Journey to 500 : Growing our capacity and creating headroom for more growth

26/4/21: Continuing with our growth stories, CEO Mark Lawrence sets out some of the critical strategic features of TClarke’s recently announced Journey to 50% revenue expansion and £500m turnover. Here he explains how the business has prepared to build its capacity to operate at £500m revenue and beyond – and create the headroom resource capacity for further growth.

There are skills shortages within the Construction Industry and for high quality Engineering Services companies like ours, there is even greater reliance on skilled and expert people. TClarke has always been ahead of the industry in creating its own pipeline of skilled engineers.

If you google ‘5% club’ you will find an excellent employer organisation which encourages construction companies (among other sectors) to have 5% of their staff made up of apprentices or employees in training. It is seen as a critical investment in our collective future and the health of those companies involved. TClarke exceeds that gold standard of 5%. We more than double it, year after year. 

Our apprenticeships are highly sought after and for those who show exceptional aptitude, we have a Future Leaders Programme. It identifies our employees’ strengths at various stages of their careers and provides them with continuous additional professional training, networking, and personal development. From a community perspective this is all good news and clients and principal contractors very much like to see that in choosing us, they are supporting this growth in the nation’s skills base. 

The strategic value to TClarke in our journey to £500m turnover and beyond is extremely important to underline. We have built the pipeline not just of quality engineers and trades people but of professionals capable of leading the delivery of the engineering services for some of the biggest named clients in the world.

This kind of responsibility and opportunity is what we offer – and it motivates our people. Every year, our Future Leaders programme delivers an ongoing wealth of talent of high-quality leaders, fully networked into our business and capable of delivering the standards and culture of our company. So, in planning long-term for this permanent hike in scale, we have been preparing for all the extra headroom we need to deliver the work our bid teams win, in the TClarke way, and create the extra capability to go out and win and deliver more.

This is our strength. Our £500m revenue target is a product of our absolute confidence in the scale and quality of additional capacity that we have to deliver and sustain these higher revenue levels and beyond, alongside our very well defined standards for safety and quality.

In the next of these articles, I will set out the ways in which we have achieved something equally important – a strategic and extremely positive shift in the balance of our business.