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BWB - London's been a game changer

Consultant BWB has been in business 25 years. And while 2015 is about celebration, helped by three wins at the ACE Engineering Excellence Awards, boss Steve Wooler is focused on the future. 

Birthdays always make you look back. And for BWB, 25 this year, five years ago, it was having a pretty tough time. After a management buyout two years previously the firm had been plunged into a recession that bit it hard because most of its business in buildings, environment and infrastructure was for private developers in the Midlands.

"BWB is picking up flagship projects in the capital won in competition with some of the best known consulting engineers in the business. In high rise residential for instance, the firm has been instrumental in helping to secure planning consent for Lewisham Gateway, New Bermondsey and Millharbour on the Isle of Dogs."

The MBO team had had to almost halve the size of the company from 250 staff to 130 and had been fighting for survival. But when times are toughest you often have your best, and certainly bravest ideas and that’s just what happened at BWB. “We’d had no resilience to the downturn,” says managing director Steve Wooler.  “We had to find some for the future.”

Simplest problem to solve was geographical. Wooler and his team had seen the London property market was almost untouched by the recession. It was time to head south.

So right at the depths of the economic crisis in 2010, BWB started up in London. Determination to succeed, and good relationships with clients who themselves wanted to tap into the capital’s market, have ensured success and proved to be the best decision the firm could have made. It has come out of recession feeling stronger and with London now providing almost a fifth of its £12.5M income.

Along with that, BWB is picking up flagship projects in the capital won in competition with some of the best known consulting engineers in the business. In high rise residential for instance, the firm has been instrumental in helping to secure planning consent for Lewisham Gateway, New Bermondsey and Millharbour on the Isle of Dogs.

“That has been fantastic for us,” says Wooler. “ We were largely unknown in this specialist sector in London, but our clients gave us the opportunity to prove ourselves by appointing us at very early stages of each of these prestigious projects. One of these, Lewisham Gateway, is currently under construction. These were golden opportunities that we grasped with both hands and together they have proven to be a real game changer for us – we have a certain cachet now.”

“Clients use us because we invest the time to understand their business and there’s always someone on the end of the phone – someone they know, trust and can make things happen."

Last year the company opened an office in the capital and has been continuing its national expansion by building up its presence in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham as well as expanding its Nottingham headquarters. And the London effect means it is winning bigger and more high profile work outside the capital. Latest prize has been to be appointed engineer for HSBC’s relocation to Arena Central in Birmingham. “That’s another game changer – it’s currently the biggest commercial office development outside London,” Wooler says. “I have no doubt that we secured our role on Arena Central on the back of the great work we were doing on the major projects in London.”

The next move will be to consolidate presence and profile  in the south east. “London has shifted our centre of gravity slightly but we won’t grow the office there to any more than 30 to 40 people as quality office space is prohibitively expensive. But that still gives us plenty of scope to grow by attracting top talent to win and deliver prestigious work from a central London location and ‘northshore’ the bulk of the detailed work to our other offices which are perfectly capable of delivering it.

The plan is to double the size of the business in five years. We could do that organically, but if you grow too quickly the foundations can become shaky – your management processes become strained and the people you hire might not be the best fit. So it’s likely to be a sensible mix between organic growth and selective acquisitions that come with staff and established clients.”

Split in workload is now more than 80% in favour of the private sector, with the remainder being carried out for public sector clients, but Wooler is honest enough to admit the private sector element is likely to rise again. “Public procurement is just too frustrating and difficult,” he says. “There’s been a lost opportunity for the public sector to grasp the best consultants that have traditionally been focused on the private sector and deliver better value. Now the private market is back, that moment has gone.”

Wooler also has a close eye on how the market for consultancy services is changing. “Our focus is going to migrate away from commoditised design to higher value consultancy where we can really add value by devising cost effective and sustainable solutions whilst  not losing touch with a client’s commercial drivers.

“We’d had no resilience to the downturn. We had to find some for the future.”

“Consultants that harness their ability to manage data effectively will be  at the forefront of the profession. BWB is investing heavily, not just in BIM, but in data management generally.  With standard products resulting from development of BIM and big data we see the future as provision of more strategic advice and less  detailed design.

BWB is developing its own digital capability with an eye on the future. “We are surveying in point cloud and converting that to a digital model, for example surveying rail bridges without the need for track possessions by setting up three or four control points outside the rail corridor and stitching the data together. We’ve set up a BWB innovation hub and allocated  funding to give our  bright, creative people time to develop digital engineering ideas – such as ‘drive through’ visualisation of road schemes and ‘real time’ flood modelling which is proving very effective for public consultation.”

But he’s keen to make sure that computing capability doesn’t replace natural engineering instinct. “If as a profession we lose the ability to visualise and quantify the solution before we turn to the computer then we are in danger of getting it badly wrong! You always need to know approximately what the solution should so you can check the computer generated output.”

Despite all the consolidation happening in the industry Wooler is confident that there is a clear place for medium sized businesses and sees a growing appreciation of them by clients. They are also good for the employees he says.

“Clients use us because we invest the time to understand their business and there’s always someone on the end of the phone – someone they know, trust and can make things happen.

“The breadth of our service is our biggest differentiator as an SME. We  offer 70 services across 15 sectors so we are a one stop shop and can compete on capability with businesses ten times our size.

“That creates fantastic opportunities for young engineers to develop their experience and understand the life cycle of a development project. At BWB  relatively inexperienced graduates often go along to  client meetings with a director and experience the cut and thrust of how development projects evolve, gaining invaluable understanding of the commercial realities as well as the technical aspects of a scheme.”   

You can read more about BWB in the May edition of Infrastructure Intelligence 

If you would like to contact Jackie Whitelaw about this, or any other story, please email jackie.whitelaw@infrastructure-intelligence.com.