Where does your week leak?

A change of day. A few of you told me you read the Brief on a Saturday morning with a coffee, so for the next few weeks it will arrive on Saturday instead of Monday. If Monday suited you better, reply and tell me; I will decide on the numbers and the replies.

This issue starts with a conversation that changed how I read a director brief, then a look behind my own desk, because a few of you asked. This week's question sits with that piece, further down, because the two belong together.

From my desk

This week I spent half an hour with the managing director of a division at one of the big building materials groups. He runs a P&L inside a global business and has bought and sold companies. What stayed with me was how plainly he described the limits of how our industry hires: "I know people look for industry experience, but there's a lot of similar crossovers." Contractors and housebuilders fill a regional MD seat with someone who has already sat in one. The product changes. The job does not.

I wrote it up on Thursday: Sector experience is the weakest test for a director hire. The short version: if you are going outside for a director, the contractor next door is the least external move available. Same training, same instincts, same blind spots, different letterhead. If you sit on a board, write down the three problems the role has to solve and test every candidate against those, not against the letterhead.

On the desk, a new Major Projects Director search opened for a London contractor (more at the end), four data centre leadership roles went live across Dublin, Portugal and Milan, and first interviews ran on the Manchester Town Hall construction manager roles.

The market observation: the civils pipeline is being redrawn in favour of public buildings and rail. In the same week the Department for Transport quietly dropped 24 road schemes worth more than £1.6bn, LHC named 119 firms on a £1.95bn public buildings framework and Network Rail lined up a £650m direct award on East West Rail. If your order book sat in regional roads, the detail is below.

The week in construction

• The DfT has pulled funding from 24 road schemes across England, including the £930m M5 Junction 9 and A46 upgrade, the £303m Melksham bypass, the £197m Chesterfield Staveley route and the £185.3m Kendal Northern Access Route. No official list; the department is writing to councils, and the fuller rundown came from Transport Action Network. Mid-sized regional civils work like this is what keeps tier two and three contractors, and their QSs and engineers, busy outside London and nuclear. If your patch is Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Derbyshire or Cumbria, check how exposed your employer's order book was. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer, 15 Oct
• LHC has named 119 firms across ten lots on its £1.95bn PB4 public buildings framework, running from 16 October 2026 to October 2030. Galliford Try is the only contractor on every lot; Kier, Morgan Sindall, Tilbury Douglas and Willmott Dixon are among the 20 named for jobs above £25m, with regional names from Beard to Robertson alongside them. A framework place is the right to bid, not work. The hiring signal lands over the next six months as councils release call-offs, so if you are at one of the 119, that is when to expect the conversation. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer, 15 Oct
• Network Rail intends to award £650m of further East West Rail work to the existing AtkinsRéalis, Laing O'Rourke and VolkerRail alliance without a re-tender, the notice published on 14 October. Re-signalling, electrification and track between Bletchley and Oxford Parkway, timed to the Universal Studios park near Bedford opening in 2031. Continuity is being rewarded over competition. If you are already on the alliance, this is as close to job security as the industry offers; if you are trying to break in, the door is through the alliance partners, not the client. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction News, 15 Oct
• Balfour Beatty has sold its 50% stake in Hong Kong contractor Gammon to Jardine Matheson for £250m, a holding it bought from Skanska for around £36m in 2004. £83m arrives now, the rest by the end of 2028. Gammon is profitable, so this is a choice, not a rescue: the group wants its capital and its people in the UK and the US. For anyone inside Balfour Beatty or weighing an approach, head office attention, investment and the promotions will sit in the UK infrastructure and buildings divisions. Source: Lechley Community, from Balfour Beatty, 14 Oct
• Taylor Wimpey will take on no new developments in London, chief executive Jennie Daly calling viability in the capital "fundamentally broken": build costs, the second staircase rule and late-stage affordable housing reviews. Vistry is leaving open-market housebuilding in the South East; Berkeley has not bought London land in four years and has halved its on-site workforce in the city. Land budgets and site teams are moving to the Midlands, the North West and the South East outside the M25. If you lead land, technical or build for a housebuilder, that is where the next three years of hiring will be. Source: Lechley Community, from The Times, 11 Oct

