Right, I'll just go on to the next slide, which is just a brief overview of what I'm going to talk about. I'm gonna talk for about 45 minutes and then I'm gonna leave 15 minutes for questions. So, sorry about that.
Right, next. So that's me. We just talked about that, right, so the success of designing and building a new surgery will rely as much on having the right process as it does on the quality of the delivery of the individual tasks and or inspirational design.
So it doesn't sound exciting, but that's the point. In a sense. We aim for boring.
We want to look back on a project and say that we worked out what sort of practise we wanted. We bought a site, we designed a building. It cost what we could afford and it took as long as we expected and it worked just the way we wanted it to.
Essentially, we're trying to reduce risk to a manageable level and increase the predictability of outcomes. You might get lucky and find a good builder or project manager that does all that, but many people don't, and either get stuck partway through or get through with a bad result. That doesn't mean you should aim for boring buildings.
If you get the process right, it frees you up from firefighting to deal with getting an exceptional outcome. The process is well trodden and there are a cast of professionally qualified people to help you on your way. So, where do we start?
At the very beginning as the song goes. Form follows function has become a credo for most modern architects. Originally, the axiom of Louis Sullivan, who, who lived between 1856 and 1924.
He was an American architect famous for developing early steel frame high-rise building, a mentor of another famous architect, Lloyd Wright, who went on to say that form and function are one. Sullivan's actual quote was form ever follows function. the full quote, and I'm going to get very poetical here, whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.
It suggests that we might think of the building as a tool to do a job and therefore first need to understand that job before you can design the tool. The design of the building should follow the use or function to which it's going to be put. Before pen is put to paper or mouse to screen.
To make some designs, you need to establish a project brief. The project brief sets out the scope of the project and defines not just functional requirements and architecture, but. All the other constraints, what I call the development envelope.
Projects are instigated for many different reasons, such as a lease expiry, need for more space, introduction of new treatments needing to be housed, the drivers, constraints and scope will be individual to you, although the common elements will be money, time, sight, and functional requirement. The starting point of your brief will be your business plan. You may not think you have one, but they take many forms, from vague intentions, notes on scraps of paper, or fully worked up documents with supporting financial projections.
Either way, it will be unique to you and your business, but should have some essential characteristics. If you haven't already done so, it is useful to write your business plan. Formulating it is usually an iterative process developed by trial and error.
It should help you to form robust assumptions about the likely shape of your business. The outturn is very unlikely to exactly match the plan, but it should give you your most informed guess. Derived from as much research as you can get and a good dose of common sense, it should be an evolving and dynamic document.
The business planning process. So the business planning process should help you. Identify your existing and projected client base.
Understanding who and where your competitors are, what share of the market you and they are likely to take. Taking the market initiatives you intend to hatch, from which you can take an informed guess at your turnover. Costs and the associated staff and premises you'll need to support that activity.
You should also be able to form a view on how that activity might change over time. And the premises, how the, how your premises will need to respond. You may be wondering what all this has got to do with the layout of your clinical suite.
It has everything because your budget and location will likely dictate the size, type, and numbers of rooms you will need, can get, and crucially, can afford. So from your business plan. You should get 5 key pieces of information which will form your project brief.
These are a budget, both capital and revenue. An accommodation schedule, which is a list of rooms and the size that you need, their function. And the amounts of car parking.
We'll have a look at an example of one of those in a minute. How that requirement is likely to change over time. So hopefully you will want to, you'll be moving to try and expand the business and improve the business, so understanding that dynamic and a programme, or at least a date by which you expect to or need to be opening the doors, and then finally a site or location.
So here is an example of an accommodation schedule or room schedule, as it's sometimes known, . It's a basically a list of rooms to which is added some extra space for plant. That's, that's, that's, heating, such as heating and, and, and, and ventilation plant, structural walls and circulation.
And this is, this is a rough guess at the and gives us a gross internal area. For interest, I've shown a slide of floor plan and elevations that have flown from these early thoughts before we even found a site. The site has more capacity than we need or could afford, so we've introduced 14 flats.
I'll just go and. Fine And that, so I'll come back to that, so. Apologies.
That's, that's the scheme of the 14 flats, so this is the accommodation schedule for that. So quite a lot of information there which then. Will give you a good idea about costs, the size of land you need, the size of building that you're looking for, and, and whether you can afford it, without even doing any, any actual architectural work at all.
