Safeguarding the environment – the RSK story

Neil Jaques talks to RSK Group chairman Dr Alan Ryder and discovers how the company grew from a university project to a global enterprise.

With 920 employees across 45 worldwide locations, RSK is resolutely the UK’s biggest privately owned environmental consultancy.

In the past year alone its remarkable growth has seen it double in size, increase its turnover and edge ever closer to a goal set by group chairman Dr Alan Ryder in 2005 to become the UK's largest company of its kind.

Unusually for a business of such magnitude and one undergoing such rapid change, it still retains much of the familial working environment that has been ingrained since its days as a three-person-and-one-dog-in-a-bedsit operation.

“My philosophy of running a company is not to detach myself from the workforce and run some kind of emotionless machine. As we get bigger, it is getting harder for me to remember all the faces, but I’m always contactable and so are each and every one of the senior directors,” says Ryder, who recently started a blog on the company’s intranet to let staff know what is happening at the corporate front line.

Ask any of the company’s senior management team (SMT) why RSK is getting so successful and you’ll get several variations on the same answer.

Ryder explains:

“We attract some of the most talented consultants around and help them realise their potential. If you back good people and show that you trust them, they will repay that trust many times over. For example, if somebody comes to me with a good idea and says ‘we need to do this and this is how we’re going to do it’, I’ll say ‘yeah, let’s go for it’. I’ve lost count of the times a ‘one-man-in-a-bedroom’ scenario has evolved into a bustling, highly successful office.”

A case in point is the RSK’s Glasgow office. Barely a year ago, it consisted of 34 year-old principal consultant working out of his bedroom. Today he’s an associate director with a team of fourteen consultants and the bedroom has transformed into two floors of plush office space in Glasgow’s West End.

Humble Aberdonian roots

Ryder’s knack for surrounding himself with the best people for the job harks back to RSK’s formation in 1989 when he enlisted his PhD supervisor at Aberdeen University, Bernard Kenworthy, and lecturer Phil Shaw as his business partners.

It proved an astute move. With UK oil and gas exploration booming and Kenworthy and Shaw among the most pre-eminent experts on pipeline environmental issues (Ryder’s Kenworthy-advised PhD thesis was eventually co-opted by the Department of Energy to provide guidance on EIA pipeline legislation), it was a case of the right business at the right time.

Things got off to an inauspicious start, however, when Shaw pulled out at the eleventh hour, leaving Ryder and Kenworthy one consonant short of a decent acronym and £1,000 less in the start-up kitty. 

Even so, RSK hit the ground running with Ryder securing a secondment as environmental advisor for Shell’s monumental 411km North West Ethylene Pipeline (NWEP). In its first year the job raked in £45K. RSK was in business.

The next couple of years were a disorienting maelstrom of gruelling workloads, hand-to-mouth existence and vertiginous learning curves. As managing director, principal consultant and administrative dogsbody, Ryder did everything from technical consultancy to bookkeeping and photocopying. Holidays and humane sleep patterns were the stuff of fantasy. 

As soon as the Shell money hit the bank account, he employed Sue Richardson, a landscape architect who had worked as a subcontractor to RSK on the NWEP (“She was late for the first meeting and then blamed me for waiting in the wrong place, some things never change!  After many beers she agreed to join up with us”). Sue’s unrelenting confidence and drive fit the RSK bill perfectly. She also had a spare bedroom at her house in Frodsham, Cheshire from where the embryonic RSK could work.  What’s more, when she married and took the name Sljivic, she provided the elusive “S”. All the pieces were in place.

Battling claustrophobia and exhaustion, RSK continued to build a reputation as pipeline EIA experts, working for clients such as Esso and Kinectica and unwinding in the evening with dog walking sessions.

Unsurprisingly, the cosy working arrangement wasn’t built to last. Tired of a couple of fervent, hyper-caffeinated environmental consultants working at his house until ungodly hours, Sljivic’s husband booted them out.

Upping sticks, Ryder purchased a run-down former bed and breakfast a stone’s throw down the road in Helsby. Remarkably, countless refurbishments and extensions later, it still remains RSK’s headquarters and largest office, accommodating over 100 people.

