At first glance, Bristol may appear an unlikely cradle for a revolution. One of England’s most important trading and commercial centres for over eight hundred years, the city of half a million people has been home to a host of celebrated individuals, from explorer John Cabot, pirate Edward Teach (better known as Blackbeard) and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel to more modern folk such as actors Cary Grant and Jeremy Irons, as well as John Cleese of Monty Python fame. Each could be said to have fomented a little revolution in their own ways, but as for organised, focused, disruptive revolutionary fervour – not so much.
Until now.
Enter stage right JVAT – the UK branch of an Australian consultancy that specialises in engineering and assurance, and focuses on defence, energy and transport. Disruptive from the very beginning, JVAT has placed highly in the Australian Defence Industry Awards since 2020 – a testament to the effect it has already had on the defence ecosystem there. From these efforts sprung the UK expansion, starting with the appearance of a lone Englishman looking for an office and clients in 2021 to an enterprise employing over 30 people in the enviable position, less than four years later, of being able to deliberately slow down some of its more aggressive marketing in order to ensure continued quality delivery.
Henry Gardner, JVAT’s Director of Strategic Business Development for the UK (and the lone Englishman referred to above) and Peter Symons, Associate Director, Programme Delivery, recently sat down with Defence Alternatives to reflect on the company’s very rapid development in the UK and to speculate on what the future holds. So what does JVAT actually do?
“In a nutshell it’s about solving problems the client may not know they’ve got,” Gardner says. “There may or may not be a well-articulated strategic plan, there may or may not have been a capability gap analysis conducted or a roadmap developed – but there is always a desire to engage in a strategic process and to make the enterprise more agile, more capable and able to do less, better”.
That sounds easy to say but less easy to implement in a structured, focused manner. JVAT leaps that hurdle almost effortlessly by applying simple but powerful principles. “In providing engineering and assurance services there are three key areas of concern – people, mindset and behaviour. Get those right and ensure that you become an add-on or an adjunct to the main customer unit, and you have the makings of a successful engagement,” Gardner states confidently. The growth in the UK customer base in under four years bears witness to the utility of that philosophy.
One of the fundamental issues to address is people – and that goes for JVAT’s own people just as much as it does for the customer’s personnel. This is where engineers traditionally tend to struggle – in implementing sound engineering in the messy, complex and often confrontational world occupied by people. Which makes the recruitment and training process an even more fundamental component of success. Most of JVAT’s people over the last three years have been recruited through word of mouth via personal networks of some of the first employees – and that appears to be working well. “What our people do is to adopt and promote a very agile method of delivery – and, above all, to take responsibility,” Symons adds.
It sounds simple – but how does it work in practice? To an outsider the answer appears quite plain. There is a revolutionary spirit apparent in the thinking and the articulation of answers, there is an agility of mindset that seeks and almost immediately exploits opportunities to ‘do less, better,’ and there is, above all else, a will to do the best job humanly possible for the client. The initial assessment of how best to assist a new client involves a sort of homegrown variant of former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “Known knowns and unknown unknowns” aphorism. How will the customer derive greatest benefit from using JVAT’s expertise and global reach? How can an embedded team achieve the desired outcome in the available time? And how can this initial outcome be transformed into a lasting relationship?
“Land and expand is the answer to that last point,” Gardner states. “We almost invariably start with something small, with easily identifiable and measurable deliverables and a comprehensive review of results and lessons learned on completion. That has already started to produce repeat business, which is the best indication I know that we are doing something right”.
Building potency, agility and capability in a wide range of defence applications is what JVAT does – from model-based systems engineering and cybersecurity risk management to military explosive ordnance and mission support systems. Recruiting and supporting world-class consultants with the broad skillsets to manage, to innovate and to engineer while building on existing assets is how it does it. And being disruptive – changing the manner in which things get done, applying strategic thinking to tactical problems and empowering customer agility – is why it does it. As the corporate motto has it, JVAT is all about ‘Inspiring Excellence’. It is certainly an inspiring company to watch, to meet and to engage with.
JVAT is what Defence Alternatives is all about: changing the paradigm, challenging the ‘we have always done it this way’ thought process that saw lancers on horseback charge tanks in Poland in 1939, innovatively resolving the chaos and complexity that surrounds defence (and other) projects today. So, we will be following the company in the coming months and years, pursuing some of the ideas that conversation has given birth to, seeking out and telling the fascinating success stories that characterise its growth and watching as the revolution takes hold – quietly, but inexorably. JVAT is exhibiting at DSEI 2025 at ExCeL this week, on stand S2-110. Have a chat: you’ll be glad you did.
Image: The international JVAT team at a recent company meeting in Australia. (JVAT)