There's a programme, we talked about a programme. This is, actually a building programme, but you, you, for, for a project programme you will set out dates and crucially, the critical path that runs through those activities. So you'll know the beginning and end date of your project and the red bars show the critical activities.
Right, so. Generally, the size of a building is the largest determinant of building cost. Gross internal area is, is the basis adopted.
By the construction and valuation professions for analysing and expressing construction costs on a metre rate. A net internal area is used, when analysing and establishing value. There are various indices and cost services, the leading of which is the BCIS run by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.
It's users mostly quantity fares, pay annual fees, and agree to pass information on completed projects, and in return have access to generic info about typical build cost rates for certain types of building. Building costs can vary enormously depending on many things, but at the start, we assume everything is normal. At the most, at the moment in the UK a typical, Capital cost for building a surgery building freestanding on Greenfield site would be about 1800 pounds per square metre gross internal area.
So that's a really quick way to give you a rough and tough budget. If you're taking an existing building, say you're converting a bank, an old bank premises. It'll be costing you about 1000 pounds a metre to refurbish that or convert and convert it into a full blown surgery building.
And that will include everything. If you turn the building upside down and shook it, that's that figure will include everything that doesn't fall out. So design teams.
Design team fees, in addition to that, you'll, be paying for, costs for design, and that includes all the costing, the management and everything. And they're often expressed as percentages of the value of the construction work. And construction rates per square metre are usually quoted exclusive of those fees.
Those fees are typically all up from the very initial stages of feasibility right through the hand over the building, about 10 to 12% of the construction, their construction cost, right. So project brief, . Design and build projects are a team effort, as I was briefly touching on.
You'll need to draw on a good you'll need to draw a good team around you and try and share with them as clearly as possible through the brief what you are trying to achieve. Again, the form and content of this document will be unique to you and your business, but usually contains the following elements. Aims and goals, describing what the project looks like if it's successful, both in overall terms and it's measurable parts, such as cost, time scales, increased client registrations, etc.
Project directory, a list of all the roles and where known the people who lead in those roles with their contract details, contact details. Programme, a project programme that flags critical dates for different work streams. It should consider dependencies and establish a critical path as I showed earlier.
A budget, both capital and revenue for the facility and the delivery of the project itself. Functional requirements, which is what we were just talking about, expressing what the building needs to support in terms of treatments, consultations, overnight accommodation, a CT scanner. Etc.
This will include your accommodation schedule and information about the type of equipment you want to use, such as CT and hydrotherapy. And finally, site search requirements, listing those, if, if you are looking for a site and you don't have one already, listing those metrics by which you're going to rank site options if you don't already have a site. If you do have a site, mention any special characteristics.
Testing feasibility and viability. So first stage is you're looking at you're possibly looking at a building, and I apologise to those people who already have a building. They don't need this or if you, if you haven't though and many people don't, they're thinking of moving, at this stage you might draw a site plan to show the building footprint.
Access and parking and to understand how much extra space is available for expansion or to generating third party income. And I'll skip forward again with the slides just to show you one of those. So there you are.
This is a surgery, we had the chance to buy the whole of that land in front of the, the doctor's surgery behind. So we, we, we've dropped the building on there, drawn in the access and the car parking, so we know that's how much land we need, so we don't buy more than we need. If we're forced to buy the whole site, unfortunately sites don't come in nice neat fit.
Surgery sizes and shapes, we know that's the land we've got that's surplus and then we can start thinking creatively around how we deal with that. So those constraints, the list is pretty much endless, but it's things typically things like access, topography. I'll go back to that site, it slopes steeply away from the road at the front.
So actually getting and there's a steep step between the road and the land behind. So we couldn't get an access directly off that road, so we have to come through the car park at the back. Contamination is a big issue, and as I say, we start out with the assumption it's normal.
If the site is contaminated, and they often are, then you will negotiate with the person who's selling the land to reduce the price to reflect the cost of remediation. Trees, . Any planning application will need to show how you're going to protect mature trees, generally, especially in urban areas, planners don't like you chopping trees down or not without and and they don't even like you chopping them down and replanting them.
So you have to think about that. Services is a big one. Where are you going to get drains, electricity supply, gas supply.
Etc. Because they can be quite costly if they're not already onto the site, and all these things need factoring in at the outset before you agree the price for the land. The architect, so the architect will, produce the rooftop and check site capacity and surplus.