Radian collaboration and pioneering Caspian drive

By 1995 the company’s consistent performance in the energy sector had brought it to the attention of Radian, a major multinational consultancy. With both parties keen for a mutually beneficial collaboration, a deal was struck wherein RSK sold 26% of its shares to Radian and assimilated the US company’s UK consultancy arm. It was a major boost for RSK, giving it access to an entirely new client-base and a newfound global reach.

The momentum continued a few months later when several high-ranking energy experts were recruited from British Gas, further cementing RSK’s position as the premier company for environmental pipeline consultancy.

Around the same time, RSK’s management had noted the potential for work in the newly unlocked Azerbaijani energy market.

Ahead of other international consultancies and the subsequent goldrush-like contractual race that ensued, RSK secured work on the so-called “early oil phase” production of the Chirag oil field, working as a subcontractor to Det Norske Veritas (DNV).

Ever the opportunist, Ryder cornered DNV’s project manager Robert Jaques off-duty in Baku, convincing him to join RSK and lead the businesses drive in the Caspian.

It paid off. RSK soon secured a series of high-profile commissions that included work on the 231km Northern Export Pipeline, linking the gigantic Sangachal terminal to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and the 830km Western Route Export Pipeline, running west from Sangachal to the Supsa terminal in Georgia.

Buoyed by its impressive performances, RSK formed Azerbaijan Environment and Technology Centre (AETC) in 1998, making it the first Western environmental consultancy to form an Azerbaijan-based operating company with local Azeri shareholder involvement.

From this platform, it won work on column inch-hogging projects such as the Baku–Tblisi–Ceyhan pipeline – the second largest oil pipeline in the world, transporting crude oil from the super-abundant landlocked Caspian sink to the world oil market – and the South Caucasus pipeline.

RSK repeated the trick in Kazakhstan in 2005, founding Kazakhstan Environment and Technology Centre (KETC), having worked continuously in the country since 1998.

The next major change in the RSK macrocosm came in 1998, when the Dow Chemical Company acquired Radian and immediately sold all environmental consultancy divisions to Dames and Moore. RSK took the opportunity to buy back its shares and regain autonomy.

RSK expands acronym, services 

After a few years adapting to its newfound operational freedom, RSK experienced a significant breakthrough in 2000 when Peter Witherington of American-owned ENSR International approached Ryder asking him if he would be interested in a merger. In a déjà vu deal, ENSR took a 26% share, while RSK doubled its workforce to 80 with the addition of a geosciences team.  Joining up with the 2,000-strong ENSR also brought with it a near 40 year-old experiential track record and an enviable client roster.

Diversification was now top of the agenda: in 2002 RSK took over Laing Homes’ defunct engineering department, gaining civil and structural engineering expertise; in 2003 it acquired Shear Management, a 20-strong health and safety consultancy, and specialist asbestos firm M3 (RSK bought the company in its entirety in 2006). In 2004, RSK recruited heavy-hitting site remediation experts Paul Upton, Robert Nieuwenhuizen and Stefan Bangels from Dames and Moore. Upton became sales director, Niuewenhuizen led a business drive in Holland and Germany, while Bangels focused his efforts on the Belgian market.
 
2005 saw the acquisition of remediation specialists RemedX and the formation of RSK Remediation Ltd, to capitalise on the Government’s prioritising of sustainable brownfield redevelopment. RSK could now offer environmental services for every stage of brownfield redevelopment, from site acquisition to post-construction analysis.

RSK's next move, in January 2006, was to buy out the UK business arm of GeoDelft, bringing additional asbestos consultancy, contaminated-land investigation and risk assessment to the Group. It also enabled RSK market GeoDelft Environmental’s unique suite of web-based risk management tools to its clients.

Acronym shortens, company grows

Ryder was thrown a curveball when ENSR was bought out by 30,000-strong technical and management support conglomerate AECOM. 

Initially, the reconfigured ENSR relationship worked well with AECOM's commercial clout opened further doors for RSK, notably in the Middle East. 

However, AECOM soon wanted full ownership of RSK. 

“I knew deep down that I did not want to see the company sold," says Ryder.

RSK initiated an extensive due diligence and fund-raising exercise to finance the share buy-back.

Ryder and his senior management team were confident it was the right thing to do.

“I thought we had a great company, poised to do great things and we had the expertise and resources to paddle our own canoe,” says Ryder.

