An MD I know keeps a spreadsheet on his laptop that his wife has never seen. His FD has never seen it either. It has one number on it: the amount his business has been owed but not paid at the end of every month for the last four years. He updates it on Sunday evenings. The number hasn’t been below £180,000 for three years.

He doesn’t talk about it. He doesn’t report it. His P&L looks fine. His cash flow forecasts are generally cheerful. His Aged Debt column at the board meeting shows just what the accounts system prints and what the accounts system prints is a small fiction because nearly everyone around the table subconsciously wants to write off disputed invoices before they age past any visible threshold. The Sunday spreadsheet is a very real number and only the MD tracks it and wants to fix it.

Norcross exists for that MD.

What I stand for.

I stand for the specific over the general. Nearly all commercial consultancies for main contractors and subcontractors provide generic services bolted onto a fee engineered to be renewable. I don’t do that. I do very specific pieces of work that move very specific £ figures back onto my clients’ balance sheets through commercial guile, intelligence and hard work.

When your client rejects your extension of time and starts deducting LADs at £12,000 a week, Within fourteen days I’ll serve the response that stops the meter. Not a long report that you just file that tells you why, but the response that reverses the deduction on next month’s certificate.

And when your client serves a Pay Less notice on the Friday and knocks £247,000 off your next payment, I’ll take about seven days to review and draft the response that puts the money back on the next payment cert. Not a chase or moaning email. The specific lines in the Notice that made it non-compliant.

I stand for cash. Not margin. Not turnover. Not backlog. Cash. Because cash is the only truth-telling metric in construction and every other metric leads back to it.

I stand for a small book of clients too. 8 to 12 MDs and Commercial Directors across main contractor and subcontractor businesses large and small. Each are worth five years of relationship. Nothing about my practice is optimised for scale because scale is what commodity consultancies needs and this isn’t a commodity consultancy.

What I refuse.

I refuse volume work. Not urgency - urgency is where I do my sharpest work. Volume is different. Panel appointments. Bulk contract mark-up at hourly rates. Standing-list fee models that reward throughput over outcomes. Template drafting invoiced by the file. That’s a game every other consultancy plays. I don’t.

I refuse fee models that reward time drift over outcome. I fix my fees. We set deliverables and I tell you what a piece of work will cost before I start. If it takes me longer, that’s my problem.

I refuse things like insurance-market claims. I refuse pipe-work for legal firms. Life’s too short for the client relationships where nobody on the other side actually reads what I write.

I refuse to flatten my work into a category-consultancy voice. I write like a person who reads books writes.

I refuse to grow my practice past the number of clients I can be genuinely useful to. That number is small. It’ll stay small.

How the relationship usually starts and how it usually ends up.

Most clients arrive with a specific problem. An Application for Payment stuck in dispute. A Final Account that’s drifted eight months past PC. A contract they signed that they now regret. A variation that slipped through the notice regime. Sometimes an adjudication looming. Sometimes a project reveiw that turns up a hidden £280,000 in absorbed scope.

That problem gets solved. What most clients do next is stay.

The retained relationship is where my practice works harder, smarter and actually earns its keep. Margin improvement across the business. Cashflow discipline that’ll long outlive me. Someone in your corner who’s not you, not your board, not your legal team - someone who doesn’t have to say the diplomatic thing. Sunday night, month-end, the difficult client call, the FD’s inbox at 9pm. Someone on the outside who reads, articulates and resolves what nobody inside the business has the time to.

What it costs.

It costs more than a QS on your books. Less than an adjudication. Materially less than the £-value I’ll typically find in your business or project.

The smallest engagement might be a Project Review and Improvement Plan at £7,500 plus VAT. That’s often how the door opens. A typical retained arrangement then runs at £30,000 to £60,000 a year, depending on how much time a Commercial Director’s function needs from me.

There’s a second cost. Instructing Norcross is a decision to be seen as the sort of business that instructs people like me. That isn’t a cost every MD can carry. It signals to your client, your funders or your supply chain that you’re not the naive and compliant option they thought you were. Some clients welcome that. Some don’t. If your commercial position depends on you being the soft option, I’m the wrong choice.

How you know if this is for you.

You know because you probably already keep the Sunday spreadsheet, or something like it. You know because you’ve already read down to this line rather than closing the tab at the first paragraph. You know because a specific problem figure of £280,000 likely landed somewhere in your own business somewhere in the last year.

The next step isn’t to book a call. The next step is to read the Daily Brief for a month. If the intelligence changes how you think about a live matter on your desk, then book a call. If it doesn’t, neither of us has wasted the time.

Norcross. It’s a small, smart commercial consultancy for a small book of MDs and Commercial Directors, main contractor and subcontractor, who are ready to run their commercial function like a mind rather than a template. Not for everyone. And not trying to be.

Matt Lockett
23 March 2026