One of my fauvorites… A toll road PPP. Beautiful business model. Traffic studies. Economic growth projections. Sophisticated demand modelling. Consultants everywhere. Like queuing for free ice-cream… The road opened in 2007. The project was the South Bay Expressway SR‑125 toll road. Everything looked perfect on paper. Except for one small detail. Drivers. They didn’t show up. The financial model predicted tens of thousands of vehicles per day. Reality? Sometimes traffic was 70–80% lower than...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Still in the UK. Now, a hospital PPP. Large. Modern. Shiny. Hundreds of millions invested. Years of planning. Procurement. Financial close. Construction. Finally… The building was delivered. Or so everyone thought. The project was the Royal Liverpool University Hospital PFI project. New hospital. Supposed to open in 2017. There was only one small problem. The building could not be used. Fire safety defects. Structural issues. Incomplete works. Entire sections of the hospital had to be torn...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Everyone relaxes after the contract is signed. Lawyers celebrate. Sponsors shake hands. The press release goes out. “Landmark infrastructure project.” “World-class partnership.” “Long-term value for taxpayers.” Champagne. Photos. LinkedIn posts. Etc. In 2018 one of the largest PPP contractors in the UK, Carillion, collapsed overnight. Not struggling. Not restructuring. Collapsed. Gone. A tomar por cul0. The company was involved in dozens of PPP projects across the UK and beyond. Hospitals....
3 days ago • 1 min read
I hope you had not been in one of those… A meeting with a Power Point. Around 130 slides… Yes. One. Hundred. Thirty. Graphs. Tables. Appendices explaining the appendices. The speaker? Monotone. Boring. Like a GPS giving directions in the desert. A funeral seemed a fiesta in Ibiza. Slide 14… Slide 38… Slide 79… Around slide 92 something magical happened. One of the client directors fell asleep. Not metaphorically. Actually asleep. Head tilted. Eyes closed. The kind of sleep that says: “I’ve...
4 days ago • 1 min read
How you do anything is how you do everything. Leave something half-done or poorly executed and people assume the rest of your work looks exactly the same. Maybe that’s unfair.Maybe it’s not true. Doesn’t matter. That’s the perception on the other side of the table. If you don’t show leadership in a simple information meeting, why would anyone trust you to lead when the deal gets complicated? If you perform poorly once, what are the chances the other side believes the next time will be...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Everything you want is on the opposite side of fear. Let’s pause for a minute and let these words sink. I’m in the middle of a complex transaction for my real estate businesses… and those words couldn’t resonate more in me. Those feelings tell me that I’m on the right path. I’m getting out of my comfort zone, and this is great. There is nothing positive in the comfort of your couch. I can’t tell you this. If you don’t feel those butterflies in your stomach. If you don’t feel the fear. The...
6 days ago • 1 min read
World-class infrastructure. This is what I hear 90% of the time in any room on the client side. Let’s be honest. PPPs are often seen as the silver bullet to deliver big, bigger, massive stuff. The longest. The highest. The most advanced. The more expensive. Then things get into trouble and whose fault is it? The private sector. “Super expensive.” “Incredibly expensive.” “The private sector is making billions out of the poor, ingenious, and naïve taxpayer.” Give me a break. When your client...
7 days ago • 1 min read
You’re the preferred bidder. You’ve survived the RFQ bloodbath. You’ve outlasted two global consortia. You’ve negotiated 1,200 comments on the Project Agreement. You’re tired. But you’re smiling. Because you’re “there”. And your bonus, and your holidays to Fiji, “almost there”. Or so you think. In 2014, the East West Link PPP in Melbourne had a preferred bidder. Contracts were executed. Advisors were celebrating. Many, already paid. Then elections happened. Ahhh… the famous political risk of...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Yesterday I was talking about clarity.Or better said, about simplicity.If you’re not capable of putting it clearly, you don’t have the "pajorera" (faintest damn) idea what you’re talking about. Simplifying is a superpower. How many times have I seen the best technicians we could find for a task make a presentation to a Board of Directors.Charts.Twisted words beyond belief.More jargon… as if it were a competition to see who can pee the furthest.In the end…The sound of crickets. Trying to...
9 days ago • 1 min read