Why am I here?
I've been reflecting over the past few days. So I am sharing some of my journey leading up to the birth of Honoris.
I've been looking at the journey my life has been and thinking about what I would change if I had the opportunity to go back in time. I was asked this question recently at a Toastmasters session and whilst I thought I'd change a few things I quickly realised that everything I have is because of the decisions I made when I was a youth of 16 years.
At 16 and 3 months I started working as an apprentice engineer for Enger Air Conditioning Ltd (my dad insisted that I got a job and I had no idea what I wanted to do so he got me a job with the company he was contracting for). For those that don't know my dad is a Pipefitter Welder (now retired) and had his own company for many years, he has been a significant influence on my life, not least because he got me started on this journey 38 years ago now. This company was a small design and build mechanical engineering business based in central London.
During my working career, I've found that I have a taste for taking risks and this started pretty early on when, against my dad's advice, I decided to leave my first employer after 4 years and try my own thing, I found a new role working for a major contractor in the UK but it was only a few months before I was approached by a former colleague at my first job to join him at the BBC. This was the first role that challenged me and taught me that I had some strengths when it came to managing projects and people, my boss there, Cyril Turbutt, was very influential to me and I owe him a debt of gratitude for the faith that he had in me at a pretty young age (I was just 20 when I started there). By the time I left 8 years later to join the next influential person in my career I had matured a lot and found my feet as both an engineer and a manager.
My wedding day, 12th July 1997
In May of 1996 I joined Atelier 10, little did I know how important that decision was at the time, initially my role was to be based in Brunei where A10 had just secured a major project for the Sultan, but for some reason, I cannot now remember, the decision was made to keep me in the London office. I have to say I am very pleased about this because 2 months later I started dating Chrissy Chin, a drafter at A10 and 1 year after that we were married, and have now been married for 25 years today (12th July 2022) with 3 wonderful children.
Not only did I meet my future wife at A10 I also met Patrick Bellew the founder and Director of A10, an engineer that was way ahead of his time and one that taught me an enormous amount about how to design sustainably. In particular, he taught me to consider the buildings I was working on as complete systems and not as individual component parts so that the whole system was working together to give the best and most sustainable outcomes. I try to bring this process through on every project that I am part of and hope that I succeed in some small way to change the approach of silos for the design of different disciplines that is the cause of most of the conflict we have in the construction industry.
Over the next few years, I moved to Chapman Bathurst, somewhere I learnt a lot about what not to do as a leader, less said about that the better. I did however learn from my time with CBP that toxic relationships can happen at work as well as outside work, and also how much of a negative impact stress can have on your physical and mental health.
The decision to move to Richard Stephens Partnership was for health reasons, both mental and physical, as I needed to break away from the high pressure of working in the City of London and commuting for up to 2 hours each way every day and also because I wanted to do something more worthwhile. RSP specialised in delivering Building Services Design Solutions for hospitals and healthcare facilities and were recognised as leaders in the industry in this market sector.
In the 4 years that I spent at RSP, I found that delivering the design solutions for healthcare facilities was particularly satisfying as I could see an immediate benefit to those that needed the facility for their treatment, much more of an impact than designing the cooling system for a dealers floor in the city of London...
This passion for healthcare has been instrumental in my career choices since RSP, moving to CJ Design Partnership to continue my health sector work as well as helping to grow the team and build capability across a range of market sectors. CJDP was also the springboard for me to move to the Middle East, which I did in late October 2008.
The move to the Middle East was one that many around me thought was a step too far, but I had a desire to test myself and this opportunity came along just after my 40th birthday which triggered me to look for some meaning in my career achievements to that point. This introspection made me realise that I needed to test myself again to show what I could do and my risk-taking attitude took over.
I had a telephone interview with WSP and that was a strange experience, I had applied for an Associate Director role but during the interview, I was asked to travel to the Dubai office because they wanted to consider me for a Technical Director role, a big step up for me as it meant a team of 40 plus people under my control...I jumped at the chance and went across for a few days to meet the team and complete the interview process.
Joining WSP in late October 2008 I felt like I had come home, it is the first time in my career where I felt completely at home from the first day and for just about a month I thought I had made a great decision. Then November 2008 arrived and those three letters that still strike fear into the hearts of bankers everywhere the GFC..... Wow, what a sudden and horrible impact this had on the Middle East, within a few short weeks something like 100,000 people had left everything they owned (or in most cases owed money on) and jumped on the first plane out of there.
Pretty much every project that was active stopped, some never to start again and others shrinking dramatically in scale. My role changed from leading a team of 40 people on a $ 2 billion project to herding 30 plus people a month through a fairly abrupt redundancy process, a soul-destroying role that earned me the unpleasant epitaph of the grim reaper.
Part of my drive came from these 3 wonderful young people
I learned a lot about my personal resilience through this process and have stayed friends with many of the people I met and had to take through this process. I think this is a testament to the empathy with which I carried out what was a horrible task, after about 7 months of this though, I made the call to change roles. I joined a former WSP colleague at a smaller consultancy to run the MEP team and deliver their main project which was the $1 Billion development of the central campus of Sheik Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. The next 18 months were pretty tough, living away from my family and working long hours on a project that was under enormous time and cost pressure, both internally within the company I worked for and externally with the client and contractor, took its toll on me.
The next experience for me was to be made redundant for the first time in my career, which I have to say was a real shock and knocked my confidence in my abilities for probably at least a year after the event. It did, however, trigger the next stage in my career and my life, having returned to the UK and applied for over 100 roles without a single response I was starting to think that at 42 my career was over. But then an opportunity came up in New Zealand, something which Chrissy and I had considered many times, given that she is from Wellington originally, so again I took a gamble, applied for the role and joined NDY as their Health Sector lead
My biggest supporters and the reasons I do what I do
During my time at NDY, I grew the health sector from $0 to around $1,000,000 in revenue and grew the Christchurch team from 2 to 8 people, I also met the next influential person in my career, Keith Davis, an excellent mentor and, more importantly, a wonderful person who helped me enormously by having faith in me. He supported me in establishing myself and my reputation in New Zealand both in the health sector and other market sectors. Without his support and thoughtful advice, I doubt I would have achieved as much as I have in the past decade.
After about 4 years with NDY and having reached a point where I needed a change I was approached by a former colleague at NDY and asked to establish the Building Services Team for AECOM in Christchurch, I joined them in March of 2015 and over the next 2-3 years grew the Building Services team from 0 to 6 people and established a reputation for high-quality design outcomes and leadership both internally and externally.
I helped restore morale in the Christchurch office which was very low after several rounds of redundancy and changes of leadership as a result of the merger with URS. I was also asked to lead the Christchurch Buildings and Places team which gave me overall responsibility for about 40 people across services, structures, acoustics and QS. My AECOM career came to an abrupt and very dramatic end when we have my second career redundancy and the rest, as they say, is a few hops skips and jumps to the start of Honoris... in August 2018.
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