CIBSE AWARDS | LAWLER CONSULTING When recession hit Ireland in 2008, Lawler Consulting turned to energy-performance contracting to engineer efficiency savings for its grateful clients. Since then, it has enjoyed growth in Ireland and the rest of the world, and this year retained its Consultant of the Year (0-50 employees) crown at the CIBSE Building Performance Awards. Andy Pearson reports MEANING BUSINESS E ngineers are the architects of energy consumption; we are the only ones who really understand it. So says Daniel Ring, managing director at Lawler Consulting, the Kilkenny-based multidisciplinary consulting engineers. We are uniquely positioned to reverse engineer and overlay todays technology on yesterdays buildings, he adds. This is different from traditional construction engineering, and an area where the building services engineer must lead. Ring says his company has taken a lead on sustainability and energy consumption by adding energy-performance contracting (EPC) to the services it offers. Sustainability consulting and EPC in particular are fast-growing elements of this innovative engineers business, and a sector in which it has had considerable success in recent years. The practice, Ring says, has had to be innovative to thrive in difficult times. Lawler Consulting was founded as Noel Lawler Consulting Engineers in 1980, by Noel Lawler. Back then, the services it offered were conventional mechanical and electrical engineering design for projects mostly based in Ireland. Noel retired in 2005, but the business continued in his name after a management buyout, which resulted in co-directors Jason Smith and Jonathan Culleton joining the company. Business was good until 2008, when recession hit Ireland hard. We went from 26 staff to six, three of whom owned the business, Ring recalls. To survive, a decision was taken to diversify the markets in which Lawler Consulting worked and the nature of the work. It got us into the mindset that we needed to be more resilient. An overdependency on a sector and a market creates vulnerability says Ring. Under the new philosophy, the practice took on work in the UK and the Middle East, and branched out into the insurance sector, where it undertook technical investigations for claims involving flooding and fires. The big driver of change, however, came when Lawler Consulting started doing energy surveys for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. We were finding that the great ideas we were proposing in 20 May 2021 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE May 21 pp20-23 Lawler Consulting.indd 20 23/04/2021 15:55