What Two Years of Turning Down Work Built for This Engineering Firm

Notes from this week's episode of What One Thing, with guest Ben McManus of BM Civil Engineering.

A client once asked Ben McManus if he wanted to think it over before turning down their price. He said no, on the spot.

That's the sort of answer that takes most people years to be able to give, if they ever manage it at all. Ben's only two and a half years into running BM Civil Engineering, a civil engineering design consultancy that works with national house builders from the early stages of a site right through to detailed design and construction. He has a small team, three of them plus his wife, and already, turning down good money on principle is just something he does.

Integrity, pricing, and the work he turned away

One client wanted Ben to drop part of the brief to save on fees. Most people in a new business would find a way to make that work. Ben didn't. "The scope's the scope," he told them. "If you want someone to do less, fine, but it won't be us." He walked away from a scheme worth roughly half his monthly target because leaving that part out could have left the client a million or two pounds short before they'd even bought the land. "I think I've always gone with a moral compass," he says. "I'd rather gain the respect for doing the right thing over the monetary win."

Then there's the pricing itself. No sliding scale, no discount for whoever pushes hardest. "We price everybody the same," he says. "The price is the price." Which is why it was easy to say no so quickly to the client who asked if he wanted to think over their negotiation.

It shows up in something his team actively works at: winning less. That’s right, less. Last August was busy enough that a second team member came on board, and instead of just riding that wave, he started reining the win rate back in. "I'm saying no to good opportunities," he admits, "purely based on consistency of outputs and wanting to be able to still do what we're here to do." Which is a fairly unusual thing for the owner of a two-year-old business to say out loud. Most people are trying to win more, not less.

What firm boundaries have built

Saying no this often could easily have just meant less work. Instead, it's built Ben a reputation that keeps sending work back his way.

There was a prospect early on who told Ben, straight up, that he was over twice the price of the one-man band who had been given the job. A fair few people would have taken that as a loss and moved on. Ben pushed back anyway, telling them plainly that comparing two different services on price alone will never work. A day or so later, he got an email. The client had been at an event the night before, got talking to a technical director from another developer who was after recommendations for good engineers, and passed Ben's details on. That referral, from the client who'd just told him he was too expensive, has been pretty fruitful.

It's not a one-off either. Ben and his team have built enough of a name for holding their ground that they're now the ones developers call when a job's already gone wrong on somebody else's watch. One site at the moment is 75 plots into a build of 250, the original consultant's been let go, and Ben's been brought in mid-build with foundations due to be poured the following week. Not the most profitable job on the books, by his own admission, but exactly the kind of call that only comes in because of the reputation behind it.

There's a relationship side to this too. Ben talks about Laura at Ecotech, someone he'd worked alongside years ago at a different company without either of them realising it at the time, who now refers work his way just as often as he refers it hers. "She describes us as her cheerleaders," he says, "but it's the same in the opposite direction." As Phil put it afterwards, two or three relationships like that are worth more than two hundred shallow ones from people you only ever see at the same networking breakfast.

The hidden cost

None of this came without a cost, and we loved Ben's honesty about that rather than glossing over it. Ben's one thing, the thing he brought to the podcast, is what he calls the superhero complex. He'll put the pants on over the trousers for a client without a second thought, whatever it takes to get the job done properly, but he's the first to admit none of that same discipline follows him home.

Clients, delivery, and doing a good job come first, and everything else gets pushed down the list. Last summer he didn’t make the family holiday, because he couldn't put the work down. "I'd suggest it's to my own detriment that I prioritise delivery," he says. Half the time, it isn't even clients asking for that level of commitment; by his own admission, he's manufacturing a fair bit of it himself. "I feel like I put myself under more pressure than any of our clients," he says. "It's like a falsified urgency that I am creating."

The boundary he hasn't set for himself

The irony sitting underneath the whole episode is that Ben will tell a client no without blinking. But he's still working out how to tell himself the same thing.

He's got three things he's trying this year. Take annual leave. Ben is getting his wife to book it for him so work doesn’t sneak in instead. Apply the same systems and diligence to himself personally as he does to the business. And give himself permission for things not to happen today. Not everything needs to be marked urgent.  

Where could you say no

Most people running a business are trying to win more, take on more, say yes more. Ben's the reminder that the opposite can build something just as solid, sometimes more so, provided you can stomach doing it. Where in your own business are you saying yes purely out of habit, and what might happen if, just once, you didn't?

You can hear the whole conversation with Ben McManus on the What One Thing podcast, hosted by Hayley Baxter of Corbar Accounting and Phil Davenport of Affirm IT.