About GHM Scaffolding Kent Ltd

I'm Lee Arnold, and I run GHM Scaffolding Kent Ltd from Bromley. When you call about a job, you're speaking to the person who will survey it, price it, and turn up to put the scaffold up. Not a call centre passing your details along to someone else.

Before I quote anything, I come and look at the job myself. That means walking the elevation, checking what the ground is actually like under a proposed base plate, working out whether a sole board is needed on a soft lawn or a driveway, and looking at what's overhead: wires, trees, a neighbour's guttering, that sort of thing.

I'd rather spend twenty minutes at survey than a morning fixing a mistake on site.

On a terraced street in Beckenham or Shortlands, half the job is working out where the scaffold can actually stand without blocking a shared path or leaning on next door's garden wall. I'd rather sort that out at survey than turn up on erection day and find the drive's too narrow for the standards.

I speak to the neighbour before anything touches their side of a boundary. If a base plate needs to sit on their drive or a tie needs to go into their wall, that's a conversation I have before the van turns up, not an apology afterwards.

I'd rather have a phone call than a form. A five-minute conversation tells me more about a job, whether it's a chimney rebuild in Chislehurst or a full front elevation for an extension in Orpington, than a few typed lines usually do. If you'd rather message first, that's fine, I'll still ring you back to talk it through before I quote.

You're speaking to the person who prices the job and the person who turns up to build it.

Once the scaffold is up, I tag it and log an inspection straight away, then again every seven days while it's in use, and after any bad weather. If a trade tells me they need longer than we planned, the scaffold stays up until they've actually finished, not until a date I guessed at the start.

When the job's done, you tell me the trades have finished, and I book the strike. I'd rather hear "give it another week" from you than take a scaffold down early and have someone ring me back annoyed.