Operating its own way, JVAT continues to land and expand

Having expanded out of its native Australia to establish a firm base in the UK defence market, engineering and assurance consultancy firm JVAT now has its sights set on the United States.

Representatives from the company recently visited the 2024 Association of the US Army exhibition, held from 14 to 16 October in Washington, DC, to identify future prospects for business and are actively scouting for a US office location.

“The United States will be an important market for JVAT and we are very keen to engage with US primes and Tier 2 companies as well as the US Department of Defense,” JVAT’s UK director, Henry Gardner, told ESD on 25 October. “JVAT has representation in the United States with a partner in the energy domain and we are hopeful that in 2025 we can identify opportunities in the US defence domain and potential locations for an office,” he added.

JVAT was founded in Melbourne in 2017 by Jimmy Stewart, an ex-UK armed forces member and Command Field Gunner, who set up the company with the intention of doing things differently and inspiring excellence in his team and its partners. In recent years doing precisely that has seen JVAT’s global revenues grow from GBP 8 million (EUR 9.6 million) in FY2021/22 to over GBP 14 million in FY2023/24.

JVAT looks to take a proactive approach to delivering solutions (including products and services) that mitigate risks at the enterprise, programme and project level to achieve critical outcomes for its partners. As the company’s website states, “We add value to risk, turning stagnant processes, deliverables and checklists into intelligent, smoothly executed outcomes.” 

JVAT certainly has an unconventional philosophy in the way it does business. One obvious stand-out is that ‘fun’ is listed as one of the seven key values the company has identified as a guiding principle, the others being teamwork, grit, integrity, trust, confidence and respect.

In expressing JVAT’s fundamental ethos, Gardner emphasised that “It’s all about the people.” Describing the company, he said, “You’ve got an ex-military Field Gunner, that’s Jimmy – that aggressive yet clinical mindset around setting the standards for discipline and delivery. Combine that with a very much people-based mindset of relationships and having fun. Smash those two things together: that’s the culture you’ve got within JVAT.”

In terms of how the JVAT staff has expanded, Gardner explained that Stewart “just finds like-minded people to grow the business, and then he just puts a huge amount of trust, through building relationships, to his leadership team. And then we’re off.”

Having joined JVAT four years ago, working out of JVAT’s Brisbane office, Gardner came to the UK two-and-a-half years ago to set up JVAT’s UK operation, which now has 20 staff working out of offices in Bristol and Poole among 101 personnel globally.

Explaining how JVAT finds niche opportunities to do business, Gardner referred to what he called the ‘air fryer model’. “When I first went over to Australia, it was completely normal for every house to have an air fryer, but whenever I talked to any family or friends back in the UK, they never knew what I was talking about,” he recalled. “So, what we’re now doing, from a business point of view, is finding out what those ‘air fryers’ are.

One such example, Gardner noted, appeared with the advent of the AUKUS trilateral pact between Australia, the United States and the UK, under which the Royal Australian Navy will ultimately acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability. Identifying the consequent need for nuclear experts in Australia, JVAT was then able to bring in those experts much quicker, with a high level of competency, than its competitors and partners were able to do.

The company has a mindset of ‘Do less, better’ and what Gardner referred to as a ‘land and expand’ mindset, under which, rather than addressing its markets too broadly, the company concentrates on excelling in key areas and then expanding from those.

Globally, JVAT operates in three markets – defence, energy and transport – but in the UK defence is the primary market, in which the company has three lines of revenue.

Firstly, it works directly with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), with business mainly related to the Aurora Engineering Delivery Partnership, in which QinetiQ, Atkins and BMT are tasked with optimising the efficiency of engineering projects conducted by the MoD’s Defence Equipment & Support organisation. JVAT has also worked with the MoD on wind farm mitigation, ensuring wind turbines to not adversely affect the UK’s air defence radars.

Secondly, JVAT works with UK prime contractors, working on programmes such as the UK’s Tempest sixth-generation fighter, while a third business stream involves UK Tier 2 defence companies. Each of these business streams has its own idiosyncrasies, Gardner noted; the defence primes are much slower moving, but have big budgets, while the Tier 2 companies have smaller budgets, but are more pragmatic, and typically turn to JVAT when they have a problem they need solving quickly.

Much of JVAT’s global expansion, meanwhile, is leveraged off existing partners – for example via defence primes the company has worked with in Australia – or through personal contacts who are familiar with the company, not just with its track record, but in how it delivers. In this regard, JVAT effectively markets itself, with Gardner noting that the company deliberately over-delivers, in a way that the defence industry traditionally does not, while maintaining a constantly positive attitude with its partners.

“The feedback we’ve had from the customers, multiple customers, is they’ve all said that every JVAT person in that delivery space, every touch point they have with JVAT – whether it’s a delivery person, a business development person, a financial person, an invoicing person – they’re all the same: they’re positive, polite, ‘can do’ and friendly,” Gardner observed. “That stands out significantly with any client.” The company has, in fact, successfully delivered over 350 engagements with a client satisfaction rating of 94%.

For JVAT, those reactions, in combination with teamwork, grit, integrity, trust, confidence, respect, and indeed fun, would appear to constitute a somewhat unique formula for success.