COMMON TIME
Independent advice for civic, cultural and community assets
Better decisions about the places public life happens.
Common Time helps councils and other public asset owners work out what to keep, change, build, combine, run differently or stop, before the money is committed. Sometimes the answer is a new building. Sometimes it isn't.
WHAT
Common Time is the independent advisory practice of Gus Sharp, working with councils, public asset owners and project teams across Aotearoa New Zealand.
The work usually starts before the solution is fixed. A community group wants a new building. A council has three ageing ones and the money for a single replacement. A business case assumes an operating model nobody has tested.
Someone has to decide, and the evidence to decide on is not there yet.
That is the gap the work fills. Whether the project is justified at all. Which of the existing assets are worth keeping, what a new one would cost to run once it opened, who carries the risk, and what still has to be answered before a council commits.
An architect answers what to design, an engineer whether it will work, a quantity surveyor what it costs to build. Common Time comes in earlier than that, on what you should do at all, and in what order.
The work uses the council's own condition, cost and utilisation data. It comes back as an options assessment, a decision paper, or an input to the long-term plan.
Gus does the work himself. Common Time advises. It does not design buildings, build them or run them.
Every engagement gets the same test. Will this still stand up once the funding, the politics and the day-to-day reality of running it arrive?
DECISIONS
Most engagements are one of these three. Some projects move through all of them over several years.
What combination of facilities and services do we actually need over the next ten years?Start with the service, not the building. What people need, what the current assets can and cannot do, what is worth keeping and what is not, where services can share a roof, how hard each option is used, what it costs to run, and a staged pathway a council can actually adopt and fund.
Do we know enough to commit serious public money?Feasibility and options, including doing nothing. What it costs to run as well as what it costs to build. Which technical work a council needs before it decides and which can wait. Cost and service trade-offs, decision gates, and the smallest intervention that would solve the problem.
We have decided what to do. How do we make it work?Operating models and who should hold them. Going to market for an external operator. Governance, staffing and cost structure, pricing and access, commercial systems, contracts and leases, transition, and everything that has to be in place before a building opens.
Common Time works alongside architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and economists, and is often the owner-side voice in a team those disciplines lead.
PROBLEMS
- Several ageing buildings, a renewals bill for all of them, and the money for one.
- A facilities strategy that sets out what the council owns but not what to do about it.
- Two organisations each asking for their own building, where one might serve both.
- A network of halls with falling use and no agreed basis for keeping or closing any of them.
- An asset plan and a community outcome that point in different directions.
- A business case resting on an operating model nobody has tested.
- A proposal that has been in the long-term plan for years without ever being tested.
- A capital estimate revised twice, and an operating cost nobody has produced.
- A feasibility study that answers whether it can be built, not whether it should be.
- A council asked to commit before it knows what the building costs to run.
- A building opening in months, with no operating model, staffing or systems behind it.
- A venue running at a deficit nobody can fully explain.
- A decision to go to market for an operator, and no settled view of what is being offered.
- A trust or council-controlled organisation that has stopped fitting what the council needs.
- A building moving between the council and a community group with no plan for the handover.
WHO
Common Time is the independent advisory practice of Gus Sharp. He is usually brought in where a decision is complex, politically sensitive, commercially exposed, or not yet properly framed.
Gus trained and practised as a solicitor. Contracts, risk and negotiation, and making documents say what the project actually required.
Two decades in senior roles across venue development and operations, major events, destination and economic development, and community arts organisations.
He has opened buildings and run them, won and delivered major events for cities, negotiated the contracts and intellectual property behind them, and worked the long game of government and community relations.
He now advises councils, public asset owners and project teams, and sits inside larger teams led by architecture, engineering, economic and urban advisory firms as the owner-side operating voice their disciplines do not cover.
CONTACT
Based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Working across New Zealand and Australia. Most engagements start with a short conversation about the decision you are trying to make.