Senior Partners Review:

It has been a hugely-exciting and transformational year for Davis Langdon. One in which an enormous amount of passion has been put into a strategy known within the business as One Firm One Future. It has had implications on our leadership team, the way in which we are organised and the way in which we gauge performance.

The overarching aim of the strategy is to align all of the firm’s activities in a way whereby we achieve real differentiation in the services we offer. One Firm One Future is enabling us to overcome some hurdles that would otherwise inhibit our ability to respond quickly to a rapidly-changing market. Given an everworsening economic background, the timing of the new strategy that focuses on sectors and the integration of our specialist services with our core activities, could not be better.

Previously, our focus was broadly geographical in terms of the way that we would serve our clients. Now it is very much a case of putting our best foot forward, which we are confident will create and capture new demand. We have introduced sector leadership that forms the focus for this year’s Annual Review.

We are confident that this approach will prepare the business for the next decade of its history. However, when doing so, the guiding principles that are the legacy from our predecessors remain unchanged.

The partners will continue to lead with their hearts, which is not to say that we are a soft organisation, but we have a passion for our work, compassion for our people, empathy for those we work with and the courage to make difficult decisions. We remain committed to establishing and maintaining enduring relationships with those people we work with and alongside, as well as the clients we work for directly.

As a business, we will go on applying consistently high levels of self discipline in order to produce great results. This will require us to continue to be accountable for performance and accept responsibility for the outcomes of the things that we do. We are also locked into our values, being collaborative in our work, constantly striving to innovate and acting with integrity at all times.

All of these characteristics demonstrate that although our strategy may have changed quite radically, everything that has made the firm what it is today remains unchanged.

A quick look at some of our achievements in 2007–8 clearly illustrates the firm that is Davis Langdon. On pure numbers, our turnover in Europe and the Middle East (EME) increased as compared with last year by 28 per cent to £197 million (US$391m) while global turnover is up by 35 per cent to £261 million (US$518m).

Over the same period we also managed to increase our head count in EME by 27 per cent. This has largely come from organic growth, but we also completed a signifi cant merger with the Mackenzie Partnership, which has culminated in us becoming the largest construction consultancy in Scotland. At the time of publishing this Annual Review we employ over 2,100 people in EME.

Our core ideology is to attract and employ great people, for they in turn deliver great service. This requires us to concentrate our effort on being among the very best employers who apply their values both internally and externally. In this regard, the past year has seen some positive moves with the introduction of a ‘well being’ programme that includes flexible working hours, a weekly GP surgery and a number of other benefi ts. A measure of our progress can be seen by our 19th place in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For, which as an independent survey is a good measure of our commitment in this area.

Externally it was also a successful year in that we secured the Building award for Construction Consultant of the Year for the third consecutive year. Despite moving into a period badly affected by credit crunches, banking crises and high fuel costs, One Firm One Future has enabled us to identify and capture ‘new demand’ in markets that were not previously on our radar.

Having focused our knowledge and skills around sectors rather than geography we can think even more intensively about our clients’ needs. We are thus able to produce holistic solutions that align our specialist services with our core services of project and cost management.

Rob Smith
Senior Partner