The invisible majority

I had a conversation with a firm owner recently that has stayed with me.

We were talking about something else entirely when she stopped mid-sentence. “Do you know,” she said, “I do not think I have talked through an actual business problem with another surveyor in months.”

Not a technical question. Not something for RICS. A real decision. The kind where you need someone to think it through with you, not just tell you what the rules say.

She runs a good firm. Steady work, years of experience, nothing obviously wrong. But when I asked who she would normally turn to, it came down to two people. Both retired now. Both people she trained under, twenty years ago. Everyone else felt like a competitor, or too far away, or too senior to bother with something so ordinary.

I do not think that is unusual. I think it is the norm.

The assumption that gets this wrong

The natural read on that story is that it is a small-firm problem, or an early-career problem. Get bigger, get established, and it sorts itself out. You build a team. You stop being the only person in the room.

I do not think that is true. I think it can get worse.

Early on, when you are doing everything yourself, you can usually talk openly to whoever is around. There is not much to protect. Once you have staff relying on you and clients trusting your name, the list of things you can say out loud inside your own business gets shorter. You cannot tell your team you are not sure about a decision that affects their jobs. You cannot tell a client you are still working out how to handle something. The firm grows, and the room you can be honest in gets smaller, not bigger.

Circa eighty percent of surveying firms in the UK are SMEs. Most are run by one to two people carrying every decision, and the assumption that scale fixes isolation does not hold up. It just changes shape.

What this actually costs a firm

It is tempting to file this under wellbeing and move on. I think that undersells it.

A firm owner without a sounding board makes decisions alone that really should not be made alone. Whether to take on a risky instruction. Whether someone on the team is right for the role, or needs to go. Whether to merge, expand, or stay exactly the size you are. Pricing. Cash flow. What to do when a client pushes back hard on a valuation you stand behind. How to deal with a complaint.

None of that is covered by CPD. It gets learned the hard way, in real time, usually mid-decision, because nobody trained you to run a business. You were trained to survey.

The result is not that firms make bad decisions. Most do not. It is that they make good decisions slower, with more doubt, and often without ever finding out whether someone else would have done it differently. A second opinion from someone who has actually been there is one of the cheapest forms of risk management a firm owner can have. Most simply do not have access to it.

What it takes to fix this

This is not a resource problem in the way that phrase usually gets used. It is not about firms lacking money, software, or staff. It is about not knowing anyone who has solved the same problem before, and having nowhere honest to ask.

You cannot buy your way out of that. It is why firm owners inside The Surveying Room get their own private group, separate from the wider community, built specifically for this. Not general discussion. The actual questions firm owners do not ask anywhere else: what to do about a member of staff who is not working out, whether a fee is too low, how another firm handled a client who turned difficult. It is the room the woman I spoke to did not have.

The referral network sits alongside it for the same reason, in a different form. Work passed firm to firm on trust between people who know each other through the community, not handed to whoever has the biggest marketing spend. Membership and the rest of what we have built all point the same way: toward putting people who understand the actual work in reach of each other.

None of it replaces the conversation itself. What it does is make the conversation possible in the first place.

The question worth asking yourself

If you run a firm, when did you last talk through a real problem with another surveyor? Not a technical query. An actual decision, the kind that keeps you up at night.

If the honest answer is “I cannot remember,” you are not unusual. You are the majority. It is just not something anyone says out in the open.

Thank you for reading.

Nina