If you've got a problem that's keeping you awake because nobody can quite explain what's going on — that's probably the sort of work that interests me.
Henderson Commercial Services isn't a consultancy business in the conventional sense. It's more of a description of how I naturally approach complex construction problems — regardless of whether that work happens through my current employer, through the Neartime Reporting product suite, or through a more direct engagement at some point in the future.
The common thread is the work itself. I enjoy understanding difficult problems, pulling them apart carefully, and helping people understand them well enough to make better decisions. That's been true whether I've been working as a commercial manager on a major infrastructure project, building a piece of software that nobody else has got around to writing, or producing a paper that explains something complicated to someone who needs to make a decision about it.
I'm not trying to be all things to all people. The work that genuinely interests me is fairly specific — and I think it's more useful to be honest about that than to pretend otherwise.
Not an exhaustive list, but a reasonable indication of what I find genuinely engaging rather than just technically within my capability:
Projects that have become stuck and nobody is quite sure why.
Commercial or contractual problems that need pulling apart and explaining clearly.
Complex technical or commercial analysis that requires working carefully through a large amount of information.
Producing clear, well-reasoned papers that bridge the gap between technical specialists and commercial decision makers.
Looking across planning, engineering, commercial and operations to understand how they interact — and where the real problems are actually coming from.
Developing systems or tools where existing processes aren't providing the information people actually need.
Solving awkward problems that don't have an obvious answer and where the conventional approach clearly isn't working.
If you're looking for somebody to administer a subcontract every day, I'm probably not the right person. I can do it — but there are people who enjoy that work far more than I do, and I'd happily recommend one of them.
More generally, if the work is largely about volume and process rather than understanding and judgment, there's likely someone better suited. Not because it's not important work — it is — but because I'll do it adequately when somebody else will do it really well.
The work where I think I'm genuinely useful is where the problem is complicated, the answer isn't obvious, and the person asking needs somebody who will actually think it through rather than reach for a standard approach.
"If you've got a problem that's keeping you awake because nobody can quite explain what's going on — that's probably the sort of work that interests me."
Several of the Neartime Reporting tools came directly from working through these kinds of problems on live projects. NECCAT came from administering NEC contracts and finding that managing all of the procedural obligations manually was consuming disproportionate time and creating unnecessary risk. XER Inspector came from needing to assess the programme impact of Compensation Events and finding that the only serious options were specialist planning software or a manual rebuild in Excel.
The pattern is consistent: a recurring problem appears on a project, existing tools don't address it well, and eventually it becomes worth building something that does. The software is therefore an expression of the same underlying interest — understanding difficult problems and finding practical ways to resolve them — rather than a separate technology venture.
This is what the Ecosystem page describes in more detail: experience generating understanding, understanding improving processes, and processes — where they're genuinely repeatable — becoming software.
At present, this philosophy is applied through two routes. The majority of my commercial and project work is delivered through the CABER group, where I work on major infrastructure projects across the UK. Alongside that, I'm developing the Neartime Reporting product suite — which is itself an application of the same thinking to problems I keep encountering on those projects.
Henderson Commercial Services exists as an identity and a way of describing how I approach this work, rather than as a separate trading business at this stage. If you want to discuss a specific problem or project, the best starting point is a conversation — and the delivery arrangement can follow from there.
I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what the right structure looks like in two years' time. What I do know is that the type of work I want to be doing in two years is the same type of work I'm describing on this page.
If something on this page sounds like a problem you're dealing with, the most useful thing to do is have a conversation about it. No obligation, no pitch — just a conversation about whether I can help.