This is another, this is another, a project and site, and it's, it's, again, putting a footprint of the building on there to see how many car spaces. Obviously a lot more restrictive. It's in a, in a densely urban area in the city centre, so we've .
In order to support the land value that we were asked to pay, we've had to introduce quite a lot of third party income and put 14 flats over that and a basement car park. And Yeah, so, so. Those, the flats, .
The 4 floors and the ground floor there is the. The, the surgery. I want to talk a little bit about, .
Landing cost and value, you'll need to know, that the cost of doing all this work isn't higher than the value. If, if it is, you may not be able to raise the money if you're borrowing. And also having gone through all the pain effort of.
Enjoyment of, of, of extending or building a new building, it's, it's it, you, you, you'll want to know that it's worth at least as much as it's cost you to make. So, to find out the value of the land, you'll need to run what's called the residual development appraisal, simple calculation. Where the receipts from the end value of the project.
Are deducted from the gross development value. So what is it worth when it's finished, and take away the costs of making it. To establish the residual value of land plus profit and interest.
So I think I've got some there. That is very small, for which I apologise, but that is a very simple residual appraisal. So, value at the top, that's the scheme I showed you with the flats, so all the flats, the surgery is at the top, the vets, which is 342.
Square metres gross, and then net letter for 291. Kicking out a a capital value of 584,500, and then the income from the flats gives you a total of 3.3 million.
The site, the land cost of the site is 495. With all the other bits and pieces and valuations that goes up to about 600 odd. Build cost, a prime build cost of about 2.3 million.
Including fees. Which gives you a total cost of 3.3, so as it stands, that appraisal is taking, is making a loss, so.
It we've, we've come on a bit since then, we've made some improvements to the scheme and it's now profitable. But as I said, it's useful to do that calculation, you can do that early on before you've even bought the land. Before you've actually designed the building, before you've got planning permission, you'd be surprised how many people actually.
Go through planning and get a consent before they actually start doing these calculations in earnest and as a consequence, find themselves in a very difficult place. Right, so developing the design for smaller layouts you can go straight to a draught, . And I'll show you one like that, that's a scheme.
Where we, the front part of the black part of the building is the existing and the grade out lines are the, new parts. So we've, we've knocked down significant parts of it and built around it and. Knocked out the back bit and rearranged it, and the general approach is to try and create a central hub, consulting rooms at the front moving through the building.
We've introduced lateral circulation where it says pharmacy and put the pharmacy in there behind reception. And then moving through to a clinical suite behind, which is. Centred around, The prep.
So from the prep you have 3 operating theatres, a secondary, so primary ops, secondary ops, dirty ops, radiology, dog ward, cat ward, and then isolation near the back door. So if you're bringing in animals with diarrhoea and so on, they don't come right through the building, . Then a wash down area at the back there as well.
So that's in, in that case. I'm just trying to see, you may have a There, there you are. That's the existing one, but it's not very clear.
That in fact is a measured survey of the existing building, which we do before we start designing so that we can go straight to CAD. With it, it's very hard to see. You'll have a copy of these slides so you can have a look at that and compare before and after if you're interested.
So that's we've gone straight to design. This is a bigger scheme, and the alternative is, you might want to go through another stage called block planning, showing the functional relationships and adjacents. So we're thinking here, not necessarily in terms of rooms, but in terms of functions.
So the cat and dog wait or two species wait and consults moving rooms to spend moving through front and back. With a prep, similar principle that I've just described. With a clinical suite, centred around a large prep area.
The kennel and off to the right and the board and this this in this case, we had a a boarding cattery and then from that, and, and also if you have multi-story buildings, you get the blocking and stacking, so you understand vertical relationships as well as horizontal ones. At the same time, we need to develop the cost model and programme to ensure that we don't get planning permission for something that you cannot afford or for which you cannot get funding. The accommodation schedule will be very useful as a starting point for the architect, .
You could also fill out and let her have room data sheets. So I'm gonna come back, so that slide is to do with land cost and value, which I described, and you'll take advice from a qualified value, but I would urge you to do that early on in the process, certainly before you commit to buying the land and. Going to planning, often it is the case that these people are involved at the last minute and there's very little you can do about your commitments at that point.
