Why we take the projects that scare us a little

We are drawn to the complex projects. The ones with awkward integration, immovable deadlines, systems nobody has made talk to each other before. Not because we enjoy making life difficult, but because that is the main place we can add real value.

The first reason is commercial. A routine job gets bid to the floor. Ten companies can do it, so it comes down to price, and there is no room in that to do anything exceptional. The margin to care properly is not there. On a hard project, what you can do actually matters, and that is where we win.

The second reason is the one people do not expect. It is about the team. The engineers who have stayed with us for decades did not stay for easy work. The best people need to be stretched. Give a brilliant engineer a routine job and they get bored, and bored is how you lose them. The hard projects are what keep the people who make us what we are.

In over three decades of doing this, the answer has never been no. It has always been how.

The project that tested that rule hardest was one of the most exclusive private members’ clubs in London. The owner was as exacting as they come. The requests were extreme, the level of customisation far beyond anything standard, and a lot of companies would have started listing reasons it could not be done. We did the opposite. We worked out how.

When something looks impossible, it is almost never a lack of resources that stops people. It is a lack of resourcefulness. The money, the equipment, the talent — they are rarely the real bottleneck. The bottleneck is whether you are willing to sit with a hard problem long enough to find the route through it.

So we never start from “we cannot.” We start from “how.” The most demanding clients are not the ones to avoid. They are the ones who push you to become genuinely good at what you do.

When a project comes in that looks like it might be too complicated, that is usually a signal. It is the one we actually want. The difficulty is not the problem. For us it is the whole point.