Welcome to…Meet the Directors

Where you can learn a little more about our team and what makes us tick.

Please meet – Matt Garwood

How long have you been in the real estate industry and where were you prior to setting up Clarity Building Consultancy?

I left UWE with a degree in Building Surveying in the early 2000’s, so now approaching 25 years ago.

I started my career in the head office of Alder King, a multi-disciplinary practice. After qualifying, I moved to national independent building consultancies TFT, CS2 and most recently Black Cat. I held director positions at both CS2 and Black Cat.

Why did you decide to set up Clarity?

Dan, Ben and I qualified at around the same time. Although working for different practices, we met for lunch a couple of years post-qualification, heads full of wonder, and mulled over the idea of starting a business. That thought didn’t go very far at the time, and looking back I’m glad it didn’t. Much like passing your driving test, yes we could have legally operated or ‘driven’, but when the snow and ice of tricky events, instructions, negotiations and business operations kicked in, we could have come unstuck.

Now, several years later, I’ll stop short of saying we’ve seen it all, but we’ve experienced so much more, and that makes a huge difference to the service levels we can offer, our resilience, and our ability to resolve issues on behalf of clients. We all bring different skillsets to the business which makes us stronger and gives us the ability to truly offer a quality service to our clients.

What makes Clarity different?

There are a rumoured 60,400 chartered surveyors in the UK, with less than 10% of those being building surveyors. For arguments sake let’s assume ~50% are residential surveyors, so our clients could choose one of the remaining ~3,000 commercial surveyors to act for them.

Giving clients what they need, and not what they don’t is therefore essential and this is what makes me tick work-wise. I spend a lot of time making sure we’re getting this right. Where appropriate, we run truly bespoke reporting and feedback for each client. At face value a TDD or dilaps assessment is exactly that, nothing more, nothing less, and sometimes that’s a good fit. But what I love is that we don’t just lift a dusty old report template off the shelf to tell clients everything we think they need to know.

Some of our PLC clients want to know more about one aspect than others, some have specific reporting requirements that we can help with, or they are looking for angles that others don’t want or need to know about.

Quite often, with the right questions, we can help clients grow into determining what they need. That’s why it all starts with listening and understanding what matters to them, not what we think we should fill pages with. There are and always will be the basics of what we need to convey. It is everything else that surrounds that base level of advice that makes the difference. I love using my skills to ask questions to determine what the client really needs, and to receive positive feedback that we just ‘get it’.

How do you think you use your expertise to add value to clients?

Once a good amount of experience can be demonstrated, on paper a lot of people or entities look comparably similar in terms of technical ability. Some experiences may even be similar.

I’m a huge advocate for approaching a topic as if it’s the first time, free of the assumptions that come with experience. Until recently I wasn’t aware that this approach has a Japanese term ‘Shoshin’ which translates as ‘beginners mindset’.

There are of course many situations where the tried and tested approach works and there is good reason for this, I’m not looking to be some kind of unnecessary or tiresome maverick. However, it amazes me that simply asking ‘why’ can unlock some interesting conversations, thoughts and approaches.

Sometimes this makes clients, especially those I haven’t worked with previously, consider their own perspective and can drive efficiencies to wider parts of their business. This makes individuals look good within an organisation. Many years ago an old boss of mine used to drum into us ‘make your clients look good’ and this has stuck with me, so delivering this makes me happy.

What’s the most interesting or challenging project you have been involved with to date?

The most challenging project I have worked on was a high-end conversion I project managed many years ago. Our QS prepared pre-tender estimates that the client didn’t like. Against my advice, the client
proceeded with a design it could not afford and we were asked not to tender but to negotiate with a contractor that the client had worked with previously. The client ultimately agreed a contract sum using art rather than maths for £2m below our cost plan, literally in a pub, the week before Christmas.

Attempting to run a project where the contractor realised half way through they had effectively run out of money on the job was unsurprisingly exceptionally difficult. The project took a huge amount of negotiation to finalise with every conversation being time consuming and ultimately reverting to pounds and pence.

Despite being consistent and robust with our advice to that client at the time, we should have simply said no to managing the project from the outset. It taught me a huge amount about saying what needs to be said, upfront, even if it is unwelcome news. It’s a cliché but the old adage of ‘if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…’ springs to mind, and sometimes we have to call it out.

I’m delighted to report that our wonderful clients generally take advice around costs and more importantly contracts!

If you could choose a superpower, what would it be?

This question makes me cringe, but from the perspective of helping clients, it would have to be time travel. We read so many leases, contracts and documents that turn on the minutia and could have been drafted differently, along with documentation that could have been tweaked to protect clients or just been clearer about the intentions of the parties. The ability to be in the room when they were being drafted 1, 2, 5, 10+ years ago would save a lot of time and cost.

How do you spend your spare time?

I have a young family and this keeps me pretty busy. We also have projects outside of the day job, including an old barn that we’re renovating, albeit slowly!