How It All Began: From Indonesian Barrel Waves to Building Documentation
Every great business has an origin story. Some start in a garage, others over a back of the napkin coffee. Dewick & Associates? Ours started in a surf lineup in Indonesia, or more accurately, the quest to get there.
Back in 2008, our founder Phil Dewick had a simple dream: head to Indo with a mate and chase some proper waves. There was just one tiny catch. When he floated the idea to his wife, the green light came with a very reasonable condition: “Go for it, but you’re funding it yourself—outside the house budget!”
Challenge accepted.
Working as a consulting engineer at the time, Phil reached out to his network of project managers across the construction industry with a basic question: What’s the one job you desperately need done, but nobody actually wants to do?
The answer came back in a unanimous, resounding chorus: O&M Manuals.
In the construction world, Operating & Maintenance Manuals were historically viewed as the ultimate short straw. They were seen as tedious, thankless, box-ticking admin tasks that everyone avoided until the absolute last minute, usually when the site team was already exhausted, stressed, and trying to pack up for the next project.
Where others saw a headache, Phil saw an opportunity.
Instead of treating handover documentation like a rushed, end-of-project afterthought, he took the job seriously. Manuals were delivered clear, well-organised, accurate, and actually useful for the people operating the building long after the scaffolding came down.
The feedback from project teams was immediate, and so was the demand. What began as a hustle to buy a surfboard and a plane ticket quickly snowballed. Before long, those late-night manual sessions evolved into the founding of Dewick & Associates.
The Surf’s Up, But the Philosophy Remains
The trip to Indonesia happened (and the waves were great!), but the lesson stuck with us.
It didn’t take long to realise that O&M manuals were just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Project teams were drowning in all kinds of paper trails, so we took that same straightforward, high-quality approach and applied it across the entire spectrum of building handovers.
Today, that exact same mindset drives everything we do at Dewick & Associates. We’ve grown well beyond our original O&M Manual roots to deliver a full suite of construction documentation, from commissioning plans and building user guides to technical authoring, as installed drawings, and compliance.
We still firmly believe that construction documentation shouldn’t be treated as a painful box-ticking exercise. Done right, every plan, drawing, and manual becomes a genuine, valuable asset for facility managers, building owners, and maintenance teams long after the construction dust settles.
We survived the wave of paperwork so you don’t have to, and we’re still taking the hassle out of building handovers today.
