Synchronicity Group
Head of Building Surveying
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Head of Building Surveying | Oxford | Defined Path to Equity
Plenty of building surveying leaders across the South and Midlands live within reach of Oxford and spend their weeks travelling to London, Birmingham, Bristol or Reading to grow a business that will always belong to someone else. If that describes you, and you've started to wonder what the same effort would achieve somewhere your name could eventually sit among the owners, this appointment deserves a closer look.
Our client is a substantial multidisciplinary property and construction consultancy with an established presence in Oxford. Building surveying there is a successful service line, with a capable senior team, a loyal client base and a multi-million pound revenue line. The firm isn't asking anyone to rescue it or build it from nothing. What it wants is a leader who can look at a business that already works and see how much bigger it could become, then has the commercial instinct and market presence to make that happen.
The opportunity
As Head of Building Surveying you would take overall responsibility for the Oxford service line, including its strategy, people, clients and financial performance. The central aim is material growth, broadening the practice's reach across Oxford, the Thames Valley and the wider commercial property market while keeping the strengths of the team you inherit.
The Oxford office gives you an advantage most practice leaders don't have, because building surveying sits alongside a broad range of other consultancy disciplines under one roof. That gives you a ready supply of relationships and projects to introduce building surveying into, and means your own clients can open doors for colleagues in return. A good part of the role will involve working across those service lines, recruiting and developing the talent the business needs as it grows, and raising the practice's profile with clients who should already know its name.
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Much of the growth is already within reach. Across the wider business, the firm works with clients in science and research, higher education, the public sector and commercial property, many of them responsible for complex or historic estates. Building surveying already serves some of those relationships well, but there's considerable scope to do more for the clients it knows and to introduce the service to those who currently use the firm for other disciplines. The person who takes this on will be starting from a list of warm relationships rather than cold calls, with the freedom to decide where to focus and the backing to follow through. Breadth matters more here than any single specialism. Experience across technical due diligence, dilapidations, contract administration, landlord and tenant work, planned maintenance, development monitoring, retrofit or heritage will all be relevant, and nobody expects one person to have covered all of them in depth.
Who this will suit
You're likely to be a Partner, Director or equivalent who already leads a sizeable building surveying team, including senior professionals, and who can show that it's measurably larger and stronger than when you took it on. You understand the P&L as well as the programme, you've personally built a commercial client base rather than inherited one, and you're comfortable holding your own with senior clients and fellow partners. Developing the next generation of leaders will matter to you, because a business that grows depends on them.
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Equally, this role wouldn't suit everyone. If your experience has mainly involved managing an established team well, without being directly responsible for winning work or growing revenue, the firm will struggle to see the fit, however strong your technical record. The same applies if your background is largely residential, or if you'd rather keep your focus on delivery than take on the business development and commercial accountability that come with ownership.
The offer
Alongside leadership of an established practice, the appointment carries a defined path to equity. Ownership is a deliberate part of the offer, giving you direct participation in the value you create, and the firm expects the right person to treat it as a central reason for making the move.
If you can point to a building surveying business you've grown, describe where it was when you took it on and where it is today, and explain how much of that growth came through clients you won yourself, we'd love to hear from you.
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