Partner Article

Behind the Business with Jones Melling

Jones Melling Limited is an independent, multidisciplinary practice of chartered surveyors, which provides a diverse array of consultancy services to the construction and property industries. Gary Melling, co founder and managing director, takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Growing the business in difficult industry times has been a challenge, but we are enormously proud of the fact that we launched in a recession and have grown, year-on-year, throughout it. It hasn’t always been easy, but we think a reason for our success is because we have stuck to our guns in relation to our principles. One of our motivations when we started out was to create a company with the highest possible standards of delivery, and a client base that stayed with us because they recognised that. We think that the proof is in the pudding, because the majority of our earliest clients are still with us today.

Maintaining a personal service to clients, while growing the company and expanding our staff numbers, has also been tricky. In 2012, we commissioned an independent client satisfaction study. It’s all very well for us to talk about customer service – everyone does – but we wanted to measure whether we really were on the right track. We’re rough, tough construction professionals, but we don’t mind admitting that we were moved by the extremely positive outcome from the study! However, this gave us another challenge – to maintain high levels of service while growing the business. We combated this through our recruitment policy – our surveyors are all top-drawer technically and each have a real understanding of the client’s perspective.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Breaking into the healthcare and education sectors across our four service divisions has been a huge achievement. Anyone in business knows that branching out into another area can be a serious challenge, especially when juggling existing work, but we wanted to expand our professional networks and grow our sector-specific knowledge. It would have been easy to slow down in some areas, in order to grow in others, but we chose to plan strategically and employed the right tactics to implement that approach.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

In the coming year, we will be focusing on growing our service provision and client base in and around our regional offices in London, Preston and Chester. We haven’t yet had a day where we’ve not been fascinated and engaged by the new range of possibilities open to us. Every time we meet new people it’s inevitable that we end up talking about property, whether that’s commercial or domestic. And, everyone’s needs and perspectives are so different that it’s never boring.

We’d also like to continue our growth as a company, both in financial and staffing terms, and do so without any letting the standards, which we pride ourselves on, slip.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

No day is the same. We’re different in our industry sector in that we are an SME which offers a diverse and integrated raft of services to clients across all sectors. There really are never two days alike, from client and geographic spread, to a service provision basis.

Construction can be hugely frustrating for the end-user and we know that our ability to offer a complete solution, in one place, is a real bonus for our clients.

What do you wish you’d known when starting out?

I wish I’d seen the value in networking sooner! If we’d known that then we wouldn’t have turned down invitations because we were too busy, and it could have made some aspects of business growth a lot easier. Part of our development has been that we’ve learnt to be strategic about our networking and identified where the return on investment will be.

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

It’s hard to say what the “next big thing” in the industry will be, because there doesn’t seem to be anything big and new on the horizon. While we’ve never yet had a quiet year, construction as a whole is still climbing out of the recessive black hole, which tends to work against innovation.

However, we do think the industry itself will change shape. As the trend continues for larger practices to downsize or merge, we think there will be a good number of professionals, of differing disciplines, looking to kick-start their careers by forming small collective companies that offer a diverse array of services.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Graham Vincent .