Tell us about Miller Knight
Miller Knight was established in 2011, and we have grown from being a passive fire protection contractor to an established principal contractor, carrying out specialist fire remediation projects with a turnover of around £15 million. The owners of the business identified a need for a specialist principal contractor with an in-house passive fire protection and fire door capability that could provide a unique quality driven service. Everyone at Miller Knight shares this ethos for quality and for doing things the correct way. It’s really important to us to make sure things are correct and we built all our teams around delivering those principles. We currently have around 100 staff, including a good team of apprentices. We work on projects ranging from £20,000 up to £2 million and over a range of different timescales, from just a couple of weeks through to one scheme where we’ve been there for four years.
What does a typical client look like?
There’s no such thing really as a typical client for us, although they all have some passive fire protection issues that need resolving. We work across multiple sectors, with work in the public sector and with emergency services, through to some commercial and industrial clients.
However, a big focus of our work is the residential sector. Anyone who’s got a responsibility for where people live and sleep - house builders and developers, landlords, property management consultants and agents, insurance companies, pension companies - all these different bodies that have a responsibility for those type of premises form our client base. It’s a broad spectrum, and while they’ve all got similar issues, every one of them has a slightly different type of environment that we’ve got to work in.
What challenges do you face as a business in the industry?
One of the main challenges is helping clients understand the issues they’ve got and then how best to prioritise them. Most clients aren’t really prepared for some of the issues that they ultimately end up facing, so it’s our job to help.
Once we’re over those hurdles, the main challenge is often finding the best solution for the client. Here we are often limited by problems with existing structures and services, but we’ve got some really good technical teams here at Miller Knight, and we couple that with experienced site teams and our relationships with all of our suppliers. They all work fantastically well together to achieve the correct solution by doing things the right way.
Another challenge we face is often finding the quality operatives to work in this way, so we train a lot of staff ourselves and we retain them over a long period of time. But when we bring in some people with existing experience we find that we have to re-educate them. There’s a lot of problems in the industry with people saying “I do it this way because this is how I‘ve always done it”, whereas our only concern is that it has to be the correct way. The Miller Knight way is that it has to be done the correct way, to a tested proven detail, every time.
Why did you become an FPA member?
We have been a member for some time, and we feel that the FPA very much aligns with who we are as a business and what we want to achieve. Being members of the FPA allows us to keep up to date with the latest in fire safety, and this assists us in our goal of continually improving and pushing to be better at what we do.
We know that we genuinely benefit from the continuous updates and insights that we get about fire legislation changes and that in turn allows us to help our clients. So we see the relationship being really important. It’s something that we talk about to our clients a lot when we’re engaging them initially and then, during the process, it gives them a lot of reassurance that we’re engaging with someone of the FPA’s calibre. We feel Miller Knight and the FPA align well.
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