Charlie Crocker on This Is Surveying: Valuations, Brazil and The Realities of Running a Firm

Charlie Crocker on This is Surveying: Valuations, Brazil and the Realities of Running a Firm

We recently got Charlie featured on This is Surveying, the podcast hosted by Nina Young. He made a bit of history as the first valuer to appear on the show, which felt like a good excuse to share some of the highlights from the conversation here.

For those who haven't come across it, This is Surveying is powered by Surveyors UK, Nina's independent platform connecting and promoting the profession, and The Surveying Room, its free online community bringing surveyors together and breaking down silos across the different specialisms. The podcast is for surveyors, future surveyors, and anyone curious about this brilliant and often overlooked profession. Nina's mission, as she puts it, is making surveying visible — which is precisely why having a valuer on the show for the first time felt like the right fit.

From Town Planning to Valuation, Via Brazil

Charlie's path into surveying wasn't particularly conventional. He studied town planning at university, drawn to the built environment and how tactile it is, before realising that both local authority work and private practice moved too slowly for him. He joined JLL on the graduate scheme under Andrew Frost, and that's where valuation clicked.

What appealed was the combination of rigour and judgement. Valuation isn't a precise science, it's an art. You build your case using comparable evidence and market data, then apply the kind of contextual thinking that only comes from experience and actually visiting the assets. The complexity is what makes it interesting.

Before starting Terracotta, Charlie took himself off to Brazil, where he set up a planning company. It didn't work out, partly because they priced themselves too cheaply to be taken seriously. He spent around five years there, largely doing estate agent work sourcing accommodation for visiting sports teams. It's not an easy place to do business, but it gave him a very clear sense of how not to undervalue what you offer.

Running a Business: The Honest Version

Charlie was candid with Nina about what running a firm actually involves. It's hard work, it takes it out of you, and the idea that being your own boss means flexibility and freedom is largely a myth. Holidays don't just happen.

What does make it worthwhile is the work itself, and the wins when they come. But getting there requires a clear head on a few things. Pricing is one of them. Surveying has a tendency toward a race to the bottom on fees, and Charlie's view is straightforward: if the service is good, it should be priced accordingly. Charging too little doesn't just affect margin, it affects perception.

He also talked about the importance of celebrating small wins with your team while staying composed as the public-facing person in the business. Not always easy, but necessary.

AI: A Tool, Not a Strategy

The conversation touched on how firms are positioning themselves around AI, with some leaning into it heavily and others avoiding it altogether. At Terracotta the approach is more pragmatic. They use it for specific tasks where it adds genuine value, things like lease summaries and other routine work, freeing up time for the parts of the job that actually require a surveyor. The key point Charlie made is that AI is only as good as the data it has access to. It can't walk a site or pick up on the things you can only assess in person, which in valuation is often exactly where the real work happens.

Graduates and Getting Them Up to Speed

Charlie spoke about the graduate side of the business with some enthusiasm. Terracotta isn't a big firm, which means graduates are involved across everything from early on. They're client-facing relatively quickly and given real responsibility, which tends to accelerate their development considerably compared to larger organisations where the work is more compartmentalised. Hiring is competitive, and persuading good candidates to choose a smaller firm over a well-known name requires them to back themselves and take a chance. The ones who do tend to get a lot more out of it.

Final Thought

Charlie closed by reflecting on the connectedness of the surveying world and how much he values being able to pick up the phone and talk to people across the profession. It's something Nina has built The Surveying Room around — a free, independent community for surveyors at every stage of their career, a single trusted space to learn, connect, and stay up to date without noisy algorithms or scattered social media groups. The instinct Charlie described, to share knowledge and stay connected across the profession, is exactly what that community is for.

The full episode is well worth a listen wherever you get your podcasts.