When John Dillon landed a work experience role at a local Surveyors practice at the age of just 16 he instantly found his true vocation in life.
Or, as he puts it today: “I was very lucky. The rest of my year group at Bromsgrove School had no idea what they wanted to do. I was very focused on ‘right, these are my A-Level grades that I need to get to University and off I went.’
“For my work experience I was sent off to a local Surveyors’ practice in Worcestershire called Banks and Silvers. I can remember it like it was yesterday. It was a residential estate agency, surveying, a bit of commercial property and I spent a summer with them and loved it.
“I thought I like this because I am not stuck behind a desk, I am out and about chatting to people. I really enjoyed it, it was very sociable ‘do you play golf? do you play cricket?’ It was a very nice firm to be part of and I realised I really liked property.
“One of the surveyors gave me super advice. He said ‘whatever you do, go and become a qualified Chartered Surveyor.’ So I did the right A-Levels to get me into university to go and study surveying. Then in 1989 I started a degree course in estate management at Bristol.”
Like many, John has had to overcome considerable challenges along the way over the course of more than 30 years since that initial summer of work experience – but he has never regretted going into the world of property.
“My father was a lawyer but I thought I don’t want to sit behind a desk looking at legal papers. Neither my sister nor I went into law, there was no pressure from our father to do that – it was ‘go and find your own vocation.’
More than three decades later, John, now 51, is at the head of an award-winning commercial property enterprise combining sales and lettings, valuations, Commercial Property management and building surveying as well as a totally dedicated sister company dealing with house surveys.
His father’s advice to seek his own path in life has paid off handsomely for the former Bromsgrove School pupil who had found his niche at the age of just 16.
But there would be plenty of twists and turns along the way in a career which took him from his home patch of Worcestershire into the high-pressure property world of big city Birmingham and then back onto home turf and his own enterprise which now operates from three bases in Droitwich, Bromsgrove and Worcester.
“In my gap year I had a lucky break – I worked in the commercial department of Andrew Grant in Worcester. Andrew Grant was by far the biggest estate agency in the county, he used to specialise in big country homes and he had a commercial department and that was the bit that I specialised in for a year.
That introduced me to what I am doing now, commercial property. I like dealing with business people, the business community, I found it a lot less emotive than dealing with the house side. My degree very much tilted me towards commercial property and I have never looked back. I have never personally worked in residential estate agency or residential surveying.
“I finished university and went travelling for 12 months. Then I got a call out of the blue as soon as I got back from Andrew Grant to say ‘would you like to come back and be the manager of our commercial department in Worcester?’
“I was utterly flabbergasted and thought there is no way in a million years that I can do this job. I didn’t have a lot of experience, I had only done a gap year, I was very young, 24. But they were obviously impressed during the gap year, they said they wanted to hang on to me, which was great.
“Nobody from my year group was managing a commercial department at all and I thought ‘well, go for it, what is the worst that can happen?”
John found himself heading up a five-strong department in charge of colleagues in their 40s and 50s while working towards his RICS qualification. “I had a colleague who was 45, the man who trained me was 58, we had a secretary in her 50s.
“It was very tough, but I learnt so much by being thrown in at the deep end like that. I had never managed anybody in my life. The last time I was in that team I was the graduate surveyor, the boy that did everything. Suddenly here I am two years later, sat In front of everybody, saying ‘good morning, I am the manager of the team.’ I learnt a heck of a lot. I could not have done what I’m doing now had I not had that experience aged 24.”
John spent eight years building up the department at Andrew Grant and growing the client base before hitting a major stumbling block. “When we got to the really big stuff, clients would say ‘sorry John, we can’t use you any more, we need to go to a big national firm of surveyors in Birmingham.’
“It really annoyed me, I was working with those clients, I had watched them grow from small one-man bands to companies which employed 40, 50, 60, 100 people. They were totally satisfied with what I was doing but they felt that when they got to the really big-sized developments they had to go and use the big boys.”
But, as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them, and John took himself off to the big city as a valuation surveyor with the national surveying practice of Lambert Smith Hampton. It was the start of a six-year stint which proved an eye-opener on a number of levels, and would in due course bring him back home to Worcestershire to pursue his dream of running his own property business.
“My client base changed dramatically, I was dealing with big, corporate property owners. The team had grown to eight of us and then we hit the 2008 recession, the banking crisis and commercial property fell off a cliff.”
Desperate to cut costs, Lambert Smith Hampton ordered John to reduce his team to just two. “It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I had built this team up over my six years there. I don’t ever want to make those kind of decisions again.
“It was an epiphany for me. I had always had this desire to have my own business. I found myself running an entire department by myself in 2009 and I thought ‘why am I doing this for a big corporation, I may as well do this for myself.’
“I handed my notice in in the middle of a recession, I left and set up my business in Bromsgrove as JP Dillon Chartered Surveyors on September 1, 2010. It was almost like I had not been away….
“I was greeted by a business community that knew me and it was easy to get work because my competition in Worcestershire had just gone through a major recession. They were weary, values were down and I was the new boy back, full of energy and new business. Off I went and slowly managed to generate new clients and activity.”
John took on a “brilliant” secretary/PA in the shape of former Andrew Grant colleague Lynne Davis – “she was fantastic, the best PA ever” – to run the office while he sought clients and customers. Meanwhile, he struck a deal with highly experienced PR consultant Jonathan Reay – who had worked for Lambert Smith Hampton – to handle publicity.
On the back of the successful PR, John found himself increasingly in demand from other property sector operators who liked the look of JP Dillon Chartered Surveyors for potential mergers, including Philip Jones, who ran Worcester Chartered Surveyors Guise, Jones, Sawyer.
“It was a major turning point in my business because Philip Jones had management clients, where he collected the rents and organised the service charges. He had some fantastic management clients which would have taken me 10 years to win.”
By September 2012 the company was renamed GJS Dillon and had added an office in Worcester. Having an office in Worcester helped put us on the map. It really bolstered the company and took it to the next level.”
A further merger with a Chartered Surveyors practice based in Stourport run by a former colleague called Bill Fellows followed, bringing residential survey work into GJS Dillon for the first time.
“It really catapulted the business, which was great.” Further impetus was added when the firm invested in new headquarters at Droitwich, whilst retaining its Worcester and Bromsgrove offices for meetings.
“I needed to get back to an open plan floor, it is then that we developed our four teams that we introduced into the business in 2016. We have really started structuring the company, systems and processes with department heads and a proper organisational chart for the company. There are now 14 of us spread across two companies.”
The Dillon empire has since expanded further with the post-Covid establishment of GJS Dillon, The House Surveyors, following another merger with a residential Surveyors firm run by Bromsgrove businessman Tim Joinson.
“That has gone from strength to strength since Covid. There is such a demand for qualified Chartered Surveyors. Lots of surveyors have retired or disappeared and there is a real shortage in the county. It has just gone through the roof.”
With GJS Dillon turnover increasing steadily year on year, John is looking forward to a future of “absolute growth.” “The biggest growth areas in my business are property management, building surveying and valuations. My job now is strategy, forward thinking. I have to delegate as much as I can and support my five department heads. My focus is to go and win work for the team.”
John is confident GJS Dillon can weather any impending recession thanks to its assets of property management, building surveying and house surveying. Meanwhile, in due course he plans to pass on the business to the next generation of department heads by offering each of them an equity stake in the business.
“I have got some really capable directors in this company and I have already started passing equity to them. That is how I attract talented people to the business.”
It’s fair to say that the man who first found he had a talent for property as a work experience lad of just 16 is now investing in new generations of talent – and future-proofing his hard-earned business legacy at the same time.
