Eleven years on, the Morgan & Mallet Group is an international staffing company with three specialist agencies covering household, hospitality, and yacht crew, eight offices, and a database of more than 50,300 vetted candidates across six countries. It has grown every year since it began, almost entirely through repeat business and referrals.
Morgan & Mallet was co-founded by Morgan Richez and Laurine Mallet, who together had spent years working as household staff for wealthy families before they ever placed anyone.
Laurine started as a nanny. She worked for high-profile families and lived the job from the inside, which is where a lot of her thinking about discretion and family fit comes from.
In 2014 she left to follow a different ambition and went to cooking school in France to train as a chef.
France has two recognized kitchen qualifications, the BEP and the CAP, and Laurine earned the CAP, the diploma about 85% of the chefs she now places also hold.
Morgan came up a different way. He started as a bike courier in London, which is how he learned the city street by street.
“I used to be on the bike to deliver in London. I knew London. It’s very important to know the cities, to have this knowledge about the city. This is the most important thing.”
From there he moved into driving, handling cars like Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis in Paris, then into private service for ultra-high-net-worth families in London as an executive butler and chauffeur. One client owned hotels and a private jet and would cross three or four countries in a single day. That was the world Morgan understood before he ever recruited for it, and it shaped how he reads candidates today.
Morgan and Laurine started the agency because wealthy families were going global while almost every staffing agency stayed local.
They had both seen the same problem from inside the houses they worked in. A family might own a place in London, a villa on the Riviera, and an apartment in New York, and travel between all three through the year. The staff often moved with them. But a London agency couldn’t find you a butler in Monaco, and a New York agency had no reach into Dubai. Each one stopped at its own border.
Having worked the jobs themselves, they also knew what made a placement last. It was rarely about a polished resume. It was about whether someone could read a household, stay discrete, but be able to anticipate, and handle the small things before they became big ones. They built the agency around finding that.
Laurine moved back to France in August 2014 and started the commercial side alone while still at cooking school. She fitted the work into the gaps in her day.
“During my internship at a restaurant in Paris, I would answer candidates and clients on my day off and during my break, between three and six. We started to receive requests, and three hours a day wasn’t enough. So I decided to stop the cooking school and work full-time for the company.”
Three months after Laurine, Morgan left his chauffeur job and joined her in France. He took a job as a receptionist in a high-end concierge building in Paris and built the company website on the side. The very first placement came through while he was still working that desk. A call came in from an elderly gentleman in the 15th arrondissement of Paris who needed a caregiver, and Morgan found the right person himself, by hand, before the company even had a database.
After a few months of this, Laurine made the call.
“I told Morgan, we’ve got a lot of clients, that’s great, but if we want to grow you need to stop your job and we work together every day.”
They officially set up the company in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2015.
“We established it in the UK because the administrative process was much easier and faster there than in France. France is really bureaucratic. We had friends in the UK, a lawyer and an accountant, so we travelled there and did it in one day.”
Morgan & Mallet grew from one UK company into an international group with global offices and three specialist agencies, expanding into France, then Switzerland, the UAE, and the United States as client demand pulled it from one market to the next.
The offices now run from New York, Los Angeles, and Miami in the US to London, Paris, near Monaco, near Geneva, and Dubai. The point of that spread is the thing they founded the company on. A family with homes in three countries can staff all three through one agency, and a candidate interviewed in Paris can be matched to a role in New York or Dubai within minutes.
In the early years, every candidate file was built by hand. Recruiters typed information into Word documents on their own laptops, formatted CVs from scratch, and kept references in personal files where nothing could be shared.
The team tried off-the-shelf software to fix it. Bullhorn was built for enterprise sales. Job Adder was a UK-centric single scrolling page. Neither could track the things that actually matter in this industry, like live-in availability, domestic couples, pet allergies, boat permits, or willingness to travel with a principal.
So in 2020 they started building their own system instead. It now generates a standardized Morgan & Mallet candidate profile automatically, adjusts what it asks for based on local law, and keeps every office working from the same live information.
Eric Rios, a recruiter who came to Morgan & Mallet after recruiting software engineers at Google, audits candidate profiles in that system every month.
“All of this is done manually. We create our own minimum qualifications and put them up against every resume.”
In practice that means helping clients write the job description, set a realistic salary, and structure the contract, because Morgan and Laurine have both been on the staff side of a badly written role. It also shapes how they treat the people they place.
“We treat every candidate with respect, even the ones who do not get the role. Some of those candidates later recommend us to their employers. Reputation travels fast. Good behavior brings good business.”
Laurine has seen that a lot over years. One butler she interviewed, who had worked for French presidents, impressed her so much that he now calls the agency himself when his employer needs more staff. A recent domestic couple placement came directly from him.
Discretion is at the center of all of it. Working with public figures and families who need absolute privacy, the company treats confidentiality as the foundation of the business, and that expectation continues from the first interview through every placement.
The other thing that is still there now is how close the founders stay to the work. Morgan still talks to his team every week and answers candidates directly.
“Even though we’ve got eight offices in the world, we are still a small company. I have direct contact with everyone. I don’t put a manager in between. I think this is the most important thing.”
The company still hires from the industry it serves. Several recruiters worked as household staff, hospitality professionals, or yacht crew before they joined.
Morgan & Mallet is one group made up of three specialist agencies, each focused on a different part of the luxury staffing world.
Morgan & Mallet is a luxury household staffing agency that places private staff for families and family offices, from butlers and housekeepers to nannies, estate managers, private chefs, and personal assistants. It runs at householdstaff.agency and is where the company started.
Morgan & Mallet Hospitality recruits executive and front-of-house talent for luxury hotels, palaces, Michelin-starred restaurants, and high-end retail.
Morgan & Mallet Yacht Crew places private and superyacht crew, from captains and chief stewards to chefs, engineers, and deckhands.
The three share the same vetting standard and the same regional recruiters, so a client can staff a home, a hotel project, and a yacht through one relationship. The group also works with legal partners for international employment, contracts, and visas, which matters most for clients who own property in more than one country.
What ties the three together is the founders’ own history. Morgan and Laurine built the group to solve problems they had lived themselves, either inside a private home or across a desk trying to place someone into one.
Morgan & Mallet co-founders Morgan Richez and Laurine Mallet are available for interviews and commentary on household staffing, hospitality recruitment, yacht crew, salary trends, and private service.
The company’s salary findings come from the Morgan & Mallet Household Staff Annual Report (2025/26), based on analysis of more than 200,000 candidates and thousands of placements, and the report is widely referenced for salary data across the markets the group serves.
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