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Visiting Neil Sandberg, former chair of ACE, at his family firm’s London office is a unique experience. The office is a monument to 150 years of Sandberg heritage. The furniture is ornate. Portraits of his predecessors hang on the walls. Ornaments include original oil paintings by Stanhope Forbes of engineers heating and cooling tramlines along London’s Embankment and a century old scroll expressing the gratitude of the first Chinese Republic.
Yet despite the history, the company doesn’t live in the past.
“History is fantastic but it doesn’t find you the way forward”, explains Neil Sandberg, the fourth generation of Sandberg to run the firm. “It might help. It does show you decisions made in the past must have been good ones to achieve our longevity. But that’s no way to be sure decisions made now will be good for the next 150 years”.
Behind the historic surroundings change is highly valued. Neil’s father Alec Sandberg OBE served in Burma with the Royal Engineers during World War Two. He returned home and transformed Sandberg from a railway consulting firm to a full materials consultancy. That move was made despite huge successes in railways but amid concerns there was little future in what had become a mature market.
Neil stressed that some of the family were not sure that Alec should reshape the practice. There were valuable assets such as patents and properties that could be realised. If the transformation failed then the company might have failed with it, resulting in all the assets being lost. One great aunt, concerned about her inheritance, warned Alec, “Proceed at your peril”.
Proceeding led the firm into a valuable specialist field. Neil told Impact: “We are still very niche. If you are the size we are it is difficult to offer everyone everything. Instead we choose to be niche and mainly by having an excellent enthusiastic team, good at it. If we achieve that then there is a business for firms like ours. So we have to stay very focused.”
As building materials change, so does Sandberg’s research and consulting work. As an example the company moved into glass twenty years ago, spotting the expanding market, with its associated problems. “That was a very good call then and still serves us well today. Glass fails and we have the glass expertise to help clients understand why and to help them avoid it in the future”, Neil explains.
“In essence we offer problem avoidance, which is often hard to sell until one has helped a client by solving a particular problem. From there, with careful nurturing and excellent service, we should have a client for life!”
Materials consulting is currently taking another new direction. The fourth generation of Sandberg is happy to say his company is moving with it: “For example, areas we are looking at now include thermal performance of materials. Monitoring thermal performance is a big area, be it modelling or thermal imaging systems. We’ll take our thermal performance expertise and instruments anywhere. Last year we were asked to demonstrate this technology in China which was tricky because the equipment was deemed to be spy technology.”
Of course, amid talk of the past and the future it is hard to avoid the present. A phone call from a client requesting longer payment terms bought us back to reality for a moment. There can be little escaping the problems that engineers across the sector face with regard to collecting fees.
Neil Sandberg strongly feels there is a moral duty on clients to pay quickly and fairly.
“Most businesses like ours have had to increase our working capital because people are paying later which is frustrating because we are their engineer, not their bank.”
He is also keen to see strict fee competition give way to a better focus on quality and whole life costing. However, he knows that won’t be easy to make happen.
“It is very very difficult to quantify quality in a meaningful way. And as with anyone making decisions, if you can’t quantify your decision it is extremely hard to demonstrate how you made it.”
So after 150 years of business and four generations of family ownership Neil Sandberg knows what is at stake when promoting his business. Currently activity levels are very high and the firm is slowly expanding. Although the horizon in this market is short and difficult to predict, he is cautiously optimistic.
Amid the challenges of the present he expressed his determination to overcome them saying, “During our first 150 years we have worked extremely hard to build an international global brand and reputation for materials expertise and quality of which we are very proud. We have every intention of building on that and still have a mission to be around for the next 150 years”.
 Full article to print.
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