Party Wall PRO

In this episode Lee tells us how he managed to build his successful party wall practice from scratch in only two years. He gives us the one marketing tip that helped him kick start his business and tells us how to go about growing it into a sustainable party wall practice.

You can also watch the interview on YouTube.

Transcription

Philippe: Welcome to another edition of our podcast and today I’m really excited to have our champion user, Lee Kyson on the line from Kyson Building Consultancy. I said, champion user because you’ve got about a thousand new matters on Party Wall PRO, which is pretty exciting, but it’s not about you using our software anyway, it’s not about self-promotion, it’s more about you. Can you talk a bit about how you started, where you started, and how you got into surveying in general?

Lee: Well, basically I come from a trading background and I’ve spent all my life in construction. I’ve been used to having people working for me, building and renovating properties, much of my work was as a plastering contractor with mostly plasterers working for me. However, that was always on the physical side and as I’m not getting any younger, I decided I needed to try and make a change, but at the same time put the experience I’d gained to use. One day I was actually preparing a quote for a builder, to get some building work done on his house and while I was around there he was telling me he was having problems getting a party wall surveyor, and I was, vaguely familiar with the [Party Wall etc. 1996] Act, I just look into it and found out lot more information. I attended the course run by the faculty of party wall surveyors and started off working basically as a party wall surveyor, but just as a sideline and now it seems like it’s taking off and it is most of my work now. Philippe: So, you started your practice from scratch completely.

Philippe: So, you started your practice from scratch completely.

Lee: Yes!

Philippe: That’s interesting because you are the first one. Normally people come from surveying practices, where they’ve done a little bit of party wall and then decided to set up their own practice or are still with bigger firms. That’s quite interesting: out of nothing, you started. So, how did you get to grow it, because obviously, that first client was one thing, but then how did you take off from there?

Lee: I think originally, I advertised heavily, wherever I could get some adverts in I would put them in and, I’ve probably spent an arm and a leg on advertising but it just brought… Let’s just say it wasn’t a very good return rate. It gradually got the foot in the door and gradually, I would get one customer then another and then it would gradually lead on to getting more and more customers. I say customers… but under the party wall act, they are not customers or clients but owners and for the sake of clarity we just refer to them as customers. But it just gradually advanced from there, an architect would bring me up and then I manage to maintain all future contacts with that architect and then gradually another architect came on board and I manage to keep in contact with them and managed a continual flow of [LOST CONNECTION].

Philippe: I think I’ve lost the connection there.

Philippe: Welcome back. You were explaining, how you got from your first customer, to building a bigger practice. You started advertising. Where did you start advertising?

Lee: I put an ad in Yell, because you can always do a freebie one in Yell. I also used another couple but I have to be careful what I say, because they weren’t very successful as I never actually had a single response from them. They were affiliated with local authorities for different areas. They weren’t successful. I think mainly it was Yell and I gradually managed to get a lot of responses from Google, and I did pay for some ads on Google, but then I gradually let my client base take over.

Philippe: Who did you target, on Google? Was it architects and project manager

In our first episode Alistair tells us how to build a reputation and what skills are needed to be an efficient Building Owner surveyor. He also shares some tips on how to start a party wall practice and why you shouldn’t do it alone too early.

You can also watch the interview on YouTube.

Philippe: Hello everyone! Today we’ve got Alistair Redler with us from Delva Patman, Redler who is the man when it comes to party wall surveying and he has been in the business for how long now, Alistair?

Alistair: Well this from 23 years, since starting work probably about 28.

Philippe: 28? How did you?– so tell me– from the start how did you get into surveying.

Alistair: By accident, almost! I left school with lousy A levels, did 3 years doing manual labor work and a cousin of mine who’s a structural engineer and now senior partner of a large firm in the South recommended that I spend some time with him seeing what engineers did. And having decided that surveying looked more interesting than engineering, I went into it. I decided that was a good call–it was all I could do. So basically, just, it was a good lifestyle rather than a choice.

Philippe: Right, so how did you, from there, go into party wall matters? Did you start straight away with just focusing on party walls or was it just general surveying and then?

Alistair: No, ah, sort of. A colleague; and there was a couple lectures on party walls that I thought were interesting. It was interesting that there was a specialization that was relatively straightforward and at that time, very boutique applying to only in London. And I quite liked the idea of it. As I got into surveying and working, I found I liked the professional end of surveying better than construction and design. So I got into dilapidation surveys, and party walls and to a certain extent repair works rather than design works; very much my field, I am not a designer at all. So, the party wall work, and I used to get as I could from the firm I was working in. And eventually, in ’92, I thought I’d apply to a firm that was more specialist and applied to a few firms including Delva Patman and got the job. So, I wanted to be more specialist and do rights of light as well so it was a deliberate attempt to get into this field.

Alistair: Delva being extremely experienced and very very capable.

Philippe: And then, and then, from there on, how do you– how do you actually start building your own practice? Because it’s –, it’s like, with my background as a lawyer you work in a law firm with a partner that hands you the work, and without questioning it. But you don’t really have time to go in and seek your own instructions, your own clients. So how did you go from, from working for Delva into slowly getting your own client base?

Alistair: I think you do it just by working, actually. I think it’s about personality, but I think it’s about working. I have -we, we, as a practice do almost no marketing. No active marketing, no classic marketing. No cold calls, no taking people to lunch twice a week, no -you know–, no marketing budget effectively. We manage to do the job, when we do the job, we think very well; we do it our way. We do it very well. That, backed up with doing lectures and articles, and just helping people out. It’s amazing, that one of the best ways of getting a name around is for your rivals to speak well of you; in party wall world particularly. And other negotiating fields like dilapidation and so on, because if your rivals speak well of you, not only do they want to negotiate with you, because well it may not be the easiest ride, it will be a fair and honest one. But, the clients can’t also go to the same people, there’s a conflict, so you get the contacts that way as well. So basically you’re doing the job best you can.

Philippe: So that “best you can”, is that just going above and beyond what