Simon Lock is a key member of the Woohoo team, working as a Sustainability Consultant.
Here, he shares his career journey to date, what he loves about his job and how he achieves success.
What’s your career experience to date?
I’m currently working as a Sustainability Consultant as part of the Woohooo team. I’m a relative newcomer to the heritage building industry, with a background in performance engineering.
I originally qualified with a Masters in Motorsport Engineering and specialised in vehicle electronic systems and controls strategy. This involved lots of accurate vehicle measurements, using a wide variety of sensing technologies and how controls systems use this information to gain the most performance from a vehicle, working across British 125cc, World 125cc, Formula 1 and Formula E.
My work then evolved into performance engineering, and simulation work in the electric car series Formula E, culminating in race wins at world championship level.
My experience has transferred to buildings with the approach of accurately measuring required data, using the data to understand the underlying physics of a building, and then simulating different changes, to ensure that the proposed changes are going to have the required impact.
How do you achieve success in your role?
Success to me is enabling project partners to make well-informed decisions, to achieve their goals.
This involves taking the time to understand what the client wants to achieve with their space, properly understanding how their building works through data and simulation and then highlighting to them what options they have available, to make their project a success.
Success also takes other forms, such as visually showing how much waste is in a process or giving insight into how someone’s building works and how they can get the best out of it.
What’s your favourite aspect of your role?
That’s easy, the best part of the role is watching what people can achieve with the information that we’ve been able to provide. This could be changing from space heaters to an air source heat pump to drastically reduce their bills, providing a set of drone photos that has enabled funds to be gathered for a roof replacement, changing façade renders that have allowed someone to gain listed building consent, or even a company changing to a fleet of electric vehicles, to reduce their emissions.
What’s your favourite thing about being part of the Woohoo team?
I particularly enjoy the collaborative nature of the work we do. We aim to learn every day, and we always want to base our decisions on information, rather than hunches.
We can’t always be experts, but if we gather good information, we can use this to communicate with others who do have that experience and learn from that.
Finally, tell us a fun or surprising fact about you…
I keep bees and have a fascination with nature. How ecosystems have evolved and use the resources and physics in their landscape provide infinite wonder and inspiration!
If you’d like to get in touch with Simon to discuss your next project (or hear about his time with Formula 1… or get some advice on beekeeping!), be sure to contact us, we’d love to hear from you.