President tells contractors to 'learn a great many new tricks'

Contractors will have to make some tough choices and change their ways of working to satisfy the demands of their clients and remain “in business and in profit”, according to Bob Shelley, newly elected HVCA president.

He urged members to learn “a great many new tricks”.

“Building engineering services contractors have reached not just one crossroads, but several – and the choices they face in their business lives have never been so challenging, nor so complex,” Mr Shelley told his audience at the HVCA's annual general meeting.

Transforming
The continuing recession; the ever more rigorous legislation with which contractors must comply; increasing demand for renewable technologies; and the ongoing quest for sustainability were transforming the industry, he added

He said that today's industry was dramatically different from the way it had been ten or even five years ago and in another five or ten years’ time it will be very different again. 

In the past decade, sustainability had come “to pervade everything we are and everything we do”, said Mr Shelley.

Opportunity
“Whatever the ‘climate change sceptics’ may want us to believe, the development of a low-carbon economy is with us for the long haul and represents the biggest commercial opportunity our sector has ever known.

“The rewards are there for the taking – provided we have the skills, the competence, the initiative and the will to reach out and grasp them.”

The good news for HVCA members, though, was that they didn’t have to do it on their own.

Footprint
“We have at our disposal the strength, the resources and the expertise of an organisation that has honed its services, expanded its footprint and built its influence over more than a century,” said Mr Shelley.

The HVCA existed to provide the advice, guidance, support and leadership its members required, he said.

“And I see it as one of the principal objectives of my term of office to ensure – not only that it continues to fulfil these crucial roles, but that we add even more value by helping members and their businesses to grow, to develop and to progress.”

Premier
In the excellence of its membership, the quality of its standards, the rigour of its entry criteria and the professionalism of its staff, the HVCA was simply unrivalled, the president went on.

“We are already the premier organisation in our sector – and I aim to do everything in my power to keep it that way.”

The goal was to create an association that was more effective than ever in delivering “services that genuinely meet the needs of its members” – and in “representing their interests across the construction sector as a whole, and along the ‘corridors of power’," added Mr Shelley.