THE DEBRIEF – THE EDITOR’S TAKE ON THE BRACE YOURSELF PODCAST
I spent two busy days at ScaffEx 2026 and there was plenty to look at. New systems, roofing products, software, automation, augmented reality and equipment filled Manchester Central, while exhibitors had clearly invested heavily in making their stands bigger and more ambitious than before.
But the most interesting conversations I heard around the show had little to do with the equipment itself.
That comes across clearly in the latest episode of The Brace Yourself Podcast, recorded on the exhibition floor by Simon Boyes and Ben Beaumont. The episode moves around the show, taking in contractors, suppliers and industry figures on some of the broader challenges facing scaffolding businesses, and one theme comes through repeatedly: the companies thinking hardest about their people, processes and leadership may gain just as much advantage as those investing in the latest product.
Giving people a stake in the business
One of the strongest conversations is with James Brearley of Rose System Scaffolding. Brearley explains that when he established the business, one of his early decisions was to give members of the senior management team shares in the company, a deliberate attempt to create genuine commitment from day one.
“When things went wrong, when we had tough things like Covid, Ukraine, war, and we were wobbling, everybody came together. How are we getting through this? Not how are you getting through? It’s your business. No, no, no, it’s us as a team.”
Nine years later, those same senior people remain with the business.
But Brearley also makes a useful distinction. Customers don’t care how a contractor has structured its ownership or whether employees have shares. They care about delivery. The value of having people invested in the business comes from what that commitment produces: better planning, consistency and a team that takes responsibility for delivering what has been promised.
As Brearley puts it: “You’ve got to deliver what you say you’re going to deliver.”
Technology has become much more practical
Technology was one of the most visible themes across ScaffEx, but compared with a few years ago the conversation has moved on. Contractors are less interested in technology because it looks impressive; they want to know what problem it solves.
Brearley describes how Rose uses ScaffPlan for modelling, Monday.com for planning and workflows, and mobile systems for scaffold handovers. The impact, he says, is practical: better planning has allowed the business to reduce unnecessary movements of equipment and scale without continually adding administrative staff.
“Technology has allowed us to scale up a business without necessarily adding loads of extra staff.”
For me, that’s the more important technology story from this year’s show. The question is no longer whether scaffolding should embrace digital tools. It’s whether a particular system saves time, improves safety, reduces waste or helps the business operate more efficiently.
The owner cannot make every decision
The conversation with Brearley also moves into leadership and how his own role has changed as the company has grown. He now sees much of his job as developing and mentoring the next generation, with younger members of the team increasingly driving technology and innovation, researching new systems and putting proposals back to senior management.
His advice is simple: “You’ve got to let the business innovate… but you’ve got to let your staff fly.”
It lands in an industry full of owner-led businesses. The skills required to start a scaffolding company are not the same skills required to run one when it has 50, 100 or several hundred people. Eventually, owners have to build people around them who can make decisions without asking permission every five minutes. Otherwise, the owner becomes the bottleneck.
Culture has to be visible
That issue continues in another substantial conversation with Adam Millgate and Shane Wood from KAS Scaffolding. Their discussion focuses on company culture and, importantly, how something that can sound fairly vague is turned into day-to-day behaviour.
For KAS, that starts from the moment somebody joins the business. New starters are given branded clothing and told what the company expects in terms of behaviour, presentation, PPE and standards. It costs money before the business even knows whether that employee will work out, but the directors see it as part of setting expectations from day one.
They also talk about giving managers and employees enough freedom to make decisions and accepting that sometimes those decisions will be wrong. The distinction they make is between making a mistake and continually repeating the same mistake.
“They can’t always find us every five minutes to say, ‘What do I do here?’”
That approach only works if people know they won’t be punished for a reasonable decision that turns out badly. It’s the best definition of culture I’ve heard in a long time: culture is what happens when the directors are not standing on the job.
Keeping scaffolders is about more than pay
The same discussion tackles a problem familiar to almost every scaffolding contractor: staff retention. Scaffolders can move quickly when another company offers more money, and KAS openly discusses having employees leave for better-paid positions elsewhere, only for many of them to return.
That experience challenged the immediate assumption that the answer was simply to increase wages. Pay matters, obviously. But so do stability, the way people are treated, the working environment and whether employees believe their employer will support them.
The directors describe helping workers financially at difficult points, including with loans and personal circumstances, while acknowledging that sometimes people still leave afterwards. Their response is not to stop helping everybody else.
As one of them puts it: “Kindness costs nothing. And you shouldn’t let one bad experience make you… insinuate that everyone else is the same.”
More than products
Towards the end of the episode, NASC chair David Brown describes the enthusiasm around this year’s event and points to its growing scale, while AT-PAC UK and Ireland managing director Charles Stratford reflects on heavy traffic through the company’s stand and interest from engineers in its products.
That, I think, sums up ScaffEx 2026. The equipment still matters, and the ability to see products, handle them and talk directly to the people behind them remains one of the main reasons for attending an exhibition. But the conversations around those products are becoming broader: how to build a business that keeps good people, where technology genuinely removes wasted time, and how much decision-making still depends on the owner.
And underneath all of it, the question I keep coming back to from the KAS conversation: what standards are you prepared to accept when nobody is watching?
The latest episode of The Brace Yourself Podcast, recorded at ScaffEx 2026 in Manchester, is available through the Brace Yourself channels. ScaffMag is the show’s Official Media Partner.
