Skip the subbie packages, stall as a director

Every QS I meet who is aiming at commercial director wants the same thing early on: the big package, the headline final account, the number that looks good on a CV. Nobody asks to run the drainage subcontract or the groundworks package through from procurement to final certificate. It looks like junior work. It looks like admin.

It is the single most useful thing you can do before you go for the director job, and most people skip it.

Why the small package teaches you more than the big one

On a main contract measurement or valuation, you are working with cushions. Programme float, contingency, a client who is used to the dance. A subcontract package has none of that. The sub prices tight because they have to. Their cash flow breaks in weeks, not months, if a payment slips. A dispute with them does not get absorbed by a bigger balance sheet somewhere upstream, it lands immediately, on a business that might have six people in it.

Run one of those packages properly, procurement through to final account, and you learn things no amount of time on the main contract side will teach you: how retention actually feels to the business losing it, how a variation that looks trivial on your spreadsheet can be existential on theirs, how quickly goodwill curdles into a formal claim when someone feels squeezed. You learn to read risk from the other side of the table, not just price it from yours.

That is the judgement a commercial director actually uses most. Not the skill of managing one large client account, which most people have had plenty of practice at by the time they're ready for the step up, but the skill of managing a whole supply chain of smaller, more fragile relationships, any one of which can derail a programme if it is handled badly. I spent twelve years as a QS before I moved into recruitment, and the packages that taught me the most were never the glamorous ones. They were the ordinary subcontracts nobody else wanted to own.

The QSs who skip this step still become commercial managers. Some still make director. But you can usually tell. They are fluent in contract clauses and hopeless at reading a subcontractor who is about to walk off site. They negotiate like the other side has the same balance sheet they do, because they have never sat across from one that didn't.

If you are mid-career and you cannot remember the last time you owned a subcontract package end to end, rather than a slice of one, go and find one. It will feel like a step sideways, maybe even backwards. It is the fastest route to the judgement the director's job actually needs.