Weston Williamson on how it managed its global expansion

WW+P began its life 40 years ago as a London-based practice. For much of that time, our clients and projects came from across the UK but over the past 10 to 15 years, the opportunities arising internationally have led to expansive growth across the globe.

Secure work by using existing connections

Our homegrown connections have always been the main drive for us to take on international projects; when past or present engineering partners have become aware of new opportunities, they call us up. Once you establish a good reputation for design quality and technical excellence, contractors and engineers want to work with you, and that repeat business has resulted in international opportunities.

One of our first significant international projects was in Malaysia in 2012, designing the Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transport in Kuala Lumpur. We relocated some of our team from our London studio while hiring a local design team to deliver the project. Our work subsequently stretched across Asia, working on projects such as Delhi Metro, Gurgaon Rapid Metro and Chennai Metro.

But the most significant international move happened in 2016 when were part of the design team that won the competition to design and deliver Melbourne Metro. This was an enormous A$16 billion public-private partnership project, which required design, approval and construction support for five stations. These were set to completely transform the way people moved to and through the city. We used the project as an opportunity to transplant more of our colleagues from the UK and establish studios in Australia. There was an enormous amount of interest in relocating from members of our team at all grades – which didn’t surprise us after the then-recent Brexit vote.

Sustain a pipeline of work

The Melbourne Metro timing was opportune. The Australian government was investing in sustainable mass transport in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. The most straightforward way to establish a studio in a new region is to secure a project and then secure a pipeline of work that builds on that success.

For Sydney, we adopted a different approach: we invested in a studio presence in a region that we knew would have a viable pipeline, then built on the global relationships we had with engineering firms and clients to secure positions on tenders and design competitions. This is a tough route for a practice but, fortunately, one that’s repeatedly worked for WW+P.

Choose regions tactically

The next studio we opened was in North America, where again we were able to leverage our relationship with engineers in the UK to secure work on the government-led programmes of transit-oriented-development (TOD) investment. Australia and Canada are relatively straightforward countries to work in for British firms because of the Commonwealth – we share language and legal structures, and our accreditations generally have reciprocal recognition.

More recently we’ve been winning projects in the Middle East and China, both of which have well-funded strong pipelines of government expenditure in sustainable mass transit as well as urban regeneration projects that suit our practice’s skillset. The relationship with global engineering firm Egis Group has been instrumental in supporting these latter phases of growth.

Have an on-ground presence

WW+P now operates nine studios across four continents – a model that reflects how crucial it is to be present where your clients are. Our hub studios like London, Sydney and Toronto have the critical mass required to enable our design and technical experts to sit alongside operations, finance and management. But we also have several satellite studios that ensure we have continuous relationships with key client bodies around the globe.

Some regions are perfectly happy with the ‘fly-in-fly-out’ approach but others look for a greater degree of interface to ensure the delivery, design dialogue, client interactions and work are supported.

Take risks – but make the most of technology

Setting up in a new region is always tricky and there’s rarely any guarantee that the investment will pay off. Over the past 40 years, we’ve established project teams around the world that have demobilised at the end of the job. Along the way, we’ve learnt the importance of achieving the right blend between local production and international support. It takes time and money to set up sustainable business development relationships and invest in a marketing presence that achieves success in foreign markets.

The pandemic demonstrated that hybrid working was possible for most industries. Our in-studio culture is very important to us and, while we ensure our teams spend three days a week in their respective studios, physically connecting with their colleagues, we also know the opportunities that can come with being remote and flexible.

We’re now able to seamlessly support international projects with a plethora of tools to ensure our design teams can collaborate around the multiple time zones. These digital tools allow us to co-create and collaborate, pulling in talent from around the world. A good example of that is a project in Australia that is being designed by our teams in Sydney and London, supported by a visualisation team in Ireland and a free-hand sketch team in Madrid – all contributing within a working day.

We’ve built our reputation through delivering and securing repeat business with clients and winning design awards to steadily raise our profile. International recognition helps. When we recently won New Civil Engineer’s Bridge Architect of the Year Award, we immediately had new clients contacting us from all over the world.

Find the right local partners

Working as an architect internationally brings a lot of challenges. There are local codes, tech specifications, preferences of contractors – many global idiosyncrasies. It’s always been critical for us to work with local partners: either people we hire directly or local design firms.

In Australia, there’s a profound, multifaceted relationship with First Nations designers for example – a relationship that comes with many historical sensitivities but which ultimately enriches the design process. Meanwhile, over in China, it’s very difficult to do government-led work without partnering with local design institutes, which requires a great degree of collaboration and co-creation.

There can be language barriers too. Most of the areas we work in the world have English as a primary language but for other regions, it’s important to have bilingual staff and expertise on board.

Look to the future

For the first 30 years of our practice, we were exporting our British design skills and expertise. Over the past 10 years, however, through work with new clients and regions, we’ve learned about global best practice and applied that to our projects back home. We’ve benefited hugely from our relationships with our sister architect practices in Egis’s Architecture Line – a global network of established studios that have correct accreditations and taxation setups, allowing us all to interact and collaborate seamlessly. We all have client relationships and access to a talent pool of over 1,400 design professionals, which makes it easy for us all to hire in the different regions in which we specialise. In some territories, it would be almost impossible for any of us to do this from scratch.

Growing the way we have might not suit every practice. We work on complex infrastructure for government clients, which means that there’s a finite pool of clients and projects for us to target. We go where the clients are investing. We follow that logic first and foremost, rather than deciding on a region to expand into. As we approach our 40th birthday, we’re very much looking forward to the next phase of the practice – the challenges and rewards it brings, with our international projects strengthening us.

Ali Mowahed is chief executive of WW+P Architects