RMT Solutions is just me. There are no employees and no sub-consultants: every lift plan, every review and every invoice goes through my hands. That has always been the limit on what a one-man business can do. AI has moved that limit further than I thought possible.

Building the tools I always wanted

For years I worked the way most of the industry does: spreadsheets, templates and whatever software the market offered, bent to fit the job. With AI, I describe what I need in plain English, the way I would explain it to a colleague on site, and we build it together.

In practice that has meant:

• My own lift planning toolkit. Lift plan reviews, lift plans, method statements and a drawing engine that draws the machines to the manufacturers' published dimensions and the rigging as real gear: master links, shackles and round slings, not boxes and straight lines. It works from my own library of crane and lorry loader data, taken only from UK and European manufacturers' sheets.
• LiftPlan Studio, a lorry loader lift planning app built from the spreadsheet I had been using to plan those lifts.
• Lift Planner AP, a modern lift planning program covering mobile cranes, lorry loaders, telehandlers and excavators, which I am preparing as an invite-only preview for Appointed Persons.
• Four websites: RMT Solutions, Wildlife Photographs, RMT Visuals and this one, together with a dashboard that tells me each week how they are doing in Google.

None of that would have been realistic for one person a few years ago. The hours alone would have ruled it out.

Why I moved from Windows to Apple

My working life used to run on Windows, because that is where the software I depended on lived. Once I could build my own tools, that tie was gone. The software is mine, it runs where I want it to, and much of it now runs in a web browser anyway.

So I moved to Apple. My desk now has a Mac Studio, a Mac mini and a MacBook. The Mac Studio is where I work. The Mac mini sits alongside it, sharing the same keyboard and mouse, so AI jobs can run on one machine while I carry on with another job on the other. On a busy day there might be several reviews and lift plans being worked on at once, each in its own window, while I check the finished ones.

What AI does not do

This is the part that matters most in my trade. AI does not take responsibility for a lift. I do.

Every plan and every review that leaves RMT Solutions is checked by me as the Appointed Person before it goes anywhere. The calculations and drawings come from software I built and tested myself, working from manufacturers' data. AI is what I used to build that software. It does not plan lifts and it does not decide. When I change my own software, the safety figures (radii, capacities, utilisation, ground bearing) are tested against known results and must not move unless I have asked them to. A model of a building can tell the software where a beam sits, but never what it weighs or what a crane can lift. Those numbers come from the manufacturer's data, and I check them.

I am just as careful about what I share. Business documents go only to the tools I trust with them. Anything I use for public social media posts can go to a wider set of tools, because that content is public anyway.

The hobbies too

It has not all been work. The same tools run my wildlife photography site, including a weekly panel of the latest bird sightings at Pennington Flash. They help with my wildlife films and keep the website in good order. Time I used to spend on admin now goes on being out with a camera.

What I would say to anyone in the trade

You do not need to be a programmer. You need to know your job inside out and be able to explain it clearly, which most experienced people in construction already can. AI turns that knowledge into tools, but the judgement stays with you.

A year ago I was a lifting consultant who used software. Now I am a lifting consultant who builds it.

You can’t direct a kingfisher. You can’t ask a roe deer to step into better light. All you can do is learn the habits of your subject, work out where it’s likely to be and when, find a spot where you won’t disturb it, and then wait — often for hours, often for nothing.

I’ve come to think of that waiting as the whole point rather than the price of admission. It’s the closest thing I have to switching off. After a week of lift plans and risk assessments, there’s something restorative about a task where the only thing required of me is to be quiet, alert, and patient.

And when it does come together — when the bird lands exactly where you hoped, in the light you’d been picturing — the photograph almost feels like a by-product. The real reward was being there, ready, having earned it.

(This is placeholder writing to show how a journal entry looks. Replace it with your own — I’ve kept the structure simple so it’s easy to edit.)

This site is my attempt to stop keeping them apart.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more the two have in common. Both reward preparation. Both punish the assumption you didn’t check. And both, in their own way, are about respect — for the people working under a load they can’t see, or for an animal that has no interest whatsoever in my schedule.

I’m roughly ten years out from retirement, and rather than treat that as a cliff edge I’m treating it as a direction. The plan, loosely, is to let the camera take up more of the calendar as the consultancy winds down. This site is partly a record of that slow swap — the work I’m proud of now, the photographs I make along the way, and whatever this all becomes.

If you’ve found your way here, thank you for reading. Have a look around the photography, take a look at what I do, and check back now and then — I’ll be adding to it as I go.

The difference between a plan that protects people and one that simply satisfies a requirement usually comes down to a single quality: whether someone actually questioned the assumptions in it.

It’s easy to produce a document that references the right standards, lists the right equipment, and reads convincingly. It’s much harder to look at that document and ask the awkward questions. Is the ground really going to take that load? Has anyone checked the actual weight, or are we trusting a figure someone remembered? What happens if the wind picks up halfway through? What’s the plan when — not if — something doesn’t go as expected?

That, to me, is the craft of it. Not the paperwork, but the scrutiny. Catching the one assumption nobody questioned, before anybody has to find out the hard way that it was wrong.

(This is placeholder writing to show how a journal entry looks. Replace it with your own thoughts on the work.)