You could be forgiven for thinking that planning and development consultants such as myself would never contact the ‘competition’.
How wrong you would be!
Collaboration is key when it comes to creating the best outcome for my clients. Through my years of experience, I have come across a number of collaborators who we like to involve and work alongside on my clients’ planning applications. By doing so, I feel confident in the knowledge that my clients’ best interests have been taken care of as well as giving their applications the best chance of success, of course.
We regularly involve technical specialists such as architects, ecologists, arboriculturalists, highway and drainage experts, even other Chartered Planners to name but a few. Certain planning applications need other disciplines and I find it to be a more cost effective and efficient use of my time to recognise when other specialists should be brought on board that project. Equally, they feel the same about my areas of expertise too - strategic schemes. for example, or where there could be a conflict of interest – hence, we see each other as collaborators not competition.
I feel this is the same in many walks of life nowadays. I regularly come across other sectors where hobnobbing with the competition used to be frowned upon. Marketing, for example. But again, particularly since the pandemic, we are all becoming more used to working in different ways and our support networks have grown accordingly. We are all in this together and our clients remain the most important people in our working lives. If we can create a better, more positive result for them, why would we cut our noses off to spite our faces? It seems inconceivable, doesn’t it?
Thank goodness we have all moved on! I am sure we all have our favourite partners who we enjoy working with in particular but, honestly, our working relationships are all about creating an easy, stress-free, optimum result for our clients. We all know which of our contacts would be best suited to collaborate with on a project and our recommendations go a long way to helping our clients with their instruction process. And we rarely get it wrong!
As a Chartered Member of the RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute), I am bound by the organisation’s strict rules and regulations. As such, I am here to provide impartial and cost-effective advice so clients are safe in the knowledge I am always going to act in their best interests.
If you would like me to act on your behalf or just want an initial chat, please feel free to call me on 07762 627861 or email me at rachael@ablplanning.co.uk