Rob Smith has worked across more sectors than most commercial professionals manage in a full career. PFI hospitals. Retail fit-outs. Nuclear. Aviation. Rail. Highways. Flood and Coastal Defence. He spent a decade as a freelance QS before moving into a Head of Commercial role, where he now oversees a team of 26 QSs at a consultancy operating across infrastructure and rail.

He is the kind of person who reads around every subject he touches. Who checks the mechanism, not just the outcome. Who asks, before accepting anything as fact, whether anyone has actually verified it.

That habit, unglamorous and almost impossible to teach, is how he saved a client tens of millions of pounds on a single project’s AFC.

The question most people don’t ask

A few years ago, Rob was reviewing a client’s inflation advice on a major programme. The numbers didn’t sit right.

“I looked at it and went, that’s bogus. That doesn’t work, it’s too expensive.”

He could have filed a note and moved on. He didn’t. He went away, spent three days writing a paper, came back, presented it, and the alternative approach he proposed saved tens of millions of pounds on that project alone. The methodology was then rolled out across an entire region of the client’s programme. On the second tranche of that work, he found further significant savings in procurement.

A very significant sum. Because one person asked whether the accepted answer was actually correct.

The reason it happened isn’t complicated. It’s that Rob has spent his career building the habit of not taking things at face value. The inflation figure was wrong because nobody had questioned it. Nobody had questioned it because questioning accepted inputs isn’t what most commercial functions are set up to reward. The job is to execute. Report. Certify. Move.

Rob’s job, as he defines it, is something slightly different.

Where the money actually hides

Rob gives another example. Smaller, but illustrative in a different way.

A contractor put through expenses including someone on maternity leave as a recoverable cost under the contract. Technically, they were entitled to do this. Most commercial managers would have processed it and moved on.

Rob knew the mechanism. The mechanism of the time meant that the British government reimburses 103% of the salary incurred for employees on statutory maternity pay. Which means the contractor wasn’t just entitled to recover the cost from the client. They were entitled to recover more than the cost from the government, if they knew where to look and how to claim it.

“So to get a 3% benefit from the government instead of just the direct reclaim from the contract.”

It’s a small number in isolation. But the principle behind it is the same one that found tens of millions elsewhere. Know what you’re actually entitled to. Read the mechanism, not just the headline. The difference between a good commercial professional and an exceptional one often lives in the distance between those two things.

He has a shovel hire example too. A contractor billing thousands of pounds over several years for shovel hire on a vegetation clearance contract.

“You go buy a 50-pound shovel, a 250-pound storage unit and use that.”

Nobody had looked. Nobody had asked why they were renting shovels for years of collective cost across a programme when ownership was a one-time purchase. The line item was small enough to pass through unchallenged. Which is exactly how these things work. The money doesn’t hide in the big numbers that everyone scrutinises. It hides in the small ones that nobody does.

What the industry trains people to do instead

This is where the argument sharpens, because Rob’s approach isn’t standard. It should be, but it isn’t.

The commercial function in construction is largely built around execution and reporting. You receive instructions, you value the work, you certify, you report the position. The system rewards speed and accuracy within its own framework. It does not naturally reward the person who stops the process to ask whether the framework itself is right.

We have heard versions of this from senior commercial leaders across the wider Field Notes series. The pattern is consistent: most commercial training, formal and informal, is built around doing the job correctly rather than questioning whether the job is being defined correctly. You learn the contract. You learn the forms. You learn the programme. But reading around the subject, challenging the accepted position, going away and writing the paper that reframes the entire approach, that is rarely what gets you promoted early in your career. Often, it’s what slows things down.

Rob is direct about what this means in practice.

“They can reiterate a press release. They can say sorts of things. But actually it’s not backed up by the actions. If you say I don’t believe this is a good thing, okay great, what’s the alternative? And they’ll go, I don’t know.”

That last sentence is the tell. When the challenge arrives, the people who haven’t done the reading have nowhere to go. They can flag the problem. They can’t solve it. The further up the organisation you sit, the more expensive that gap becomes.

The skill behind the savings

Rob is clear that the quality underpinning all of this isn’t brilliance. It isn’t even experience in the traditional sense. It’s curiosity combined with the discipline to follow it through.

“Read around the subject. Just try and get different views and then make up your own.”

That sounds simple enough to be dismissed. It isn’t. Following through on that habit, consistently, across everything you touch, across the inflation inputs and the maternity mechanisms and the shovel hire lines that nobody has looked at in years, requires a specific kind of commercial discipline that most people train themselves out of as they get busier and more senior.

The busiest people in a commercial function are usually the ones who have the least time to question anything. So the questioning stops. The accepted position becomes the permanent position. And the question that could save a client millions goes unasked for another year.

Rob’s advice for people earlier in their careers is to build the habit before seniority makes it inconvenient.

“Don’t take stuff at face value. Always get a second opinion.”

Not as a bureaucratic step. As a default. As the thing you do before you sign off, before you certify, before you accept that the number in front of you is the right one just because it arrived in a spreadsheet.



What this actually requires

The inflation paper didn’t write itself. Rob spent three days on it. He did that without being asked, without knowing whether anyone would take it seriously, and without any guarantee that the client would implement what he found.

That is not a description of an execution mindset. It is a description of someone who has decided that their job includes asking the question that the brief didn’t raise. Who takes the view that commercial expertise isn’t about processing what arrives on your desk accurately. It’s about noticing what should have been on your desk and wasn’t.

Most commercial professionals never find their question. Not because it doesn’t exist. Because they’re too busy executing to look for it.

“If you can do that and think about it, look at something, read around the subject, just try and get different views and then make up your own. That’s what makes a great QS.”

The money is in the question. It always was.