Care, integrity, and excellence

It’s been over 160 years since family-owned business John Sisk & Son (Sisk) was founded in Ireland. Today, the company is active on construction and civil engineering projects across the UK, working for a range of large public and private sector clients, and has developed its presence across Europe, providing construction and fit-out projects in the data centres, life sciences, and retail sectors, among others. The company boasts 1900 employees across a network of regional offices, with premises in St. Albans, Solihull, and Warrington, and has also recently expanded into new locations: in Central London and Leeds city-centre.

Despite its history, however, Sisk sits within a rapidly changing industry. Technological advances - combined with a growing push towards sustainable construction methods - are forcing companies to evolve. For Ger Hayes, Managing Director, UK South at Sisk, it’s crucial to be at the forefront of that change.

“We’ve successfully expanded our growth in the UK, Ireland, and Europe across key markets, and that growth is getting stronger, as can be seen in the group’s excellent financial performance in its latest results,” Ger tells us. “Sisk has the track record, scale, and capacity to successfully undertake large, complex, multidisciplinary programmes, aside from residential, and we are recognised by our global customers as world leaders in safe and effective delivery.

“Now, we want to be at the forefront of transitioning the industry towards becoming a more sustainable, productive, and inclusive industry for all,” he continues. “Our 2030 Sustainability Roadmap targets include employing data apprentices and enhancing data analysis.

Meanwhile, our Digital Twin Whole Project Lifecycle offering allows Sisk, working in collaboration with our supply chain, to provide our clients with an array of tangible benefits that go way beyond the certainty of delivery during the construction phase. We strongly believe in our vision, capability, and commitment to driving this technology forward for the industry with a view to continuing to unlock significant additional value for all our key stakeholders.”

It’s been a turbulent few years for Sisk, and for construction more broadly. Like many, the sector was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, with travel rules and restrictions, as well as social distancing measures significantly reshaping ways of working across the country. But for Ger, it was a period that demonstrated Sisk’s “resilience, empathy, and evidencebased leadership” in the face of adversity, and which saw the company continue to hand over projects in line with revised programmes.

The brunt of the pandemic having now passed, Sisk is in good shape. The company boasts a strong pipeline of work, and recently announced the extension of its work on the Wembley Park development in London until 2025. The company has been involved with the project since 2004, when it struck an agreement with the developer, Quintain. Now, after completing ten projects worth more than £813 million, Sisk has successfully delivered over 2000 homes for the community at the dynamic 85-acre regeneration scheme. Crucially, however, the project is also a testament to Sisk’s capacity for innovation.

“The Wembley project, and the Eastern Lands phase in particular, has been a particular hotbed for new technology for us in the UK,” Ger reflects. “By leveraging 4D and Digital Project Delivery (DPD) with tools such as BIM360, we ensured the sequence and methodology we planned in the virtual world back in 2016, was exactly what we delivered in the build phase. It’s meant that we’ve been able to deliver an array