So room data sheets. Again, before, before you've even instructed the architect, you can, you, you can basically start making a list of everything that goes into every room. So we would, normally, .
the items equipment, so we would normally show drawings that are fully loaded. That means we would draw everything including right down to the waste paper bin to see that. The spaces work and, and you can fit everything in, and you might include all the equipment including, you know, clippers down to clippers and everything, .
And the drawings would normally show them as three different categories of equipment. So A, those that are supplied and fitted by you, such as a waste paper bin. B, those that are supplied by you and fitted by the contractor, such as an exam lamp.
And those that are supplied and fitted by the contractors, such as fitted cupboards and hand bases. The architect should know the general principles of layouts and workflow, and you will have already thought through which room should connect with which the functional adjacency. You will have a, have your own way of doing things, e.g., where you want the, for example, where you want the autoclave and how.
And where you want to scrub up. Often this preference is derived from your knowledge and practise, the way you've always done it. Designing a new building gives you the chance to challenge some of that thinking.
So I would urge you to take that opportunity. So there's a room data sheet. And in this case, it's a consult room.
And we've got everything, so computer, telephone, waste paper bin, seats stool. Exam light, base cupboards, and then we've got services that need to support those, the number, and at the bottom there, we're looking at the environment, so what flooring is going to be, the skirting, everything. So this is a fairly thought through brief for the architect, so you don't have lots of toing and froing, so you can get a lot of it out of the way, cover a lot of ground quickly.
This is a drawing showing, . The different types of equipment, as I've described, A, B, and C, in this case it's just . It's just A and B .
So you've got the pink is showing the things that the contractors are fitting, and then the blue is showing the bits that the client is, is supplying. I don't think we had anything like exam lights. It's a very small scheme.
I'm trying to show you that the, the projects come in lots of different shapes and sizes. This is a, this was . A shell, scheme, it's a retail shell, and we agreed an agreement to lease and lease before.
Before the site was even bought by the developer, and then we took a pre-agreement to lease the unit, and then we had to wait for it to be built, the shell, and then we designed and fitted out the shell. It works quite well. It's, it's, it's about as small as you can get, but you see we've got two consult rooms there and it works as a, branch.
So here are some photographs, some general principles and examples for layout and finishes starting from the front. Separate species waiting doesn't have to be. Entirely segregated, and there are subtle ways in which you can urge people to go and sit in various areas, put photographs up of, say, cats in one area and dogs in another, .
Reception desk is at height that that you can write, and, and pay. There's a lower part there for wheelchair access. .
It's made in a durable material, it's oak, so if it gets knocked, it can be sanded down over time, it's, it's treated, and if it's not, it can be repaired, sanded, finished, refinished. The floor, in this case, the client wanted a this a vinyl floor, so it's it's a non-safety floor, it has a a certain amount of grip in it, but it was a trade off between having something. Other than the plane safety flooring and something that was patterned.
And they took the view that they wanted that one. So there's a, it's a fairly irregular building. It was one that we converted from an old, electrical wholesalers.
Showing a picture of a 3 cupboard there between two theatres. It's quite useful cuts down. You just talked about stock control, it enables you to have one set of drugs shared.
Between the two theatres. Going back, branding features, colour waves, materials palette, worth thinking about when you're instructing the architect to just, it's an opportunity if you are thinking about rebranding and focusing on, and I would urge you to go back through your business plan and when you think about colours, it's not necessarily just the first colour you like, although that's important. It's, it's trying to see that the style.
Matches your client base and your clients are gonna feel comfortable and it's somewhere they're gonna want to come, so it's, this is in. A leafy part of the home counties, and I think they were aiming at a kind of Waitrose. Style, but obviously different parts of the country, different, client demographic, you're gonna.
Hopefully adjust your branding, styling. To suit the client, we've got some cages, some walk-ins there, the walkings, we generally these days are, . heating and cooling the buildings with .
With with condensed air conditioners, and air conditioning, it, it certainly, I would urge you to, because most buildings, new buildings now are super insulated, so they don't need a lot of heating. But the issue going forward in the future is, is considered to be cooling, is going to be the hard part. So think about cooling, certainly those areas where animals are going to be under stress.
And certainly through the waiting area to consider your and consults where your clients also are going to be under a certain amount of stress, especially if they're. They have animals which are, are, are ill, so. It's also very cheap to run, .
So, air conditioning, the walking cages are lined with safety flooring in this case. So you can entirely hose them down. There's a floor drain in the floor there, you can see, so you can actually wash down.
