We spent over 20 years in specialist subcontracting. We started out working for other contractors in the early 2000s, founded our own business in 2009, and grew it to £6 million in turnover — delivering flooring, ceramic and natural stone tiling, and hygienic wall cladding to tier one and tier two main contractors.
Our projects ran from large residential developments to hospitals, colleges, schools, offices, MOD contracts, and commercial fit-outs. Individual packages exceeded £2 million. We learned this industry from the ground up.
What we didn’t fully understand, in those early years, was what we were signing.
Our mission is to be that platform.
In the beginning, we didn’t review contracts in any real depth. Relationships got us through. But as the business grew, contracts got longer, teams got bigger, and relying on goodwill cost us money.
So we brought in a freelance QS. Someone we trusted, with strong experience. £300–£500 a review. The reports were thorough — but written in language we didn’t always follow, and calibrated for main contractors, not specialists. Clients pushed back on the volume of flagged clauses. It helped, but only just.
Eventually we employed our own QS in-house. That moved the needle — but it came at a cost most subcontractors underestimate.
Once you factor in NI, pension, holiday, sick pay, software, and overheads, a single contract review by an in-house QS costs the business somewhere in the region of £200–£350 in salary cost alone — and that’s before counting the work they’re not doing while they’re doing it. Every hour spent buried in a long, complex subcontract is an hour not spent on valuations, variations, final accounts, or cost reporting — the work that actually protects your margin and brings money in.
Even then, things still got missed:
These aren’t paperwork problems.
They’re balance sheet problems.
A missed employer insolvency clause means when an employer goes bust, you’ve no legal route to recover what you’re owed. Retention delayed by two years at a high percentage can lock up the equivalent of half your annual net profit — your money, funding someone else’s project. A floor protection requirement of 5,000m² at £3/m² that nobody priced for is £15,000 gone before the first tile goes down. And that’s before you get to uncapped liability, set-off rights, and payment terms designed to quietly strangle your cashflow.
Since Covid and Brexit — and with global conflicts continuing to push material costs and supply chains around — competition for the same projects has intensified and margins have compressed further than ever. The risk has never been higher. The room for error has never been smaller.
We’d spent years wishing a tool like this existed. We knew exactly what it needed to do, because we’d lived the consequences of it not existing. What we didn’t know was whether it could actually be built.
So we set out to find out. We attended events, spoke to specialists, worked with developers, and invested significant time and money learning what AI could realistically do. The build estimates were daunting. But the problem was real, the need was urgent, and we already knew the spec by heart: read a subcontract in minutes, flag the dangerous clauses, explain them in plain English, and give the subcontractor the wording to push back — available the moment the contract lands in your inbox, not three days later.
So we built it.
Our subcontracting business is now closed. No ongoing projects, no clients in the supply chain, no horses left in that race. Beacon Risk is our sole focus.
We built this tool as contractors. We’re making it available as a technology company — with one goal: to give every specialist subcontractor the commercial protection that, until now, only the largest businesses could afford.
Across the UK, hundreds of specialist subcontractors sign complex contracts every week. Most do one of three things: review it themselves and miss things, pay £300–£500 for an external reviewer who doesn’t quite speak their language, or rely on an in-house QS — and on a 700-page subcontract, even the best reviewer can have an off day. One missed clause can cost tens of thousands.
None of those options is instant, consistent, or reliable at scale.
Beacon Risk is all three. Every time.
Upload a real subcontract and get a full risk report in approximately 10 minutes. 14-day free trial. No setup required.
