You have probably had this conversation. You ask a contractor for a quote. The contractor sends a number. Six weeks later, the project is half-built and the number is different. Nobody is sure when the change happened.
Eighteen projects, one pattern
For two years before Myrmex, my brother Artur and I ran Construct & Furnish. We completed eighteen residential and restaurant renovations across London. Clients trusted us. Most projects worked out. The work itself was good.
What sat behind the work was not. Quotes were written from memory. Project communication ran on three different messaging apps at the same time, with no single channel anyone could rely on. The cost spreadsheet said one number. The progress spreadsheet said another. Both were updated by us. When a client asked a question, the answer depended on which app they had used and which person on our side they had spoken to.
We noticed something across those two years. The pattern was not random.
The first quote was always for a different scope than the one that got built. Nobody told the client the scope had changed - not deliberately, not as a decision. It just drifted. The client knew because they signed variations, but the variations came in batches and they signed them because the work had started and stopping was worse than signing.
The architect on most of our projects knew the scope was incomplete when the contract was signed. They did not say so out loud because the project needed to start. The cost plan was already done.
This is not the contractor’s failure. The contractor priced what they were given. It is not the architect’s failure either. The architect designed to brief. The eighteen projects were delivered by people doing their jobs correctly, in their own discipline, and the budgets and programmes still drifted on most of them.
Nobody in the chain did anything wrong
The failure was in the sequence. The contracts were signed before the design was done.
This is what the Pre-Construction Services Agreement exists to fix. The PCSA is a fixed-fee agreement under which we do the pricing work - the cost plan, the buildability review, the risk register, the trade engagement - before the main construction contract is signed. By the time the client commits to building, the gap between the quote and the actual cost has been closed.
Myrmex was incorporated on 13 March 2026. The firm is six weeks old. We built it specifically because we ran a different company for two years before this one and watched the quote-to-actual-cost gap shape almost every project. C&F was formally dissolved. Every system Myrmex runs traces back to a decision to make that gap stop existing.
What we still get wrong
When a client is not available, we sometimes assume we know what the client wants. The assumption is usually correct. Occasionally it is not, and the correction costs time that was not necessary. The fix is a written confirmation step on any decision the client did not personally sign off, before work proceeds.
Heritage approval timelines in Central London cannot be predicted. There is no published standard. Conservation officers across boroughs hold different positions on what they will and will not accept, and the same officer can hold different positions in different weeks. Myrmex has started work on the basis of optimism rather than confirmed consent. That is the same sequencing failure the PCSA exists to fix, applied to a different part of the project, by the same people who named it as a problem.