My Life As a QS

Cooper & Hall Director Ian Wilcock’s career has taken him from a nuclear plant to jail

Having retired from day-to-day quantity surveying, it was suggested I write a retrospective. Artists do retrospectives, why not quantity surveyors?

Why did I choose quantity surveying?  Well, it was my Uncle Ernie’s fault. Having been thrown out of the Air Cadets for crashing too many gliders, he got a City & Guilds in estimating – I never understood the connection, but everyone else in the family seemed to think it made sense.  So, Uncle Ernie became an estimator/quantity surveyor (the two jobs were often combined back then) and lived in a four-bedroom detached house on the Wirral and had a car. Whereas we lived in a terraced house in Liverpool and travelled by bus or train.

So, I passed my A Levels and went off to Trent Polytechnic – by train – to do a sandwich course in quantity surveying.  The sandwich year was at Windscale and Calder Works, now the Sellafield nuclear facility. This was a real education! The senior QS for the mechanical subcontractor had a plaque behind his desk which stated “never before in the history of human endeavour has so little been achieved by so many at such great cost”.

After graduating, I got a job in York working for a small QS practice. This was good experience, with lots of small and varied projects, and it was a very happy office. Unfortunately, the partners weren’t as happy, and the company started to disintegrate. Within a couple of years, the company became three separate entities, only one of which survived. In the middle of these travails, I was made redundant.  There is never a good time to be made redundant, but six months after buying your first house…

Fortunately, I got a job straight away.  It was a one-year fixed term contract sorting out old final accounts for Selby District Council.  I thought this was ideal – a year to find a job that I really wanted.  It was a nightmare. What they didn’t tell me at the interview was how old some of these final accounts were.  I started in the autumn of 1984 and about half of the final accounts were in £ s. d. For young people, this means old money and that the accounts were pre-1971.  Most of the people involved were retired or dead, but the “biggest” issue was the council auditor – a small bald bloke with a tweed jacket and a green pen.

After about six months I got a new job, working for Beard Dove & Partners at HM Prison Full Sutton in York.  This was my first experience of computers – a 9 mB hard drive and 8” floppy disks – cutting edge at the time.  Beard Dove had been told the job was fully designed and that there wouldn’t be many variations. The monthly financial report took six hours to print out on our state-of-the-art dot matrix printer.  When I left there were 13,500 variations – so fully designed then!  Eventually Beard Dove opened an office in Leeds.  It wasn’t a happy place and in 1988 I left to join A S Friend & Partners, a company from Aylesbury who were trying to spread into the north of England.

I enjoyed my time at A S Friend & Partners – good variety of work, some PQS and some working for contractors and subcontractors.  We did a lot of work for Sir Robert McAlpine and eventually for Maurice Hill a cladding company.  This is when I first met Phil (Cooper) and Graham (Hall), who were contracts manager and senior QS respectively.  The projects for MHL comprised mainly power stations and similar projects, so I was site based a lot of the time in places as exciting as Grimsby and Connah’s Quay.

Due to a lack of job security, the amount of time working away and long commutes (York to Grimsby is a hike on a daily basis) I started looking for other employment.  Eventually I got a job with Shepherd Design.  This was quite a change; working in a large design office as opposed to a site cabin or a small office – often by myself.

After nine years at Shepherd I got a phone call from Graham asking if I could do some final accounts, at weekends.  Bizarrely, I agreed.  A few months later Phil and Graham offered me a partnership. So in August 2005 I began my career with Cooper & Hall.  The idea was to help Graham who was stacked out with work from subcontractors.  It didn’t work. A few weeks later I was asked by Shepherd to help with a BQ – I didn’t realise I was so popular.  Since then, Cooper & Hall has grown and expanded into all areas of quantity surveying.

What have I learned in a career as a QS:

1. Communication is crucial.
2. You should complete and coordinate the design before you start construction – sounds like common sense, but it hardly ever happens.
3. Sort problems out as you go along – trying to settle 15-year-old final accounts is never the answer.
4. Write everything down.
5. Never leave a letter/email unanswered.
6. Keep smiling…
7. ,,,and beware of people with green pens.

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