The situation

Some companies grow steadily. Heighway grew like a lit fuse.

George Heighway founded the business in 2020, and within a couple of years it was a respected high voltage contractor working up to 33kV. Fast forward to now and they're delivering critical infrastructure across the national power network at up to 400,000 volts: substation builds, cable jointing, protection and commissioning, the works. When the UK's largest battery storage site needed its electrical installation done properly, Heighway got the call. Their client list reads like the backbone of the British grid: national grid operators, distribution network owners, Tier 1 contractors.

Along the way they'd organised themselves into four specialist divisions. Optimi handles extra high voltage design and commissioning, Construction does the civils, Energy covers the mechanical and electrical work, and Plant runs their in-house fleet of cranes and operated machinery. Four genuinely capable teams under one roof, able to take a project from muddy field to energisation without a single subcontractor.

The trouble was, none of that showed. They were still trading as Heighway ERC (Energy, Rail, Construction), a name describing a company that had long since stopped existing, on a website built for it. And their whole culture leans understated. Their own line about themselves was that they'd rather build a reputation on the quality of the work than on loud logos, right down to the subtle signage on their vans. Which is a wonderful way to run a business, and a hopeless way to be found by someone specifying a £100 million grid connection.

They deserved to look like what they'd become. That was the job.

What had to be true

Before anything got designed, three questions needed answering. How do you make four divisions feel like one serious group without flattening what makes each of them special? How do you build a proper presence for people who are constitutionally allergic to showing off? And how do you sell to an audience of engineers who can spot a bluff from half a sentence away?

The decisions

One family of marks, built to hold together

Each division needed its own identity within the group's, so Larcs designed the full set: a primary Heighway mark, then lockups for Optimi, Construction, Energy and Plant that carry the family resemblance wherever they appear, from a tender document to a hard hat to the side of a crane.

There's craft hiding in that set that nobody will ever consciously notice, which is rather the point. "Construction" is a much longer word than "Plant," and if you're not careful you end up with four logos of four different widths that read as an accident rather than a family. So the lockups were built to hold a consistent size across the set. Get that right and the group looks like it was always meant to be one company. Get it wrong and no amount of good photography saves you.

One home, with the history preserved

Heighway arrived with three domains. Their original one carried six years of hard-won search equity, a new one was bought for the group they'd become, and a spare was tucked away for the future. Everything now lives at heighwaygroup.com, with the old domain redirecting rather than dying, so every link, bookmark and Google ranking they'd earned since 2020 came with them. Nothing thrown away, everything pointing one direction.

We designed the site first, then went and shot it

Every construction business has a folder of photos taken on someone's phone, and a company bidding against the biggest names in UK infrastructure can't introduce itself that way. So a professional content day was part of the project from day one, not an upsell at the end, and the order of operations was the clever bit. We designed the site first, then wrote the shot list from the finished pages, so the drone footage and photography were captured to serve a design that already knew exactly what it needed. Two days on site with a professional crew, one for aerials over a live substation build and one for the people and the kit.

The result is a site that looks like them. Their teams, their compounds, their machinery, shot properly, plus a film that introduces the company in their own voice. Understated and credible, exactly as they are in person.

We learned their world before marketing to it

Heighway's buyers speak a technical language of DNOs, IDNOs, grid connections, protection and commissioning, and marketing that gets the vocabulary wrong dies instantly with that audience. So before a single ad ran, we did the homework: proper keyword research, a competitor landscape, and a briefed knowledge base so everyone at Sonder touching the account starts from real understanding. Then we took the plan back to Heighway's engineers and asked them to mark it.

The content that's come out of it works the same way for their buyers. Not "we're experts in grid connections," which anybody can claim, but genuinely useful explanations: what an IDNO actually is, how it differs from a DNO, and what that means for the connection you're planning. Written to be correct first, because for this audience, correct is what gets found.

What’s live now?

A brand that finally matches the company. One group, four divisions, a family of marks that holds together everywhere from a van to a tender, and a website full of their own photography and film rather than stock.

One domain with six years of search history safely carried across, and a search and ads programme speaking the language their buyers actually use.

And an early sign it's landing: career applications started arriving through the new site in real volume, from exactly the kind of skilled people a growing infrastructure business needs. For a company that had been hiring through LinkedIn posts, that's the new brand quietly doing its job.