Gleeds is betting on a leaner structure, national business units and investment in digital tools to drive its next phase of UK growth, with defence, data centres and public sector work central to the plan. Construction News talks to the firm’s UK chief operating officer Brian McCardle, who has just stepped up from his former role as managing director.
Q: Last year’s accounts showed turnover up a bit, didn’t they?
A: Yes. In the UK, rather than globally, because I’m talking from a UK perspective, we finished 2024 on £135m. We’ve just closed out the 2025 numbers at £157m, and we anticipate growing again by another 15% this year. There’ll be more detail later on this year.
Q: Is that growth a result of strategy, or just market conditions helping you?
A: It’s always both. Market conditions enable it, but our strategy helps us adapt to those conditions. Five years ago, beyond the LLP structure, we simplified the business. I’ll give you an example. I was managing part of the north, and at one point we had more than 50 cost centres and P&Ls in the UK. We simplified that five years ago down to 24, and that made us much better at sharing resource across the business and much more agile in how we approach the market.
In the north, for example, we used to have cost management Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle. In the end, we merged them, so they all shared resource and no one was just focused on their own small portion of the business. At one stage we had 54 cost centres when the business was probably an £80m-a-year business. So a lot of businesses were around £1m each. We’re now a 24-business-unit business on £150m turnover, so the business units are much larger in scale.
Q: And with that reduction in cost centres, are you also looking at further structural changes as part of the strategy?
A: Probably the biggest focus now is the UK strategy I’ve just finalised for 2026 to 2029. A lot of that is about how we look and face the marketplace, so it’s more externally focused. It does include chapters on people, finance and other internal matters, but we’re looking to develop our services and align them with how the market and our clients are moving.
One of the main foundations is service innovation and service excellence. We’re doing a full review of every service offering we have — commercial management, project management, building surveying, taxation advice, everything — to ask: how will this change? Will it still be relevant in a few years’ time? What do we need to start doing, stop doing, or digitise?
For instance, in 2025 we set up a data centre business in the UK with its own P&L. That was because the main players in the data centre market tend to operate on a UK-wide or European-wide basis. They don’t make decisions based on the north of England or London and the South East. So a national business unit made more sense for data centres. That was one of the first moves we made last year. We already had around 10 people working in the data centre world, but spread across lots of different parts of the business. Now we’ve brought all of those together, and by the end of this year the data centre team should be around 35 people. So we’re really doubling the size of that part of the business simply by operating it on a UK-wide structure.
Also, at the end of last year, we set up a team called Built Asset Solutions. Within the business we had a number of regional building surveying teams, a geomatics team doing survey work across the UK, and a national FM team. We’d developed over the last few years and realised there were a lot of synergies between those three teams. So we decided, at the end of last year, to set up Built Asset Solutions as an amalgamation of all three, operating as a national business unit.
Q: What is the rationale for bringing those teams together?
A: There are a whole host of rationales, some internal and some external. We noticed that facilty management teams were naturally getting involved in survey programmes. It’s not identical to what building surveyors do, but there are a lot of synergies in how they manage teams and programmes. We’re also implementing more digital products in surveying, one of the main ones being digital twin, and the geomatics team uses similar technology. So we had three teams using similar approaches in the market, and we felt they were better together as a national business unit than as lots of small regional teams.
We also do a lot of smaller-scale programmes of works through our building surveying teams on a national basis, which again ties in with FM. Bringing them together gives us more synergies and makes our market approach stronger.
Q: How are you using AI in your business?
A: It’s partly AI, but I’d say it’s also digital products and services more broadly. AI tends to get used as a catch-all phrase, when in many cases it’s just a smarter product that helps us deliver services better.
Last year we rolled out Visualize in the UK. It’s basically a camera on a helmet. As we do monthly site visits, whether for valuations or general site inspections, the camera relays back to the office and connects to the BIM model. As you walk through the site, it recognises where you are in the building and creates a digital record of everywhere you’ve been. So instead of a few photographs, we now have a record of every element of the building through the life cycle of the project.
I can look back at projects now and say: “Show me what this area looked like on 20 January 2025,” and it will bring it up. You can go directly to a location within the building and see the progress there. You don’t have to just follow a video sequence. It effectively builds that into a 3D model over time. That’s not AI per se, but it is a digital product that allows us to deliver something much more effectively.
