Richard Smith is a Director within the NTMMS team at Gleeds, where he leads on the delivery of major leisure, sport and regeneration programmes across the UK. He brings over 20 years of experience in delivering complex, multi-stakeholder developments, with a strong track record of guiding projects from initial concept and business case development through to delivery and operational readiness. His expertise spans sports facilities, leisure centres, stadia, event spaces, theatres, hotels and heritage buildings, working across both public and private sector clients.
He specialises in large-scale leisure-led regeneration and is experienced in strategic advisory, stakeholder engagement, cost-benefit analysis and operational planning, supporting projects that aim to improve communities and long-term social value outcomes. In his role, Richard’s day typically starts early and is a mix of client engagement, including face-to-face meetings and strategic discussions, alongside team leadership, ensuring momentum is maintained across projects and reviewing progress and direction on a daily basis. He is motivated by the opportunity to improve health and wellbeing across communities, encouraging participation in sport and activity from children through to older generations, and by the positive impact well-designed leisure environments can have on quality of life. He was attracted to the leisure sector because of a long-standing passion for creating places that bring people together and genuinely enhance community wellbeing. His decision to join Gleeds was influenced by the organisation’s strong sense of community, its support for teams across the UK and globally, and the way it values, engages and develops its people. Gleeds values that resonate most strongly with Richard are professionalism with personality, particularly when engaging closely with communities and stakeholders. His advice to new joiners at Gleeds is to take time to get to know colleagues, who he describes as highly knowledgeable and very supportive.
One of his proudest achievements at Gleeds is reaching the point of commencing works on site at Gurnell Leisure Centre after a highly complex four-year stakeholder engagement and planning phase. Outside of work, Richard enjoys spending time with his family and reading, particularly on topics such as leadership, history and current affairs. If he had not pursued a career in this field, he believes he would still have worked in a people-focused role, potentially in social work, as he is a qualified foster carer.