People on the move

• Duncan Benedetti, Group Chief Executive at Briggs & Forrester from 1 January 2027, after 20 years with the M&E contractor, most recently as managing director of its Living business. Paul Burton steps down as chief executive and stays as chairman; Matthew Orme takes over Living. Construction News, 13 Oct
• Simon Kesterton, Chief Executive at SIG from 1 May 2027, promoted from CFO five months after joining from Kier, where he was finance chief through the balance sheet rebuild. Pim Vervaat moves to non-executive chair, and the search for SIG's next CFO is live. More
• Dominic Anstey, Commercial Director at BW Workplace, from Mace.
• Sergio Cavalaro, the government's Chief Construction and Scientific Adviser, from Loughborough University, a three-year full-time term created on a Grenfell Inquiry recommendation. More

Where you stand, in one place

Since September, every person I work with has had a private page of their own, and from this week it is part of every conversation I have. I call it Lechley Rooms. It exists because the worst part of any search, for a candidate or a client, is the silence between updates, and because email threads are a poor record of where things stand.

If you are a candidate, your page shows every search you are in with me, one card each: the client, the role, the stage, and a dated line from me in plain English on where it stands. You can read the full submission I wrote about you, scores included, the same text the client reads. There is a message thread with me, a form for what you are looking for, a place to drop your CV, and a button to book a call. If you are a client, you get one room per search: the progress of the search, each candidate's submission as it is shared, and a way to request an interview, pass, or ask me a question in place.

One rule, the same as everything else on my desk: nothing appears on a page unless I wrote it or you did, and every reply reaches me and lands in my CRM. Below is the page of a fictional candidate, Priya Nair, so you can see how an exchange looks.

Her page: where the search stands, in my words, and the message thread. She wrote back about her dates; I had it in my inbox and my CRM before she had closed the tab.

One search: the stage she is at, what happens next, and two buttons that tell me whether she is still in.

Her submission, word for word what the client reads. If anything in it is wrong, she tells me before the client sees it.

If you are working with me now, you already have your link. If you would like one before we are working together, reply and say so.

Behind my own desk

A number of you have asked how I run a one-person search desk with most of the admin done overnight. I have written it up at backoffice.lechley.com: what is realistic, what it will not do, and a five-step process for working out which three tasks are worth handing over first. One rule makes it work. Nothing is sent without me; every email, note and message is a draft until I say yes.

If you run a business of two to thirty people, run the five steps and reply with your list. I will tell you honestly whether it is worth doing.

Whatever your size, the five steps start with the same question, so this week it is the question I am putting to all of you. Where does your week leak?

This week's question: which task in your week would you hand over first?

• Chasing follow-ups and replies
• Writing up meetings and notes
• Reports, bids and the paperwork behind them
• The diary, the inbox and the admin

Vote on this week's question

Vote with one tap, and read my take on Friday: community.lechley.com/question. Whichever task wins, Friday's piece will say what handing it over actually takes.

New on the community

• Sector experience is the weakest test for a director hire (Thoughts)
• Hinkley's fish protection: what does each fish saved actually cost? (Ask anything)
• McLaren clears Gateway 2 for £229m Ebury Bridge phase two (News)
• BAM buys Dutch pipeline and cable firm A.Hak for £428m (News)

All of it free at community.lechley.com.

One useful thing

Before the next director brief goes out, write the three problems the role has to solve on one line each, before anyone writes "sector experience essential". Then score every candidate against those three lines and nothing else. It takes ten minutes, it stops the shortlist being built for comfort, and it is the single change most likely to put a leader from the supply side, a consultancy or a client body in front of you. If you lead on that side, do the reverse: translate your record into those terms before a contractor reads it.

What I'm working on

A UK contractor has asked me to find a Major Projects Director, a new senior appointment taking overall strategic, operational and commercial control of a major London leisure and residential scheme, then a portfolio across London and the South East. It reports to the Chief Operating Officer and the board, carries accountability from pre-construction through delivery, commissioning and close-out, and needs someone who has run schemes in the £20m to £100m range with leisure and residential in the record. Permanent, with an executive package to match.

Alongside it, four data centre leadership roles are live for a turnkey delivery partner with more than 500 MW in flight across Europe: Project Lead in Dublin, Project Lead in Sines, Portugal, a Regional EHS Manager for Europe and an EHS Lead in Milan. The briefs are at lechley.com/jobs.