The original budget was $5.6 million. The final cost was $5.67 million. The board told us afterwards that they had assumed there would be a second ask.
After more than a decade as officers on ships around the world, we understood ports in a particular way — from the vessel side. We knew what worked, what failed, and what had been accepted as normal for too long.
That perspective followed us ashore.
The people who work in ports are rough around the edges. They know how things should work. They don't mind telling you straight off what they think. They don't want a good story — they want proof that you have done the work and delivered on time, without excuses.
That is the environment we came into. It suited us.
The shore power installation at Ystad was the world's largest of its kind at the time. A genuinely new system, which meant there was no manual for several of the problems it created.
Regulations governing safety and grounding in a marine environment had to be worked out from first principles. Spare parts for equipment that had never been installed at this scale took months to arrive. We solved the downtime problem by drawing on components from the backup crane. Not elegant, but effective — and it kept the project moving.
The same period produced a range of other projects. Energy initiatives that reduced consumption at one of the terminals by over €10,000 annually. Repair of approximately 170 concrete pillars beneath the quays — structural work that would keep the harbour safe for decades. A faulty heave compensator on a newly manufactured rail ferry ramp.
Different problems. The same approach: understand the system before touching it.
The project that defined this period was the port expansion — 86,000 square metres of new hardened area.
The material choice was concrete stone rather than asphalt. Asphalt requires a new surface layer after roughly seven years. Concrete stone gives sixty-plus years of durability with no maintenance requirement. The saving over the first asphalt maintenance cycle was approximately €700,000–€900,000.
The scope also included two storage buildings of 12,000 square metres and the civil infrastructure for a working harbour that could not stop operating during construction. The sequencing of that work — keeping the port operational while building around it — was as much of the project as the construction itself.
The original budget was $5.6 million. The final cost was $5.67 million — a variance of less than 1.3 per cent.
The board told us afterwards that they had assumed there would be a second ask. Every project they had run before, large or small, had come in at multiples of the original estimate.
What we did differently was not complicated. We planned each step the way we had learned to plan on ships. We held weekly meetings with the contractor — meetings built on genuine trust and a shared purpose, not on status updates and liability management. We kept communication clear enough that problems surfaced before they became costs.
We had a common goal, and both parties knew it. That tends to be enough.
Next step
The starting point is always the same: understand what the asset actually requires before deciding what to build. We are happy to start with a conversation.
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