Time is Money, and Money is Time: so if, like me, you’ve ever been involved in starting up a new business, you’ll know just how frustrating the early days of any enterprise can be. Finding the right office space for a start and then navigating your way painfully through the Delphic mysteries of a commercial lease: can take months…and every hour spent waiting is dead time…dead time is money lost or wasted. Then the office has to be fitted out (often to exacting specifications), so more dead time…still more money wasted. And by the time you finally get the chance to move in and power up the computers, you’re wondering whether the clients you told (six months ago) to save the date have forgotten who you are. It’s a problem every entrepreneur will be familiar with…

Then take into account that the average life expectancy of a new UK business fell from 10.7 years in 1999 to 8.6 years in 2022 (a fall of 20%: www.money.co.uk/business/business-statistics). Setting up a shop can dissipate more than 6% of that operational life. And if you need to commission new commercial space (as if life wasn’t short enough), the picture gets even more depressing: moving from pre-planning to topping out can take years, and we’re not just talking major projects here: even a humble shop or garage forecourt development can take up to two years to complete. Time lost is money wasted.

But money can buy time too…or at least it can when shrewdly invested.

Take, for example, Belimed (www.belimed.com), which has been around for a while and specialises in medical and surgical instrument sterilisation. As you might guess, there’s no point having a sterilisation unit located hundreds (or even dozens) of miles away from the hospital that needs all those hygienic scalpels and surgical scissors. The average surgeon can’t, and won’t, wait days for the next shipment to arrive, and the hospital he (or she) works in will rarely have a readymade building for Belimed to call its own. So what did they do? Spend six months finding, renting, and converting a local warehouse to meet their demanding requirements, or write off two years to commission and build a purpose-built facility. All that money wasted while they sit and wait…

In fact, and this is the point, Belimed took neither wasteful way: they opted instead for a Modular Construction option, creating fully equipped, portable units capable of being assembled on site where needed…without hanging around.

That modular facility is known as FlexSPD, and it can be assembled from pre-manufactured components in a matter of days, ready to meet fluctuating levels of highly localised demand: and the units come complete with pre-installed washer disinfectors and sterilisers, as well as prep and pack workstations, all carefully designed to keep those surgeons happy. And when the facility is needed somewhere else, the individual units can be disassembled quickly and taken away…that’s the inherent virtue of modular technologies: they’re sustainable and highly adaptable, which die-hard adherents to traditional construction techniques can only dream of.

3D Volumetrics

3D Volumetrics is the beating heart of modern, modular construction: enabling individual components to be created efficiently in an environmentally secure environment before being shipped out to where they’re needed most. Houses, schools, hospitals, office buildings, and yes, modern sterilisation units (temporary or permanent)… can all be created at least 30% faster, at far higher quality, and up to 50% less expensively through the use of Modular Technologies (www.newengineer.com).

Some facts are simply inescapable: when push comes to shove in these fast-moving times, time is still money…and money is more and more about time.

Executive Overview

Dead time places a chill hand not only on new businesses but on established companies too. And especially now, we need all those businesses to thrive. Modular Construction provides a readymade answer.