A: What we’re doing this year is looking to mandate it on all sites of significance, subject to client agreement. There are some sites with security concerns where clients don’t want a full visual record of site progress, so we work with them to decide whether it adds value and whether they want it implemented.
Q: Is BIM making a comeback? There’s been all the focus on golden thread information and building safety.
A: I think we’re finally getting to the point where tools like Visualize are enabling the full 4D model — where the programme starts to connect properly, and then the schedule and programming of the work connect too. I think it’s partly a natural progression in the technology. The Building Safety Act has given it extra energy, but I don’t think it’s the sole driver. You see similar things happening in markets like the US, where the Building Safety Act doesn’t exist.
Q: Gleeds recently highlighted some challenges posed by the government’s new focus on defence spending. How is that playing out?
A: Yes. We’ve got a head of defence, Suzanne Tail, who has been very good since joining the business. A huge part of the strategy over the next few years will be focused on defence work. I’m not going to name all the clients because of the sensitivity, but we work for organisations involved in defence delivery, and also directly for government. The UK has got to drastically increase defence spending, and there’s a massive estate that needs looking at – from munitions facilities through to major assets like submarines and tanks, all the way down to accommodation for services personnel. It’s huge. What’s also important is that we learn across sectors. Some of what you’d traditionally view as energy work feeds into defence, and vice versa. Those critical national infrastructure sectors overlap in useful ways.
Q: Is that in areas such as nuclear?
A: Yes. We’ve worked in nuclear for years. We also work with BAE in Barrow, and some of the work being done there on submarines has relevance to what Rolls-Royce is doing on small modular reactors. In many ways, a nuclear-powered submarine is effectively a small modular reactor (SMR). So there’s a crossover between the energy sector and defence, and that will likely loop back into the wider energy market too. I think SMR represent a huge growth opportunity for the UK, and their usefulness can spread across multiple sectors. It’s not just a defence story. Data centres, for example, have an enormous energy demand. SMRs may well have a role in powering data centres. More broadly, they could become part of the UK’s general energy mix. We’ve got to build new towns and millions of homes, and that power has to come from somewhere. At the moment we’re still heavily dependent on gas, but SMRs could be part of the answer.
Q: A lot of the sectors you’ve mentioned are driven, directly or indirectly, by public spending and policy. Has Gleeds shifted more towards the public sector?
A: Yes. Over the last 10 years, Gleeds has probably shifted from being a business that was 70-80% private sector and 20-30% public sector to almost the reverse. We’re now probably around 60-65% public sector and 30-35% private sector. There has definitely been uncertainty [in the private sector], and there still is in some parts of the market. But what we’ve found is that if you’ve got a good balance of sectors, that helps enormously. Residential, for example, can be very hot at times, particularly in London, and then it can dip. But if one sector dips, another may pick up. Residential doesn’t always follow the same pattern as commercial, and so on.
We’ve got eight sectors that each account for more than 5% of the business, ranging up to around 15%, so we’re not overly reliant on a single sector. Money always wants to be deployed somewhere. If one area cools off, investors look elsewhere. If you’re overexposed to one sector, that can hit you badly. But if you’ve got a good spread, it helps.
One of the key differences is that infrastructure, energy, defence and data centres tend to be national in outlook. Decisions are made on a national or even continental basis. In property and real estate, decisions are much more often made locally, city by city, local authority by local authority, or region by region. That lends itself to a more regional structure.
Q: Are you content that the industry is out of the woods on Gateway 2?
A: I think everyone has focused heavily on Gateway 2, but I’ve always felt Gateway 3 will be the bigger issue. By the time you reach Gateway 2, you’ve spent money getting to that point, but the really big capital outlay happens during the build. If you get to Gateway 3 and you’ve spent £50m-£100m on a residential building and then can’t occupy it, that’s much more significant – whether it’s for sale, build to rent, or student accommodation. If you miss the start of term for student accommodation, you’ve got a serious problem. So I always thought Gateway 2 was something the industry would eventually work through. Gateway 3 is likely to have even more significant impacts.
