Founder hails its vital role within built environment.
The Preferred Partners supply chain, which was established in 2021 to encourage collaborative working throughout the built environment, is starting to gain traction in the buoyant Tees Valley region, supporting the delivery of approximately £12m of projects to date.
Rob Lynas, managing director of Lynas Engineers and founder of Preferred Partners, believes it will play a vital role in supporting SMEs to access higher value projects because it is enabling smaller companies to engage informally and in person with organisations much larger than their own to collaborate over tendering for projects together.
As a multi-disciplinary supply chain, Preferred Partners can now claim 45 companies as members, many of which come from the local area including Esh Construction, and MGL Group, while others are national firms with northeast offices.
Meanwhile, Lynas Engineers has also gone from strength to strength after moving to Cargo Fleet Offices in Middlesbrough a year ago. Building on its enviable client base which includes several local authorities and leading regional companies such as Sembcorp, Mandale Developments, and Seymour Civil Engineering, the firm specialises in civil and structural engineering design and project management with a particular emphasis on infrastructure and drainage design.
Recent project wins for Lynas Engineers include an appointment to provide design capability to ESH Construction in the delivery of a large active travel scheme in Rotherham and also the delivery of a 2km link road for Middlesbrough Council where they will provide design, supervision and project management.
Commenting on the growth of Preferred Partners and his own business, he said: “This summer and last, Preferred Partners hosted a networking event, Constructing Links, in partnership with our sales and marketing partner, Just Williams. It was a sell-out success and dozens of businesses from across the region came together to discuss and challenge embedded and often outdated practices.
“The event facilitated a great deal of knowledge transfer into the network along with information about forthcoming tenders and opportunities through our key speakers and panellists. We have received tremendous feedback since the event. Delegates left feeling that everyone in the room was ‘on the same page’.
“The team we have built at Lynas Engineers is deeply embedded in a collaborative way of thinking and working, which is delivering some great results for us. In fact, collaboration forms the cornerstone of our ambitions for the future, and we hope it will be responsible for shaping a new way of working across all sectors.”
Another significant building block helping to shape Lynas Engineers’ future is apprenticeships. Lynas Engineers has built its team using non-traditional routes with the vast majority of its staff starting off their careers as apprentices – a model to which Rob is absolutely committed because it has led to a very close-knit, award-winning team today.
He continued: “At a time when skill shortages continue to hamper the construction sector, we are continuing to invest in apprentices and graduates. Giving young people the chance of an apprenticeship is a vital part of the solution to ensure the construction industry has a strong future.
“Over the last three years, we have experienced 45% growth including the appointment of six new members of staff, four of which are apprentices, and we have supported the delivery of over £35m of projects. In the years ahead we are looking to diversify into renewables and the retail sector and with our existing formula for success, I am confident about the future.”
Current headcount stands at 15 and Lynas Engineers plans to create two more jobs in the coming year.
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