With a hose, the whole of that room. And I thoroughly recommend that with a removable bucket. So for any solids, they come out.
The cat cages on the other photograph I would suggest. The, the, The power would be better in the centre of the two banks of cages, as the wires will then, you don't have trailing wires. If you've got wires going to the bottom cages, they're not trailing across the top cages, so wires in the middle.
Generally, also don't forget to provide enough space underneath and at the top, or somewhere in that room for all the stuff that comes with the cats. So generally we're trying to make these finishes durable. We're conscious of the fact that they're washable, .
On a daily basis. Have a look at the, if you're not familiar with the Royal College standards document, I mean, it's, it's, it's short on really hard specifications for buildings. I mean, one of the few things it does state, if you want hospital status is the overnight stay.
And in terms of the physical finishes, it, it's, you'll need to cap and cove. So again, down the bottom here is running the The vinyl up the walls, or having a welded, I'll go back to the other slide and you can see, I think, or not, no, perhaps not, in that one. Yeah, you can see at the back, near the dog bowl over here, there's set in coving, but that's welded, so there's no seam.
So it's a welded seam. There is sit on coving, but that is unacceptable. Because stuff can get underneath it.
So, you're thinking about time, privacy and dignity, I'll go back to. Right back to this drawing. So introducing the lateral access is going to enable you to, clients can leave the building without running the gauntlet through the waiting area.
I could go on and on about this stuff, and I'm very happy if you want us to come and talk to you about that, . Individually I'm happy to do that, but I would like to. Go on and talk a little bit about the construction part of it before I take questions, so.
So He just Go back through these, so, finding a building and making a contract, quantity sphere is a, it's usually a quantity sphere you will want to. Who are trained primarily to deal with contractual and financial matters relating to building projects. They'll prepare you the budget cost plan and find you the best procurement route and type of contracts you have with your builder.
There are industry standard forms of contracts and the route you take will depend on your appetite for risk and how quickly you need to get started. So, they are generally fall into the categories of management contract tradition where you would just pay the contractor, whatever it costs plus a management fee, high risk, traditional contract where you have. A design team that's separate from the contractor who manage the contractor separately, or there's a fixed price design and build, so the contractors said, you, you will only get paid if you build me what's on the drawings, .
As I said, standard standard forms of contracts, your bank will be interested in the form of contracts and how it's administered. On larger contracts, they may want to appoint their own monitoring surveyor. The QS will prepare the tender documents and will be principally seeking to get proposals from contractors that have certainty around three principal elements and those are cost, time and specification.
Without certainty on all three, the other elements are changeable and therefore no good. So time Cost and specification. Construction management buildings cost time and quality.
While at this stage you're planning and a design and are keen to get on site, try to resist cutting the time you give contractors to prepare their proposals and to mobilise after you've placed the order. The more prepared they are before they get on site, the better the job will be. The level of production design detail would depend on the form of contract and procurement route.
You will likely have elements of contract design for which you will need to make clear statements about your output requirements, e.g., for heating design, you will target ambient temperature range for each room.
You'll also need to ensure that for the contractor design parts they have adequate professional indemnity insurance if indeed they fail on the design. You may also need collateral warranties from the design team. These extend the PI cover to named parties beyond the original parties to the contract.
So beyond you and the builder, you will find the bank might want access to the designers or builder's PI cover, so that's the collateral warranties. So, contract management, so in order to manage the contract, it's usual to employ an employer's agent to administer it. They're often the person firm that is used to run the tender.
They might also be. The project manager who has run the project from the start is useful to have someone who understands the practicalities of construction and legal understanding of JCT contracts. The programme is important as time is money.
Your advisors will challenge the contractor's proposals. It will also help give you a cash flow forecast and give you, give the bank or other external funders . That the project is realistic, it will also show and help you plan when you need to start marketing, buying equipment, etc.
The programme is significant when managing the project through construction. It forms a baseline, which will end with a handover date. JCT standard forms of contract provide for liquidated and ascertained damages, that is.
Some money that is charged weekly if the contractor is late. There will be circumstances that allow the contract to extend this state through the contracts, such as bad weather or for changes to the work that they're being asked to do. Interim payments, if the work runs for more than a month, the contractor is going to need interim payments.
