Story
I started AK & AK Property in May 2008, in the crash, with small jobs for friends and family.
The first year's turnover was £28,171. It grew to become a contractor, construction manager and development manager, with the core trades in house, including groundworks, concrete frames and brickwork, and a joinery workshop in Croydon. At its peak turnover was over £20m a year. We employed up to 100 people directly and held fixed-price JCT contracts from £1m to £15m. Across all its contracts since 2008 the business built hundreds of homes.
The company, 2008 to 2025
The company changed its name from AK & AK Property to Kuropatwa Ltd and then to London South Build.
In July 2010 two colleagues who had been with the business from the start joined me as partners. Lukasz led the in-house trades: the groundworks, the concrete frames and the brickwork. Dariusz led the site teams and set up and ran the joinery workshop at Mill Lane in Croydon. Between the three of us the trades, the sites and the office were covered, and for most of a decade that is how the business was run.
The move from small jobs and refurbishments to main contracting came around 2012 and 2013, and included the delivery of 9 high end apartments in Duck Lane in Soho. We carried the whole job from basement to roof with our own labour on the core trades and subcontractors on the rest. From there the jobs got bigger and the roles widened. By the middle of the decade the business was development manager on most of its schemes, as well as main contractor on many and construction manager on others. It kept the core trades in house throughout.
Dariusz left in 2018 and Lukasz in 2021. From then on I ran the business alone, with the site teams and the trades we had built up. Direct headcount peaked at up to 100 people. That was the business that took on the three contracts from 2020.
The loss
From 2020 we took on three contracts worth £21m combined. The big, complex one was Clapham Quarter, 36 flats behind Clapham Common South Side, priced in 2021 and signed in 2022, before the Brexit labour shortage and post-Covid construction inflation had worked through to costs. A perfect storm of a big, complex job under priced and then hit by the worst construction inflation in living memory.
Even during this unparalleled time of turmoil in the industry, every building was handed over to the clients, with Building Control signed off and all the warranties secured. However, the three contracts lost money on a huge scale that the business could not carry, and there was no pipeline behind them. On 27 March 2025 the company went into liquidation. A second, smaller company that did subcontract work for the business went into liquidation with it, for the same reason: it was owed money by the main company and had no other work.
Warren Buffett said that when the tide goes out you find out who has no trunks on. I had built a good company on the assumption that prices would behave. They did not, and my contingency did not cover the gap.