Short pieces about software, systems, and what actually happens when an office team tries to run a £1m–£20m construction business. No thought-leadership. Just things I keep seeing on the inside.
From 1 July, tariff-free steel import quotas were cut roughly in half and the out-of-quota duty doubled to 50 per cent. You don’t import steel. Your fixed price feels it anyway.
Read postSince October 2025, social landlords must fix hazards to a legal clock — and they deliver that work through contractors. What it means for your job sheets and your next tender.
Read postWhen a job overruns, the contract asks one question: can you prove what caused the delay? In most firms the answer lives in WhatsApp and one man’s memory.
Read postNew rules make agencies — and sometimes the firms hiring the labour — liable when an umbrella company fails to pay PAYE. Why the chain behind your agency workers now needs a proper record.
Read postA duty that arrived quietly in April: keep records proving every worker’s holiday and holiday pay, for six years. In most construction firms that record is a spreadsheet and a text thread.
Read postDigital waste tracking becomes mandatory for permitted waste sites this October. It doesn’t apply to most builders — but it puts half your waste record in a regulator’s database.
Read postA £100 penalty for a month in which nothing happened. The CIS nil return is back, and it catches exactly the firms with the least reason to be thinking about subcontractors.
Read postIn the twelve months to May 2026, 3,803 construction firms went under in England and Wales. The question isn’t whether it happens near you. It’s how fast you’d know the cost.
Read postA developer in Norwich learned that a WhatsApp thread was the contract — and its own subcontract, sent later, governed nothing. Yours could learn the same lesson much cheaper.
Read postThe office pays what the merchant sends because it has nothing to check against. Why delivery tickets and invoices never meet, and the ten-second habit that fixes it.
Read postThe excavator stopped digging days ago. It’s still on hire, still billing, because nobody sent the off-hire. The leak isn’t the machine — it’s the phone call nobody made.
Read postA drawer of card photos tells you a card exists, not that it’s about to run out. As renewals pile up, here’s why a spreadsheet loses and what watches the dates instead.
Read postCIS makes you withhold tax from subcontractors and file a return by the 19th each month. The rate isn’t yours to guess — and a stale one costs you, not them.
Read postA subcontractor sends an inflated application. Your surveyor means to query it, then gets pulled away. Three weeks on, an adjudicator says you owe the lot. Here is the deadline that did it.
Read postThe client points at a wall and asks if it can move. Your site manager says yes. Three months later, nobody can prove it happened. How variations vanish — and what stops them.
Read postThe government wants to ban retentions. That won’t release the money already held against your finished jobs. Here’s why retention cash goes missing, and the small purpose-built register that collects it.
Read postMost mid-market firms assume the golden thread is somebody else’s problem. The legal duty may sit elsewhere — but the commercial demand for fast, structured records is already flowing down to you.
Read postMost businesses that ask this question aren't ready yet. That's not a sales pitch dressed up as honesty. It's actually the answer. Here's a way to tell from where you sit.
Read postMost of what's being written about AI in construction right now is sales material. There's a smaller, more useful question underneath the hype: where does AI add real value in a construction office, and how should it be set up to do so safely?
Read postYour office manager is a software developer. They might not call themselves one. But if you look at what they actually do all week, a significant chunk of their job is building, fixing, and maintaining software inside your business.
Read postWalk into any mid-market construction firm and ask the office team to show you how the business actually runs. You won't be shown software. You'll be shown spreadsheets. Here are the five that quietly run a firm, and where each one starts to fall apart.
Read postAsk any mid-market construction MD how long it takes them to send a quote, and they'll tell you a number that's longer than they'd like and shorter than the truth. The hidden queue is the cause.
Read postThe phrase “custom software” has a bad reputation in mid-market construction. The reputation is earned — but the failure mode isn't bespoke itself. It's a specific way of doing it that breaks predictably.
Read postMost mid-market construction firms are paying for software they barely use. The bit they don't use is hidden inside the same quarterly invoice as the bit they do, which is why it's so easy to miss.
Read postA civil engineering MD called me last spring. He'd been told he needed a CRM. Three different IT consultants had told him the same thing. None of the problems he wanted solved were CRM problems.
Read postI take on a handful of new clients a year. If any of the notes above echo your business, drop me a line.
