The European Union is still the biggest buyer of UK services exports, with the US in second place. But exports to the US are growing at a far faster rate.
Still, the bottom line for Britain is that in many cases it is American companies calling the shots. Their brains, creativity and skills are now feeding US profit margins instead of British ones.
“Because things haven’t been as buoyant in the UK, there is a lot of talent that are putting their hands up [and going for US jobs],” says Smorfitt.
What this means for British dynamism remains to be seen. There is an argument to be made that working for a US company can help impart the skills and training needed to make the UK competitive again.
But the flip side is that our best and brightest may end up moving to the US, leaving Britain little more than the back-office to the biggest economy in the world.
Then there is the question of how long this hiring boom will continue. Donald Trump has campaigned with a slogan to “stop outsourcing” and has pledged to introduce tariffs of up to 20pc on the value of goods entering the US from other countries.
Such levies won’t apply to the trade in services – a British worker doing paperwork for an American business in London, say – but the political messaging may send a chill through corporate boardrooms should Trump retake the White House.
A threat could also come from UK economic policy. Interest in Britain from US companies dipped in the wake of the September 2022 mini-Budget, when UK markets were volatile.
American bosses are growing nervous again. Employers last week emerged as the biggest losers of Rachel Reeves’s £40bn tax raid, which will ratchet up costs for companies from April.
In order to raise £25bn through employers’ National Insurance contributions, the Government is also lowering the level at which employers have to start paying them. Then there is the looming overhaul of workers’ rights, which will mean employers have to give new staff full protections from day one in a job and will strengthen the power of unions.
“If American bosses in boardrooms in the States know anything about the UK market, it’s that compared to France and Germany, labour laws are more flexible,” says Duncan Edwards, the boss of transatlantic trade association BritishAmerican Business.
The imposition of more rigid rules will be “a concern for US companies who already have big numbers of employees here”, he says.
“Whether that turns into hiring less people, we’ll see. But it’s certainly an issue for the managers in the UK trying to attract investment from their parent company.”
If the costs of doing business in the UK suddenly spikes, it’s inevitable that the appetite for hiring here will cool as companies turn to cheaper options elsewhere.
Stanford’s Bloom says: “The big competitor with the UK is central and South America, in that US firms do a lot of off-shoring of jobs to Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.
“These have a lot of skilled coders and technical staff, so to compete Brits need to have some cultural or language edge. So yes, US firms will offshore to British workers, but it’s a narrow realm of jobs where fluent English is important.”
Trends can quickly turn. A senior manager at a US company with staff in Britain is now “seriously questioning whether it’s worth staying” following Reeves’s mammoth tax raid, a person familiar with the plans says.
As for East, he is now hiring people in the US on local salaries. Today, they make up a quarter of his 180-strong workforce. The US makes up 40pc of his business, and it is growing rapidly. For now, he still plans to keep a large chunk of his workforce in Britain.
He says: “We want to continue to take advantage of the cost efficiencies.”