Job swap

Reckon you could handle your boss’ job? Simon Pickford of QS and building surveyor CNP did. He got the chance to prove it when he swapped jobs for a day with his MD Andrew Chisholm. Their experiences were recorded for Radio Five Live’s Victoria Derbyshire show for a feature called Be Your Own Boss.

Pickford, a building surveyor, says: “I’m always having a laugh with the boss saying he spends all his time either at lunch or in his Spanish villa. I thought that he did a similar job to me but earned a lot more money. So it was weird when he asked me to swap, but I was up for it.”

While Pickford went to a meeting with a top client, Chisholm was tasked with checking the installation of an intercom on a project in Westminster. With undisguised glee, Pickford says he landed his boss with a particularly mundane duty.

Meanwhile, Pickford faced a client who was unimpressed when a relatively junior member of staff turned up without warning in place of Chisholm – and with a BBC recording crew.

I’m always having a laugh with the boss saying he spends all his time either at lunch or in his Spanish villa
Simon Pickford, CNP

But Chisholm says Pickford made a good impression at the meeting. “The client said Simon performed well. He stayed calm and gave them what they wanted.”

Pickford says the experience taught him that the boss must get to grips with a far wider range of projects. Pickford tends to work on about eight projects at a time, ranging in value from £60,000 to £10m and he runs projects of up to £500,000 single-handedly. “The range of projects Andrew knows about impressed me,” says Pickford. “He won’t have a clue about the smaller day to day jobs I do but he has got to know broadly what every surveyor is doing with each of the big clients. He also has to know the technical stuff.”

But Pickford was undaunted. He says the experience left him looking forward to reaching Chisholm’s level. “Part of Andrew’s skill is that he’s very much a people person but then so am I. I’ve always felt I can reach his level.”

Chisholm, meanwhile, who is a building surveyor by trade, says his day’s surveying was “quite frenetic and hectic”. He says he wanted to gauge the pressure on his staff and concluded that they don’t have enough time “to reflect on progress and write stuff down”.

It would be a brave move to turn business down because our boys are too busy, but maybe the solution is to be more realistic about what we ask of our surveyors

Andrew Chisholm, CNP

He says: “It would be a brave move to turn business down because our boys are too busy, but maybe the solution is to be more realistic about what we ask of our surveyors.”

He adds that despite being the boss, it’s important not to take work too seriously. “We are surveyors, we should be enjoying what we do.”

Both Chisholm and Pickford admit that the best bit of the job swap, though, was going on the radio afterwards to talk about it.