My take

My take on my company's acquisition of some of Ballast's northern offices is that, even though recently the finances there haven't been too hot, the people there are. And in all my 30 years in the industry I've rarely found that firms have rotten construction skills. What has often been lacking is the leadership to make a return on those skills.

I see construction as a service business, not a product business. It is primarily about its people and the need to get them to believe in what they are doing, so that they can delight their clients.

The construction industry in the UK is traditionally hierarchical, but we believe in a flat management structure to get people to take responsibility. Just a few hours before the announcement that we'd bought part of Ballast, I addressed about 50 of its employees from the Manchester region and told them how the ROK model worked.

This week I have asked all the offices to come up with a business plan, introducing a flatter structure. We help them to understand the culture and the style, but it is up to the people in these offices to fill in the detail.

A flatter management structure does not mean that people will lose their jobs, but often they will be redeployed, perhaps into roles that are more directly involved in generating revenue.

Ultimately, it is not the management, be it middle or board level, that creates revenue – it's those putting bricks on bricks. The rest of us – and I include myself in this – are dependent on them. It's vital for us to make their life easier, and a less authoritarian structure can help achieve this.

This is exactly what we did when we bought Llewellyn last year, and today it runs at a profit of 1.6% of turnover, when for years it had been running at practically zero …