“The market is continuing to grow and change and RSK is growing and changing with it. We’ve got a vision for where we want to be and now we’ve got the freedom to get there.”

Buoyed by its newfound operational mobility, RSK initiated a breathless acquisition programme that saw its ranks swell with the addition of 150-strong site investigation contractor Structural Soils (instantly transforming RSK into the UK’s largest site investigation services provider), 60-strong Carter Ecological Ltd (making RSK the UK’s largest ecological service provider), pioneering Benelux-based ground remediation specialists ESA and – perhaps less predictably for an environmental consultancy – the 40-strong international business-to-business communications agency Technical Editing Services (tes), which expanded its service provision to include media and communications.

Meanwhile, it moved to reinforce operations in Scotland (adding the Glasgow office) and formed RSK Ireland Ltd to deal with contracts in Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as in-country businesses in Romania and the Middle East.

By summer 2007, RSK became one of the few UK consultancies of its kind to form a dedicated Carbon Management business, a venture that was inspired by its sponsorship of the Ashton Hayes Going Carbon Neutral project (the eponymous Cheshire village’s bid to become the UK’s first carbon neutral community).

Nuclear frisson

Towards the end of the year RSK formed specialist nuclear industry consultancy RSK Radiological (a joint venture with cutting-edge, US-based decommissioning experts Radiation Safety & Control Services) and the provisionally titled RSK Water and Waste and RSK Strategic Solutions, which will provide advice to the water and waste industry and to blue-chip boardrooms, respectively.

In every conceivable way, 2007 had seen RSK Group emphatically move up a league.

The 2007 Report Consultancy Guide, published by environmental consulting sector ‘bible’ ENDS, confirmed as much, proclaiming RSK to be one of the UK’s six largest multi-disciplinary consultancies.

It had resolutely become the UK's largest privately owned company of its kind. 

2008: expansion continues 

The year began where the previous left off.

In mid January RSK acquired Britain’s foremost ‘building envelope’ design, construction and testing company, Building Sciences, making RSK one of the largest and most qualified providers of energy and emissions performance-related consultancy to the housing and construction industries.

Established in 1986, the company was the first in the UK to offer the construction industry – from designers and contractors to end-users – consultancy and testing advice related to the building fabric performance of heat, air, moisture and acoustics.

As the most pre-eminent company in its field, it has built up an experiential track record that reads like a who’s who of UK developers, including major names such as AMEC, Asda Superstores, George Wimpey and Bovis Lend Lease.

Later that month, RSK acquired 130-person environmental consultancy and building materials authority STATS.

Formed in 1974, STATS initially focused on structural investigations and associated materials consultancy – rising to prominence as Britain’s motorway expansion programme peaked during the 1970s and 1980s– before diversifying to offer a range of environmental services.

It has provided input to such headline-grabbing projects as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (on-site materials testing, advice and inspections of pre-cast concrete, steel and coatings), the M74 Carlisle to Glasgow motorway (comprehensive on-site materials testing and advice) and Europe’s largest retail development, Bluewater Retail Park.*

Not only does STATS bring with it expertise in entirely new areas (structural investigation, testing and consultancy for buildings and civils structures and building acoustics) but it also significantly enhances mainstay RSK services such as ground engineering and remediation (among other things, through its cutting edge geophysical survey capability), environmental impact assessment and laboratory analysis (STATS are rock and concrete petrography experts and run the pioneering Centre For Stone and Slate Technology)

The future of RSK

Dr Ryder has no plans on decelerating RSK's growth and has already pinpointed several other acquisitions in his bid to create the ultimate “one-stop-shop” for environmental support services.

Asked about the secret to RSK's success to date, Ryder emphasises unity and loyalty. These are traits that permeate not just the company itself but also its long-term advisers, such as lawyers and auditors.

“We have a team that enjoys mutual respect and trust, and is supportive of one another.  That has been crucial to me,” he says.

“Business life, like our personal lives, has its ups and downs and unplanned events happen.  I have been lucky to meet people that I enjoy working with and who have always supported one another. It is the strength of that team that powers the company forward."

As for the future, it’s quite simple.

”I want RSK to continue to be a place where people enjoying coming to work, and for it to be the number one environmental consultancy in the UK,” he says proudly.