Calibrated Thinking is a series of posts written to share my experiences at work - building businesses, processes, and teams - and what this has taught me. Content will range from technical to personal. If any of it is useful - in the work you do, the business you are building, or the decisions you are sitting with - then it has done its job. This is my first post.
I have been a parent, an engineer, and a business owner for thirty years. For most of that time, technical problems were rarely the hardest ones. My children and businesses grew up together. Same years, same lessons, same non-negotiable standards applied to both. You cannot build something worth having - a family, a company, a reputation - and treat principles as optional. Either they hold under load or they do not. In my world, that is not a metaphor.
I co-founded my first business with another engineer; both of us in our mid-20s. We built it up to a team of eight, delivering safety-critical projects across the UK and overseas. When I left, more than 20 years later, the business was in good shape and in good hands.
Then I started again - deliberately smaller, more selective, with a clear idea of what we were building and why. Every lesson from the first twenty years went into this second iteration. We conduct independent on-site structural testing for the construction industry; test data replaces engineering approximations and assumptions with verified fact. Independent testing is a small but essential part of how the built environment gets created safely.
In the posts that follow I hope to share this world of work with you.
Melanie Scholes, Co-founder, London Fixing Testing Ltd
