By 2016, I'd spent a decade at Sykes Energiprojekts, rising from Project Engineer to Cost/Design Engineer to COO and Projects Director. I understood delivery — what it took to get a tank farm or a depot from drawing to commissioning, across different sites, different regions, different teams. What I hadn't yet learned was what changes when there's no one above you to escalate to, and the decision is simply yours to make or not make.
Founding Awimax Engineering Services taught me that the hardest part of building a company isn't the engineering. It's the shift in what you're actually responsible for.
Responsibility for outcomes, not just execution
As a projects director, my responsibility was to deliver what had been scoped, on schedule, to specification. That's genuinely difficult work, and I don't want to undersell it — but it operates within a defined boundary. Someone else owns the broader question of which projects to pursue, how to price them, whether the company itself is healthy.
As a founder, that boundary disappears. Every decision about which clients to take on, which projects fit the company's capacity, how to price work fairly while still being sustainable — that's now squarely your problem, and there's no one to escalate it to. The technical judgment I'd built over a decade was necessary but no longer sufficient on its own.
Building systems, not just delivering projects
The biggest adjustment wasn't strategic, it was operational. As a projects director, the systems I worked within — finance, HR, procurement processes, quality assurance — already existed. My job was to deliver well inside them. As a founder, those systems didn't exist yet. Someone had to build them, and in the early years of Awimax, that someone was me, often while also still being directly involved in delivery.
This is where the Master's in Project Management I completed while still at Sykes ended up mattering more than I expected at the time. The technical and delivery training came from the field. The structures for actually running a business — the ones that let Awimax grow from a single engineering services company into a group spanning engineering, energy, and gas over the following decade — came from being deliberate about learning the management side as well, not assuming delivery experience alone would translate.
What carried over, and what didn't
- What carried over directly: the discipline of treating a project as one continuous sequence rather than disconnected phases, and the instinct for where delivery risk actually hides.
- What had to be learned separately: how to evaluate which opportunities were worth pursuing, how to price work sustainably, and how to build the operational backbone — finance, people, quality systems — that delivery alone never required me to think about.
- What surprised me most: how much of founding a company is about consistency over years, not intensity over a single project. A turnkey delivery has a defined end point. Building a company doesn't.
A decade later
Awimax today spans engineering services, energy, and gas — a group, not a single contracting company. That growth came from treating the lessons of a decade in project delivery as a foundation to build on, not a finished skill set. The technical grounding from Sykes still shows up in how Awimax approaches every project. But building the company itself required learning, deliberately, everything that decade hadn't taught me.