The company
BuildBuddy is a main contractor working across Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire for developers, investors and commercial clients.
Ten years of conversion, refurbishment and fit-out across the East Midlands.
In ten years it has grown from a single conviction, that a building is better served by one contractor answerable for the whole of it, into a company delivering around £4 million of construction a year with every trade under one roof.
Almost everything it builds began life as something else, a house that becomes seven flats or a unit that becomes a clinic.
BuildBuddy established itself through HMO conversion, delivering scheme after scheme for the largest developers in the region. Those developers returned for a second and a third, and several are still with the company today.
BuildBuddy operates with its own standards, its own methods and its own workforce.
From there it has taken on blocks of flats, large-scale residential refurbishment and commercial fit-out, broadening its range without loosening its hold on any part of it. The ambition remains to establish BuildBuddy as the leading construction company in the Midlands.
Born out of a gap in the market.
Working within the property industry gave me an acute view of problems that are endemic to construction, and I saw them from the client’s side long before I ever saw them from the builder’s. A developer acquires a building and assembles a programme around it, and then watches that programme erode: attendance that cannot be relied upon, details that were never buildable discovered too late to absorb, and finance running against a property that stands empty.
What struck me was that there was rarely anyone to hold to account. There were many problems and no single fault, because there were six companies on the job and no standard running between them.
BuildBuddy was built as the answer to that. One company holding the whole of it, carrying every trade itself, and taking a building from the first strip-out through to handover without passing responsibility to anybody else along the way.
We intend to keep growing, in what we take on and in the capability behind it.
Jordan writes on the industry in his fortnightly notes, here.
