy, public sector, and high-pressure private sector, a pattern was impossible to ignore.
The problem isn't size. It's systems.
The thought that wouldn't go away
We kept having the same conversation, in different versions, for over a year.
If Fortune-500 clients are running on the same kind of broken plumbing as a stretched council department and a 200-seat debt collection floor, then the gap in the market isn't more big-ticket consulting. The gap is in people who can actually go into an organisation, at whatever size, and fix the operational layer properly. People with the technical depth to build it right and the practical instincts not to over-build it.
We knew we could do that work. We'd already been doing it for other people's logos.
The only honest question left was whether we were willing to do it for our own.
14 February 2025
We incorporated Merlins Group on Valentine's Day 2025. Two directors. One registered address in Wolverhampton. No fanfare.
We didn't do a launch. We didn't raise money. We didn't write a manifesto. We picked up the phone and started doing the work, the same way we'd done it inside other companies, except now the responsibility for everything stopped with us.
It has not been easy
We want to be honest about this part, because the founder story most people tell online skips over it.
Building a consultancy from zero, as two young engineers, is hard. Selling complex technical work to organisations that are used to buying it from people three times your age is hard. Doing the actual delivery and the business development and the operations and the finance, all at once, with no buffer, is hard. Saying no to the wrong-fit work when the bank balance is staring at you is hard.
We've made mistakes. We've taken on engagements that taught us more than they paid. We've under-quoted things and learned. We've spent weekends rebuilding something a client could have lived without, because we couldn't. We've had weeks where the only thing keeping the company moving was the fact that there were two of us, not one.
We don't say any of this to complain. We say it because the version of the founder story where everything just clicks is a lie, and we'd rather work with people who already know that.
What we've actually learned (so far)
A few things have started to settle into convictions.
Most "enterprise problems" are systems problems wearing a costume. The real fixes are almost always smaller, sharper, and more practical than the consulting industry pretends.
Done properly beats done expensively. Clients don't need a six-month transformation to see real value. They need a clean pipeline, a working dashboard, an automation that gives their team their evenings back. Then the bigger work earns its right to exist.
Trust compounds faster than reach. Every serious client we have today came from someone telling someone else. We've spent zero on paid acquisition. The work is the marketing.
You can build something serious from Wolverhampton. We don't need a London postcode to do enterprise-grade work. Some of our clients have been surprised by that. We haven't.
What we're doing now
Today, Merlins Group works across the public sector, recruitment, construction, design, and creative industries, and increasingly with partners in Europe and the Middle East.
The work itself is varied. We've built AI-powered recruitment platforms that use video assessment to surface the right candidates faster. We've built employee tracking and operations apps for businesses like Binely Motor Services. We've shipped computer-vision AI systems that monitor factory floors for safety compliance in real time. We've cleaned up internal data, rebuilt CRMs, automated reporting, and replaced spreadsheets that should never have survived this long.
In some engagements, the automations we've put in place have cut operational costs by up to 40%, not by cutting people, but by giving them their time back.
That's the work. Real. Verifiable. Boring in the best way.
Follow the journey, and we'll bring your clients with us
Here's the part we're most excited about.
We're not going to pretend we have it all figured out. We're going to do the opposite. We're going to document this build in public, what's working, what isn't, the deals that close, the deals that don't, the systems we're putting into clients, the lessons we're stealing from year one and applying in year two.
Our bet is that the right people will want to come along.
If you're a founder, an operator, a fellow engineer, or someone running a business that knows its internal plumbing is holding it back, follow us. Read what we put out. Steal what's useful. Bring it back to your own work.
And if our journey ends up putting work in front of your clients too, through partnership, through referral, through the simple fact that you trust how we operate, that's exactly the kind of growth we want.
We didn't start Merlins Group to become loud. We started it to become useful.
Santokh Saran & Prabjot Kandola
Co-Founders, Merlins Group
merlinsgroup.co.uk · LinkedIn · @merlins.group · +44 7380 139066
