A Managing Director I know keeps a spreadsheet on his laptop that his wife has never seen. His Finance Director 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 everyone 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 Managing Director tracks it and wants to fix it.

Norcross exists for that Managing Director.

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 specific £ figures back onto my clients’ balance sheets through commercial guile, intelligence and sheer hard work.

When your client rejects your extension of time and starts deducting liquidated damages at £12,000 a week. Within days you'll have the response that stops the meter, ready to serve.

And when your client serves a Pay Less notice on the Friday and knocks £247,000 off your next payment, I’ll review and draft the plan and response that puts the money back onto the next payment cert. Not a chase or moaning email. Tackling the specific lines in the Notice that made it unacceptable and 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 keep a small book of clients, four to six at any one time. Each is worth five years of relationships. Nothing about my practice is optimised for scale because scale is what commodity consultancies need and this isn’t a commodity consultancy.

What I refuse.

Urgent work suits me. Volume work doesn't: 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 the game nearly every other consultancy plays. I don’t.

I refuse fee models that reward time drift over outcome. I fix my fees, 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 someone who reads books.

I refuse to grow my practice past the number of clients I can be genuinely useful to.

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 review that turns up a hidden £280,000 in absorbed scope.

Once that’s solved, most clients 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 Finance Director’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 Quantity Surveyor 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 retained arrangement then runs at £30,000 to £60,000 a year, set by the scope and what's at stake.

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 Managing Director 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.

If something's live on your desk, send the notice, the clause or the account and you'll have a straight answer within two working days. If nothing is, 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 Managing Directors and Commercial Directors, main contractor and subcontractor, who are ready to run their commercial function like a mind rather than a template.

Matt Lockett
Director