These can be pre-agreed stage payments, fixed amounts from the staircase in more usually against periodic valuations at the end of every 2 or 4 weeks. The contractor will submit valuations, and these will be checked by the employer's agent. Who will issue a valuation certificate to you, the client, with instructions to pay.
See if I've got one of those. Oh, I So, it's important, the contractor, the most important thing is that the contractor doesn't get ahead with the payment, so should only be paid for the work that is completed. And the materials that are on site.
So at the end, defects, liability and payment retention. The usual amount under JCT contracts to be withheld through construction phase is 5%, which reduces to 2.5% after the work of.
Is complete this is an amount that you hold back if the, to cover you, if the work is defective, and then the contractor disappears. So you've got a sum of money up your sleeve that you can put things right. It's usually held for a period of 6 to 12 months after the work.
After practical completion. I'm gonna skip over a couple of these things, right, so. Practical.
Completion and handover. The architect or other independent professional person should check and certify the building work has been completed in accordance with the designs and the contract. It often contains a list of minor works which still need doing.
We call these snagging snags and snagging list, but don't prevent you from using the building. This work needs to be completed within the defects rectification period, as I said, normally between 6 and 12 months. You can use the retention funds to rectify snags if your contractor is unable or unwilling to do so.
Together with the manuals and warranties, you should get a set of label keys and manuals for your shiny new building. You will need to liaise with the contractor about whether you want to start moving your equipment in before the practical completion date. So, Whatever the type and size of your project.
I would urge you to find a suitable professionally experienced in veterinary property to help you, . Thanks for listening. I'll take some questions now, and I hope you get the same immense reward that I still get after 35 years walking around a new building that I've just taken part in creating.
So, I hope that, right, thank you very much for that, Paul. No worries. Again, another thorough and very interesting presentation.
Just checking, we don't yet have any questions. I've got a couple of, well, I guess for me what particularly struck me is it's that old adage, isn't it? Those that fail to plan, plan to fail.
So it's really thinking about everything and I get, you know, there's a lot in there certainly that I would never have thought of. You finds when you're working with people, some of that comes as a bit of a surprise or. No, no, we, we sadly, we, we, we come across people at various stages of projects and frequently they've they've, they, they, they're they're they're they just.
Gone into the thing blind, and, and, and, yeah, it would have, it, it's not where we would have started from, but it's OK we can get over it one way or other, but yeah, I mean it is, I would add it it and and what's sad is actually quite often it's people have. Started a project thinking they've got to do it all themselves, unaware that there are a whole bunch of people out there who, it's their day job, you know, as, you know, it's like me trying to spay a cat. It's, it's, I could probably have a go at it, but it's not going to be very.
Effective or or it's gonna be a bit messy if I'm honest. So it's not a great thing to do and you know you don't need to, you don't need and and generally these people are probably cheaper than vets to employ so their time, it, it frees the hopefully frees the vets up. And as I said at the beginning, it doesn't mean that you hand over the whole project to somebody else, it means that it frees you up and it frees up your mental space to.
Concentrate on those things that are most important, like what the finishes you want and the layout and and stuff that's important to you. Sure, OK. And, and on that note, then obviously you are a chartered surveyor and you have a primary role within the project, but you're presumably quite happy to put people, that's in touch with colleagues you've worked with before.
You've got presume you have quite a big network of. Yeah, yeah, so we, we, we, we pull together teams, quite often clients will say, well, I've got this architect, I really like architect, so we will, and, and we, we pull together a team and we'll advise them on whether the person is suitable or not, and then we kind of then. Yeah, we work in teams.
It's teams, these, these buildings are multifaceted, so they, they require a whole bunch of, of, of professionals, but you just put the team together and as I say, if you're working as a team and you've not necessarily all worked together before, I mean usually we do work together and we know each other, but if we haven't, then it's even more important to all be able to communicate the plan and what you're all trying to achieve and when you're trying to achieve it by, and how you're going to do it. And also I suppose you go through stages. And what we try and do, it's quite expensive, you know, in terms of fees and time.
So what we try not to do, and, and certainly before at the feasibility stages, you, you, the project might still be abortive, so you, you, you, you want to spend as little money as possible on getting to that decision. So we kind of do things. It is iterative, and we go around that circle and go at a different, a deeper cut each time with the team.
