‘How do we make construction more bankable? Simple, become more predictable’ – Tilbury Douglas CFO

Matthew Gill, chief financial officer (CFO) at Tilbury Douglas, has spent almost 30 years of his career in accounting, with 10 of those as an auditor at EY, and the remainder in senior finance roles, mainly at major businesses within the UK construction and infrastructure sectors, including four-and-a-half years as finance director at Laing O’Rourke, overseeing its interests in Europe, the Middle East, and Canada. Formerly the construction arm of Interserve, Tilbury Douglas was reborn in 2022 as a standalone major contractor, fully separated from the Interserve Group, through private equity investment. Today, the company also benefits from having strong in-house Mechanical & Electrical (M&E) capabilities as well as a specialist fit-out business, and attributes much of its recent success to framework contracts and public sector projects in the sectors in which it primarily operates. Since joining the business nearly two years ago, Gill has been careful to ensure Tilbury Douglas naturally maintain a more risk averse and consistent attitude within its chosen markets, while propagating principles of good transparency and governance in house – and having just delivered its second consecutive year of solid results, he was keen to caution his industry colleagues on how a non-standardised approach to auditing across all aspects of the business can negatively impact predictability of performance outcome, impeding growth and investor confidence. 

‘Investors view non standardisation as risky’ 

“Becoming more credible with investors is about becoming less risky, and the way to do that is by demonstrating good transparency and governance across all the things we do,” Gill said. “Wanting to measure financial performance with good governance, you must take the same approach with the way you measure and manage ESG, tax compliance, retention, fair payments, and so on. What makes the difference to low multiples, raising debt, and keeping your business safe, is doing things right and making the company more predictable and the way to do that is transparency and governance – measuring what people do and deliver is hugely important for the sector if we’re going to become more investable and bankable. It is generally the role of the CFO to be the chair around the Board table that cares most about good corporate governance.” 

Max Jones is head of construction at Lloyds Bank, one of the largest lenders to the social housing market and in development finance, and a company at which he has already spent almost 17 years of his career. Jones said he and his colleagues in the corporate banking and finance sector typically consider a relatively simple criterion when evaluating a new investment prospect, including in construction whose returns seldom compete with those in more profit rich sectors. Jones said that unlike adjacent markets, there is a tendency within construction towards nonstandard practices in business reporting and governance, which poses a significant financial risk to investors and lenders and, in turn, contractor viability, which he said needs to be corrected from the senior leadership tier on down. “One of the tests we apply is simplicity and repeatability,” Jones said. “Can the CFO and the CEO articulate the focus of the business in a tough sector with low margins? Can they do it in less than three sentences? Can they demonstrate they know what [the business] is good at and that it has focus?  One of the things I think this sector must get better at, is being externally facing and simplifying the rhetoric around health and safety, cyber risk, and data etc – being more accessible for financiers – because when I benchmark [construction], it doesn’t help when it’s bespoke, nonstandard, complex. Multiples of four to six, bonding providers finding the sector tough, not all banks in the UK supporting it, is the investor community’s way of saying, ‘We don’t understand the sector. We don’t trust your earnings’. As a senior creditor, we’re looking for more secured profiles or lower risk profiles. That is one of the gating items for us as a bank when we’re allocating capital and taking investment decisions.” 

‘If performance drives potential, compliance drives deliverability’ 

Echoing Jones, Gill was keen to emphasise the importance of a “simplicity of message”, not just when a contractor is speaking with a prospective investor, but also to its workforce. He suggested that if there exists a high degree of clarity about the precise function, priorities, and goals of the business, among senior management, those principles logically should be carried forward by the operational and commercial functions within each subdivision, and whose tangible results a contractor can reproduce in compelling data when compiling a business case for the bank – and this extends to the meaningful integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles into all aspects of the business, from the office to the site, and whose importance in the minds of many public sector clients naturally inform the operational focus of preferred delivery partners, like Tilbury Douglas. Gill said: “People talk about, ‘what measures sticks’, and it’s about bringing the same level of consistency across whatever the metric is. I’m passionate, but I’m data rational. I’m bringing [that] to the financials – and across all measures. In an industry that has all this opportunity, it behoves us to really focus on it […] bringing the measurement of financial performance to social value, decarbonisation, health and safety etc, and through consistency, you drive a performance culture as well as the compliance culture. If performance drives the potential, I think the compliance culture drives the deliverability. In the public sector, they are scoring us on quality, on measures away from financial performance, on direct social value generated on the site – whether that’s opportunities for local employment and SMEs – these are all measurable and things which clients will effectively buy.” 

In a recent interview with Construction Wave, Skanska UK chief financial officer and executive vice president, Meliha Duymaz, said she and her finance colleagues are pursuing a culture of “transparency and honest communication” among and between departments at Skanska, with their individual and collective progress being reviewed and goals refined at the end of each quarter, creating a coherent interconnectedness with regards to delivery and accountability. Duymaz said in the case of Skanska, its strategy is less about achieving ‘consistency across every aspect of the organisation’, but rather the adoption of a practical and pragmatic approach to the standardisation of business-critical systems and processes, paired with a willingness to be adaptable to change when it is necessary to do so. 

Tilbury Douglas closed 2024 with a forward order book value exceeding £1.26 billion, increasing to £1.32 billion by the end of March this year, with several key contract wins within the public sector and secured new orders worth more than £637 million. Its balance sheet showed a strong cash position, remaining debt free, and ending the year at £50.7 million, a rise of £8.4 million when compared with the year before (FY2023 £42.3 million), with the group generating an operating profit of £11.5 million, up from £3.8 million the year prior.    

Source: Construction Wave CFO Summit 2025