The money is there. The people aren't.

Most weeks on the phone tell you something about the market. This week told me the same thing four times, from four different sectors.

I spoke to leaders in water, infrastructure, healthcare and steel. Different programmes, different problems, one shared headline: there has rarely been more work or more money on the table, and there has rarely been less capacity to actually deliver it.

Water: the bow wave has arrived

The clearest example is water. The numbers being talked about for this AMP period are enormous, somewhere around £6bn of planned spend this year alone. Ask people close to delivery what will genuinely get spent, and the honest answer is closer to a third of that.

This is not a funding problem. The money is committed. It is a people problem. The contractors do not have the leaders to mobilise the work, and the water companies know it. One pattern I am hearing repeatedly: boards are no longer waiting to be sold to. They are actively asking contractors to come in, partner with them and solve the problem, because the scale of what is coming is beyond anything they can resource alone.

A senior figure I spoke to this week has a good phrase for it: the bow wave. A huge volume of committed work building up, with nothing like enough skilled people to carry it. The wave does not go away if you ignore it. The problem just gets bigger, more expensive and more public.

Every business is missing the same three things

Here is the observation that stuck with me most. A leader who has spent the last few months in front of a dozen contractors and consultancies put it simply. Almost every business he meets is strong in one area and missing the other two.

The three are: a clear strategy, genuine operational and commercial grip, and the people and client leadership to hold it all together. Some firms have a brilliant standalone strategy and no commercial discipline. Others have the commercial rigour and no coherent direction. Very few have all three at once.

That is the gap I am asked to fill again and again. Not a job title. A leader who can set the strategy, run the numbers and bring the team and the client with them. Those people are rare, and the firms that find them will pull away from the ones that do not.

The centre of gravity is moving north

If you want to know where the next decade of construction and infrastructure careers gets made, look north.

There is a real prospect of serious investment finally landing across the Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Hull corridor. The single biggest unlock is not another north-south line. It is east-west connectivity, the daily grind across the M62 that holds back thousands of genuinely good people who have been waiting years for the opportunity.

Spend any time in Manchester now and you can see it. Another tower goes up, and it sells. The same is true in parts of Liverpool and Leeds. There is skill, ambition and appetite in these places that has been suppressed for a long time. Get the infrastructure right and you release it.

For leaders, the message is straightforward. Position yourself for the North over the next five to ten years. It will be a bumpy ride, but it is going to be the interesting one.

A note for the strong number twos

One more theme, this time for the individuals rather than the firms.

I spent part of this week with a leader who has, for two years, quietly done the hard yards behind a more senior, externally hired appointment. They built the function, carried the difficult work, and watched the credit settle a level above them. They are good, they know they are good, and they are ready for the top job in their own right.

If that is you, two things. First, you are not wrong to feel it; the person one level below the headline very often does the real work. Second, do not just walk away quietly. The market for that exact profile, the proven operator ready to step up, is stronger than you think. The firms worth joining are actively looking for people who have done the work without yet holding the title.

What I am taking from the week

Plenty of money, plenty of work, not enough leaders. The commercial winners over the next few years will be the businesses that treat leadership capacity as the genuine constraint it is, and the individuals who put themselves where the work is heading rather than where it has been.

One last signal to sit with. Chief people officer packages on major North American infrastructure programmes are now running well past $400,000. The market is repricing the leaders who can actually deliver. It is worth asking whether your business has noticed.

If you are wrestling with any of this, building a team, weighing a move, or working out where your next five years should be spent, that is the conversation I have most days. The Lechley Community is where a lot of it now happens.

What are you seeing in your part of the market: is the constraint money, or is it people?

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