So you know, you go from a very rough and tough rate per metre to a budget cost plan done by an estimator then to some real numbers. Then finally to a cost plan produced by a contractor which will take them 2 or 3 weeks to do, then of course you get the QS to interrogate that. And then so, so just on that strand, on the finance and costing strand, you're cutting deeper and deeper at each point and spending probably more money on each of those loops until you get to the point, you know the project is viable and you want to go ahead.
OK, thank you. And in your experience then, you know, probably most people's dream is to have a plot of land and start from scratch, but, but is there much difference between certainly in terms of issues, costs, etc. Of having a new build like that or refurbishing, you know, buying an old house and, and making it how you want to.
But the technical issues and the team you put together are obviously different. But the process is exactly the same. And, and I, I would, I, I would suggest, and I know it sounds boring, but if you get the process right, then the rest of it, it doesn't matter which project you're tackling, you just get more of whatever it is that you need in order to get there.
So, a refurbishment project. Will carry more risk, . In in potentially more risk because you're dealing with the building that you, you, you, and, and before, you know, in some cases it doesn't pay to actually rip all the ceiling down to find out what's behind them.
So you only start ripping the ceilings down once you're completely committed, and then you, then you then you find that some horror story behind that. But again, you can still plan for uncertainty. So in that situation, you would, you know, if you've got an experienced team, they'll say, you know, potentially, you've got a risk, you've got the risk that that will be that if you take that bit of the building down or you dig in that foundation, it could be this or it could be that.
So you, you will have what's called contingency that you build in. The financial equation and on a refurbishment project, you're you're you're more likely to have a larger contingency provision or you should have really, usually if the buildings, you know, there there there's gonna be more uncertainty around it. But, and, and on a big project, you will likely, or you'll be well advised to have a risk register, and that will, that will explicitly list out and you'll you'll you'll pull that together and it will list out all the principal risks.
It will also say what. The likely cost of that risk is, if it, if it goes bad, that risk, what it's likely to cost you and then you go on to say how you're intending to mitigate it. Yeah.
And how you take the risk, so, yeah. So is it, and do you do that, do you rate it as well on the likelihood of it happening and the impact it will have that type of thing, yeah, racing, yeah, usual sort of thing. So it's, it's, it's the sort of risk register you'd have in all sorts of projects, not just in building projects, but you, you'd run one for a building project as well of a certain size.
In some cases, for example, we, we've just finished a scheme, or we're just finishing a scheme. I thought it was just, and we first looked and thought this is fantastic, it's such a nice scheme, it's a nice big flat car park which is putting a little extent or relatively small extent, a couple of 100,000 pounds on the back of this building. And reconfiguring the inside.
It's quite complicated as it happens because it was over 3 stages, but the, the actual extension part of it, we thought this is lovely, it's really easy to access, it's a newish existing building. We've got tarmac car park, we've just got to dig into that. In those circumstances, if it was a bigger building, what we would do is dig.
Trial holes, so we see what the load bearing capacity of the ground is, if the soil surveys say if it's, if it's contaminated, etc. In this case, the cost of almost the cost of doing the whole foundations would be covered by the cost of those surveys. So obviously didn't pay to do it.
It's better just to, in that case, just say, look, put square brackets around it and say that's what we think the footing's going to cost. However, there is always An unlikely chance that the ground bearing is not going to be suitable. And, and make a contingency.
We, we dug through the tarmac and found landfill. And and we were trying to find good ground to put concrete on and we were pulling out bicycles. You know, it's, it's you just can't tell.
So the risks, there are risks, but, but we had said to the client before we started, that could be a risk, and we'd identified it and it wasn't huge. I mean it was a couple of 1000 pounds that cost you. Making that, but, but they went into it with their eyes open.
Excellent. Right. I'll just leave it open for about another 5 or 10 seconds or so, in case anybody does have any questions, but just to finish off by thanking both our speakers today, Sean Wiltshire, who told us all about pharmacy, inventory management and the excellent presentation from Paul.
If you're considering either extending, refurbishing, building from new, sounds like he's the man to get in touch with. Thank you everybody for attending, particularly for sticking with us when we had, when we started a bit early. And on that note, if anybody did join us at 2 o'clock when it was supposed to start, we have to start early.
The recordings will be up within the next 2 days and you'll be able to see the full presentation, but apologies if you missed the start. Just to finish again by thanking our sponsors, MWI Animal Health, and, I hope you enjoy the rest of the virtual congress. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Paul. Thanks very much.