We have a team of real experts on the Building Safety Act, headed by Lauren Watts, who are talking to clients about the risks and risk profiles involved. It’s a mature conversation, and there won’t be one single model. Some main contractors will be willing to take on more risk for greater reward. Others will be more risk-averse.
For me, these issues start before you ever get to site. Whenever a client or contractor is trying to dump risk on the other party, that’s when you typically get problems. We like to have early conversations with clients and the supply chain about risk profiles on any project, and that’s especially important where the Building Safety Act is involved because the process is still new.
Q: Does that involve getting contractors in earlier?
A: On some projects, yes. Early contractor involvement can work much better. What you don’t want is to issue a cold tender with a whole raft of Building Safety Act clauses and risk-transfer provisions that don’t match what the market is actually willing to take on. Then you get three or four tenders back and they’re either non-compliant or totally different in how they price and profile the risk. Early involvement helps determine what level of risk the contractor – and their supply chain – is actually prepared to accept.
Q: One thing we haven’t talked much about is people. It’s all very well having the strategy, but if you don’t have people to deliver it, that’s a challenge.
A: Absolutely. One of the key foundations of the strategy is our people strategy. At the moment we’re going out to every UK office to outline our employee value proposition. A huge part of that is Gleeds culture.
Everyone says they’ve got a fantastic culture, but if you ask them to distil that into two or three sentences, people often find that difficult. It may mean different things to different people. We’ve got 19 offices around the UK, some project offices and some major offices with 200 or 300 people. We want everyone to have the same experience of being part of Gleeds and to understand the culture we’ve got and want to retain.
We’ve got a big push on ensuring our churn rates are better than the industry average. It’s easier to keep our people than to recruit large numbers of new ones. We want to grow by 15% a year in turnover terms. There will be efficiencies from digital products and service improvements, but no matter how you cut it, if we’re significantly bigger in four or five years’ time we will need more people. So headcount will have to grow. The question is how we preserve the culture of Gleeds while we do that, because we think our culture and our independence are huge assets — both for clients and for attracting people into the business.
Q: That independence is interesting. Ten years ago there were more independent consultancies. Now there are far fewer.
A: Yes. If we’d had this conversation 10 years ago there would probably have been four or five independent cost consultancies. They’re mostly gone now.
Q: And does that attract a certain kind of person to Gleeds?
A: Yes, I think so. There are definitely people who don’t want to work for a giant international engineering conglomerate. They like the fact that they know people, that there’s continuity, that there’s a culture you can’t manufacture. Some people like being part of a huge global corporate structure. Others prefer a business where relationships are more personal and grounded in professionalism. I think that matters.
Richard [Steer – Gleeds chairman] has been part of this business for 40 years, and independence is one of the key words he uses consistently. Gleeds is valued in the market for that independence. There are no plans within the strategy to change that. The aim is that in four or five years’ time we’ll be the same kind of business – just bigger, more efficient and with more capability – not a fundamentally different kind of business.
Q: So what does that independent culture mean in practice?
A: I can only really describe it from my own experience. One of the things that has kept me here over the years is that we have a really flat management structure. I think the chief executive knows the graduates coming into the business. People are approachable. Within reason, people know each other. That ability to ask questions and connect with people at every level is a huge thing for me.
When I speak to peers in competitor firms, they’re often surprised by how connected we are. We make a point of that. The UK senior leadership team doesn’t just meet in London every month. We move our board meetings around the UK, and when we do that we make sure we connect with people in the local office. We don’t just arrive, go into a meeting room and disappear again. We go out for drinks, or have lunch with the office, and create opportunities for people to ask whatever they want. That matters.
We provide free breakfasts here on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Things like that create touchpoints. People come in, spend time together and talk. That kind of everyday contact matters. It helps reinforce the sense that the organisation isn’t driven by hierarchy.
Salary will always matter. But what we’re finding is that, whereas salary may once have been the primary driver, it’s now one item within a basket of drivers. Ten years ago, people didn’t ask what your EVP was. Now they do. People want to know about culture, flexibility, the office environment, work-life balance and what the organisation stands for. Expectations have changed. It’s not simply about pay levels anymore.
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Colin Marrs