Why We Go Where the Work Is

Geography has become an excuse in this industry. Firms carve the country up between them as though expertise were a local resource, and everyone calls this discipline when really it is just habit. The result is a market that limits itself for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of advice on offer.

Spending time in Leeds for UKREiiF brought this into focus. It is a brilliant city with real energy, particularly around Kirkgate, and a good reminder that the best work and the best conversations are rarely confined to one postcode. There is a great deal happening across the country that the London-centric view of this industry tends to miss.

The truth is that a development appraisal does not change its nature depending on where the site sits. The cost discipline that makes a scheme stack up in Soho is the same discipline that makes it stack up in Salford. What matters is whether the person advising you actually understands development, planning and cost management, not whether their office is twenty minutes down the road.

Axo Consulting work across the whole of the UK because we have never accepted that those lines mean anything. A client does not have a problem that conveniently arranges itself within easy reach of your office. They have a site, a timeline and a decision that has to be made well. Our responsibility is to be there for that decision, wherever it happens to be, with the same standard of advice we would give half a mile from home.

The client has a problem. Where it sits on a map is irrelevant.