COMMERCIAL MANAGER

The Story Engineers; Godalming; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

The Story Engineers are seeking a Commercial Manager to bring commercial discipline to live projects across museums, venues and major events. You will own payment applications, evaluate claims, and negotiate with clients and suppliers to protect project value.

You will lead on estimating practice, value engineering, and budgeting, while collaborating with Project Managers and Engineers to secure profitable outcomes. This role blends commercial craft with creative production leadership.

Qualifications

• Three to six years experience in quantity surveying or commercial management.
• Experience in live events, museums or exhibitions.
• Ability to negotiate with judgement and communicate with diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Owns the payment application process across all projects.
• Evaluates claim opportunities and negotiates with the end client.
• Acts as the client-side counterpart on placemaking and construction-led contracts.
• Owns the commercial forecasts and collaborates with Finance.

Skills

Commercial judgement

Conviction in the room

Standards that serve the work

Hands-on commercial craft

Negotiation with judgement

Estimating practice

Commercial points, made simple

Tools and technology

Education

Degree in quantity surveying or commercial management

Tools

Estimating tools

Cost-planning models

Job description

The Story Engineers design and deliver live experiences that move people.

We work across museums, brand spaces, entertainment venues, and major events. The work varies – permanent installations, touring exhibitions, premium activations, placemaking – but the challenge is constant: a story that needs to be told in a space that has to perform.

We call this Story Engineering. It’s what closes the gap between what a creative team imagines and what an audience actually experiences. The brief defines our scope. The experience defines our responsibility.

Enabling Big Ideas.

ROLE

Commercial Management at The Story Engineers is how big ideas stay commercially sound. The Commercial Manager brings the discipline of a quantity surveyor to a business that designs, engineers and installs experience technology, and applies it to the questions every project asks: what will this cost, what are we owed, and what is the best deal we can honestly strike with the people we buy from.

While the Project Manager has ultimate responsibility for project profitability, the Commercial Manager sits alongside them, providing well considered commercial advice, negotiating supply chain agreements, validating payment applications, identifying potential claims and compiling documentation to justify them.

The role suits someone who wants to apply real commercial acumen to a creative production environment, applying innovative commercial skills to help projects reach their potential, whilst always ensuring The Story Engineers are protected. It is a new role, its core is clear, and its edges, including how far it reaches into such diverse topics as overseas supply chains and subcontractor agreements, are shaped by the person who takes it on.

Within the first six to twelve months success will look like payment applications the Project Managers trust, claims and variations spotted early and argued well, supplier terms negotiated rather than accepted, and an estimating tool in use on live work, with the Commercial Manager setting what it needs to do and how the business uses it. Alongside all this sits a clear, agreed way of working between the Commercial Manager and the Project Managers across the commercial aspects of our projects.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Projects and Clients

• Payment applications. Owns the payment application process across all projects, working with Project Managers and others to agree what to apply for and when.
• Claims and variations. Evaluates claim opportunities with Project Managers, structures the case and negotiates with the end client, working closely with the Project Manager.
• Client-side counterpart. Acts as the counterpart to the client’s quantity surveyor on placemaking and construction-led contracts, with the commercial fluency to hold the conversation as an equal.
• Commercial forecasts. Owns the claim positions and commercial forecasts, working alongside Finance.

Suppliers and Subcontractors

• Supplier negotiation. Owns pricing, terms and retrospective discounts with suppliers, using competition where it serves the project and weighing price against reliability and availability because a project that doesn’t complete on time is not an option and a saving that fails on site is not a saving.
• Procurement approach. Builds and maintains how The Story Engineers buys and how supplier performance is judged. Works alongside Business Support on day-to-day ordering.
• Overseas supply chains. Develops relationships with local suppliers in the territories where The Story Engineers works, and the processes that keep those supply chains commercially sound.
• Subcontract agreements. Authorises subcontract agreements, making sure every appointment of a subcontractor or bespoke solutions provider carries an appropriate scope, programme and contract.

Estimating and Bids

• Estimating. Leads the estimating capability: what The Story Engineers needs from it and how the business uses it, bringing industry best practice and working with colleagues across the business. The capability draws on historic project pricing, project data and current supplier pricing, so that cost certainty grows as a design and a sale develop. Produces and justifies allowances where engineering detail is necessarily limited.
• Value engineering. Drives value engineering jointly with engineering, finding savings that protect quality and reliability, including product substitution drawn from supplier deals.
• Bids. Owns the commercial content of bid pricing and tender returns, working alongside Business Development .

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• Commercial judgement. You read a variation, a supplier quote or an estimate and see what is really at stake in it. You decide what is worth pursuing, say why, and care about how the business makes its money, not only how it measures it.
• Conviction in the room. You form a view and argue it with Project Managers, engineers, suppliers and the client’s quantity surveyor alike, always for the sake of the outcome and never for sport, and you change your mind when someone shows you a better answer.
• Standards that serve the work. Your numbers are right, your records are complete, and you say plainly when something isn’t good enough yet. You hold the standard because a wrong figure costs a project, not because the standard exists.
• Hands-on commercial craft. You have compiled valuations and payment applications yourself and handled variations and claims on projects where the numbers had real consequences. You work independently, know what good looks like, and are ready to widen your remit into estimating, suppliers and value engineering.
• You have typically gained three to six years experience in quantity surveying or commercial management in a project environment.
• Negotiation with judgement. You negotiate price and terms well. You know when giving a little margin buys a stronger relationship, and when to hold the line.
• Estimating practice. You have worked with estimating and cost-planning models and know what makes one useful: what it should do, what data feeds it, and how people will really use it. You lead that conversation with colleagues, and you stay with it until it is in use.
• Commercial points, made simple. You think about what the engineer, creative producer or Project Manager across the table needs to hear, plan the difficult commercial conversation before you have it, and make the numbers usable by people who don’t think in them. You give the honest answer even when it isn’t the one they hoped for.
• Generosity with what you know. You pass on commercial know-how so Project Managers and engineers get sharper at it, and you make sure the team gets the credit for a recovered claim or a saving.
• Tools and technology. You are digitally fluent, quick to pick up new platforms, and curious about how emerging technology, including AI, can improve the way you work.
• Welcome, but not required. A degree in quantity surveying, commercial management or a related subject. Experience in live events, museums or exhibitions. The sector is quick to learn; the commercial judgement is what we hire for.

JOB DETAILS

• Title: Commercial Manager
• Reports to: Commercial Director
• Department: Commercial
• Contract: Full-time, permanent
• Key External Relationships: Suppliers, Subcontractors, Client Quantity Surveyors, Client Teams
• Key Internal Relationships: Project Management, Engineering, Business Development, Bid Management, Business Support, Finance