How we work
A drawing tells us what someone drew. It doesn’t tell us how you’re going to build it, what the site will allow, or where your programme is tight. So we ask first.
Why we don’t lead with a price
When a supplier prices what they’re given and nothing else, they’re making a bet: that the drawing is right, the site will cooperate, and the other trades will land where they’re supposed to.
That bet gets settled on your site, at your cost.
We’d rather spend an hour on the front end than have you spend a fortnight on the back end.
Photograph
Two of your people over a drawing on a factory bench or a site table. Mid-conversation, mid-argument even. Hands on paper. Not looking at the camera.
The obvious question
Yes. Send the drawings and we’ll price them, on your timeline. If you’ve got a tender closing Friday, we’re not going to make you sit through a workshop.
But we’ll also tell you what we’d do differently — because we’re the ones who have to make it fit. That conversation makes the price better. It doesn’t make it slower.
Proof slot
Average days from drawings to priced proposal. Publish the real number. It kills this objection outright.
Proof slot
Turnaround for a straight re-price on a revised drawing set.
One coordinator
Assigned at first contact. Yours until the last delivery.
One drawing set
Timber and steel detailed together, off the same revision.
The method
01 — Understand the job
What are you trying to achieve? How are you sequencing it? What’s the site going to allow? Where’s the programme tight, and where’s the budget tight — because they’re rarely the same place. What’s the design actually trying to do?
02 — Engineer the answer
Sometimes that means more steel. Sometimes it means less. Sometimes it means changing how the floor spans so you can lose a row of props. We’ll tell you which, we’ll show you the reasoning, and we’ll tell you what it costs and what it saves.
03 — Build it right
Both packages detailed off the same drawing set, by people who know they’ll have to answer for it. When the steel and the timber are made under one roof, the junction between them stops being an argument and starts being a detail.
04 — Land it on site
Sequenced to your programme, not our loading dock. Marked up so your carpenters aren’t sorting a pile before they can start. And one number to call if anything moves — which, on a building site, it will.
When it goes wrong
Anyone can be a good supplier on a good day.
Sooner or later something will be short, late or wrong. It happens to every supplier in this industry and any who tell you otherwise are lying. What matters is what happens next.
Here’s what we do: we call you before you call us. We tell you what’s happened and what it does to your programme. We tell you how we’re fixing it and by when. We don’t wait for you to find out on site.
That’s not a promise that nothing will ever go wrong. It’s a promise that you’ll never be the last to know.
Strategic note for Jake: this section is the hardest thing on the site to sign off and the most valuable thing on it. No competitor will copy it, because copying it means meaning it. Rewrite it in your own words — but keep it.
Fifteen minutes on the phone about your job will tell you more than a fortnight of tender responses.