Specialist engineering contractor McGee suffered a £2.8m pre-tax loss last year after being hit by a £3.6m bad debt from the insolvency of a client on a major London hotel job.
The setback reversed the employee-owned groundwork and demolition firm’s previous-year £5.3m profit as turnover also fell 11% to £134m from £151m in the year to November 2025.
McGee said the exceptional bad debt masked a much stronger underlying performance, with EBITDA margin at 6.5% once the hit was stripped out, compared with 6.3% in 2024.
Reported EBITDA margin fell to just 1.2%.
Results were also squeezed by delays to the start of several projects, leaving the contractor under-recovering support costs and running with lower efficiency across plant, haulage and central functions.
Despite the tougher year, McGee ended November with £13.3m cash, against £16m previously.
The business said it remained debt free apart from normal equipment financing and maintained a 98% on-time supplier payment record.
McGee is now targeting a return to former profit levels as delayed schemes start and a strengthening pipeline converts into workload.
The contractor remains focused on London and the wider M25 market, with recent awards at Heathrow Airport, 50 Baker Street and in the data centre sector.
It has also lined up a major unnamed West End project drawing on its expertise in complex basement and below-ground structures.
The accounts said McGee was seeing more clients bring its McGee Consult engineering team into projects at an earlier stage to help solve planning, logistics and buildability challenges.
This is improving visibility over future workload while allowing the business to remain selective over the projects it takes on.
Group managing director Bernard O’Reilly said: “We enter the year ahead with confidence, a resilient platform and a continued focus on delivering certainty for our clients through our integrated engineering solutions.”
Specialist engineering contractor McGee suffered a £2.8m pre-tax loss last year after being hit by a £3.6m bad debt from the insolvency of a client on a major London hotel job.
The setback reversed the employee-owned groundwork and demolition firm’s previous-year £5.3m profit as turnover also fell 11% to £134m from £151m in the year to November 2025.
McGee said the exceptional bad debt masked a much stronger underlying performance, with EBITDA margin at 6.5% once the hit was stripped out, compared with 6.3% in 2024.
Reported EBITDA margin fell to just 1.2%.
Results were also squeezed by delays to the start of several projects, leaving the contractor under-recovering support costs and running with lower efficiency across plant, haulage and central functions.
Despite the tougher year, McGee ended November with £13.3m cash, against £16m previously.
The business said it remained debt free apart from normal equipment financing and maintained a 98% on-time supplier payment record.
McGee is now targeting a return to former profit levels as delayed schemes start and a strengthening pipeline converts into workload.
The contractor remains focused on London and the wider M25 market, with recent awards at Heathrow Airport, 50 Baker Street and in the data centre sector.
It has also lined up a major unnamed West End project drawing on its expertise in complex basement and below-ground structures.
The accounts said McGee was seeing more clients bring its McGee Consult engineering team into projects at an earlier stage to help solve planning, logistics and buildability challenges.
This is improving visibility over future workload while allowing the business to remain selective over the projects it takes on.
Group managing director Bernard O’Reilly said: “We enter the year ahead with confidence, a resilient platform and a continued focus on delivering certainty for our clients through our integrated engineering solutions.”
