The integration question
Every party below does real, necessary work, and the licensed work among it stays with licensed professionals — that never changes. The risk is not the specialists. It is the disconnection between them: the decisions that fall between five scopes because no one of them is accountable for the whole line.
Controls
Spatial and statutory design — the building as drawings that can win approval.
Stays disconnected
Menu economics, kitchen throughput and operating cost live outside the drawing set. A beautiful plan can still carry a kitchen that cannot serve its own menu at margin.
Controls
Execution — building what the coordinated drawings say, to programme and price.
Stays disconnected
Whatever the drawings missed is priced later as variations. The contractor executes the gaps as faithfully as the plan — the cost of disconnection arrives as change orders.
Controls
Equipment supply, installation and commissioning — the hardware of production.
Stays disconnected
Menu-driven sizing, MEP interfaces and food-safety flow sit upstream of the catalogue. Without an owned equipment schedule, the kitchen is bought item by item instead of designed as a line.
Controls
Identity, story and the visual system — the promise the venue makes in public.
Stays disconnected
Unit economics and operational deliverability live outside the brand book. A promise the P&L cannot afford, or the kitchen cannot serve, is a beautiful liability.
Controls
Applications and approvals — moving files through the authorities correctly.
Stays disconnected
Design decisions that will fail inspection are usually made months before the file is submitted. Paperwork run apart from design and build discovers problems at the most expensive moment.
Integrates the line
One party, on the owner's side, accountable from feasibility to opening night: the investment case governs the concept, the menu sizes the kitchen, the kitchen brief reaches the licensed engineers before design freeze, the BOQ makes bids comparable, licensing runs in sequence with design instead of after it, and the team is trained before the paint dries. The specialists still do their work — statutory design, licensed engineering and approvals stay exactly where the law puts them. What changes is that the gaps between their scopes now have an owner.
This is the reading behind the development mandate — and it is why every GGB service page states its own split between what GGB holds, what the client holds, and what stays with licensed specialists.
GGB