Celebrating 25 years—What I’ve Learnt

Andy Dawson shares the hard-won lessons from building Engine Property Group, including the brutal self-assessment needed to drive himself and the business towards top performance. 

Business is totally about people. Over those 25 years, so many people have helped and supported me and to this day wonderful people continue to contribute and help shape me into a better person both on a personal front and as a business leader and I’ll never stop appreciating that. 

 What has been one of the most significant learnings for me is that you just have to build culture first—you can’t buy culture. So, you have to look very hard inwardly as to what you represent first.

With high-performance culture essentially created from a group performing repetitive positive behaviours, it was initially difficult for me to gain a clear path of travel on how to achieve this. 

Having started by myself back in 1997, I walked the streets to get work and the notion of leadership or proper business fundamentals was the last thing on my mind. They say, “money isn’t everything” but back in those days getting work was the total priority so money was “right up there with oxygen”.

I reflect now on so many ups and downs, risks I’ve taken, lessons learnt, and my inability to set expectations and talk truly about an individual’s performance. All these factors were a function and legacy of my small business mind and mentality. I simply didn’t know any better. 

Whilst the business continued to grow there was an outright inevitably that I had to be honest with myself and significantly push into studies and coaching.

The coaching incorporated some pretty brutal self-assessments on where I needed to improve as a person and equally for me to understand the characteristics and qualities I needed to personally install or significantly develop if I were going to have any chance of taking my business to the next level.

Whilst others can determine if the studies and coaching were good for me, inwardly I know they had an effect.

I now have a greater sense that leadership is the ability to ask a group of people to collaborate with you over quite a sustained period. 

So why would anyone want to collaborate with you if you’re not clear on your values? Mine are caring and trusting, at any level. I truly try to uphold those values as internal standards. 

When I’m working with my team, it’s of paramount importance that my actions, thoughts, and emotions align with these standards. 

With regards to emotions, I’ve learnt that understanding my emotions and the emotions of others helps me empathise and helps my ability to communicate and my ability to give my team the unconditional support and positivity they need in overcoming challenges.

There is no doubt the above represents a pretty candid disclosure with regards to what the 25-year distance has instilled in me, but it’s the reality. 

The beautiful part is that I can see internally that the wonderful group we call Engine Property Group all practise the above, which just motivates us all, sees us all consistently working towards mutual goals, and sees us building a high-performance culture.

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