Critical National Infrastructure · 4,500 sites · £12m contract · 24/7/365 operations
61%
Cost reduction delivered in 60 days
53% → 90%+
On-time billing approval in 30 days
£1.7m
Fire certification backlog resolved
£1m
Billing dispute settled in 8 weeks
A national FM contract covering critical radio and television broadcast infrastructure had been failing for the better part of a year. Two account directors had come and gone in nine months. Millions in profit had been written off. The contract, covering hard FM, security and specialist services across 4,500 sites and worth £12m per year, was haemorrhaging cash and credibility simultaneously.
The problems were not abstract. They were specific, layered and interconnected — and nobody had yet gone looking for the root causes.
The infrastructure being maintained underpinned national television and radio broadcast. Penalty clauses for downtime were severe. Commercial broadcasters had contractual commitments — Six Nations rugby, primetime advertising slots, live national events — that depended entirely on continuous uptime. This was not a contract where poor performance was tolerated quietly.
Internally, the parent company was managing cashflow badly across multiple failing contracts. Supplier relationships were fraying. Key subcontractors were owed money and reaching breaking point. The risk of cascading failure across a 24/7 national operation was real and immediate.
A single poor decision — or no decision at all — could have triggered penalties, supplier walkouts and irreversible reputational damage with a client that was already losing patience.
The first task was diagnosis. Not assumptions, not received wisdom from people who had failed before — direct investigation. That meant going to the gemba: visiting sites, talking to the teams doing the work, and finding out where the real failure modes lived.
What emerged was a picture familiar in operations that have been managed remotely by people focused on winning new work rather than running what they had. Processes were broken at the most basic level. The supply chain had been changed to cut costs but never properly onboarded. People were working hard inside systems that made success almost impossible.
From that clarity, a focused multi-stream recovery was designed and executed:
Visited sites and engaged teams directly to identify the real failure modes rather than managing by assumption. This single step unlocked the sequencing for everything that followed.
Replaced underperforming contractors with better-matched partners and properly onboarded them from the outset. Where existing relationships could be salvaged, clear expectations and accountability structures were rebuilt.
Identified that the business was submitting only 60% of invoices on time and only 40% were accurate, meaning large volumes were never paid at all. Taught the commercial team a single governing principle — accuracy and completeness before volume — and went from £400k collected per month to approaching £1m in 90 days.
Resolved a £1.7m backlog of 347 fire certification jobs with no supporting paperwork, none of which could be invoiced without it. Brought in a new supplier, repeated the work and rebuilt the compliance position from the ground up.
Diagnosed the repeat-visit cycle driving excess cost and delays. Introduced systematic preparation: the right person, the right skills, the right equipment, the right permits and the right brief for every job before anyone left the depot. Cost overhead reduced 61% in 60 days.
Maintained Arqiva's confidence through transparent communication and decisive action. When a parent company cashflow failure caused all CCTV and security alarm systems across multiple sites to be switched off by an unpaid supplier on a Bank Holiday Friday, the situation was escalated, negotiated and resolved with cash transferred to the supplier within 30 minutes, before a single system went dark.
61%
Cost reduction in 60 days
53% → 90%+
On-time billing approval in 30 days
£1m pcm
Billing run rate restored
£1.7m
Fire certification backlog cleared
£1m
Historic billing dispute settled in 8 weeks
Restored
Compliance across 4,500 sites of critical national infrastructure
The operation was recovered. The client relationship was rebuilt. The contract was performing. None of that was enough.
The turnaround was real. The results were measurable. But the contract did not survive.
The original deal had been agreed CEO to CEO. When Arqiva's CEO was replaced, the new ownership reviewed the arrangement on its history rather than its current performance. One senior figure at Arqiva had never wanted the work outsourced and had been waiting for an opportunity to bring it back in-house. The political conditions that had created the contract no longer existed.
This mattered for one reason: the performance recovery had been delivered. The compliance position had been restored. The financial trajectory had been reversed. What had not been in scope, and had not been given time to develop, was the strategic relationship at board level that would have made retaining the contract possible.
Operational excellence, delivered too late or without parallel attention to the strategic and commercial relationship, is not sufficient on its own. Both have to be managed together, from the start.
If your business faces a contract renewal, a sale process or a change in ownership or customer leadership, the time to build your position is before those conversations begin — not after they are already under way.
If any part of this story sounds familiar — a contract or business unit underperforming for reasons nobody has properly diagnosed, a billing or commercial process generating less cash than the work justifies, a supplier relationship that has broken down quietly, or a high-stakes client relationship that depends on one or two key individuals — the underlying pattern is consistent.
Complex, multi-site operations fail in predictable ways. They also recover in predictable ways, once someone looks at the right things in the right sequence.
What would a rigorous, independent diagnosis of your operation reveal right now?
A focused, no-obligation Strategy Call to identify where performance and margin are being lost — and outline the practical steps to recover them before the pressure becomes critical.
Operational excellence and leadership systems for precision manufacturing businesses scaling beyond founder dependency.
Mission-critical infrastructure optimisation for data centre operations requiring maximum uptime and operational efficiency.
Your roadmap from operator to owner. Discover how to build a business that runs without you in 12-18 months.