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Jon Lee did not plan to become an acoustician. He planned to study Business Operations and Control, walked out after the first lecture and ended up in a bar during freshers week talking to someone on a course that mixed acoustics, music technology and electronic engineering. It sounded more interesting. He went along to see it, applied and got accepted.
That was the whole decision.
It was, he admits, slightly mis-sold. He had expected something heavily music-led and found instead a serious academic discipline with serious mathematics underneath it. The maths, it turns out, is what takes you into acoustics properly. He stuck with it, came out with a good honours degree and then spent a couple of years looking at other industries before a route back opened through an alumni contact. He took it.
There was no single moment where everything clicked. It built up over eighteen years in global multidisciplinary consultancies, across sectors and across every design stage from pre-concept through to construction support. What kept him in it was something particular to acoustics that very few disciplines offer: you eventually find out whether you were right. People walk into the finished space and either it works or it does not. That feedback loop, delayed and definitive, is what held his interest through nearly two decades of building capability inside other businesses.
In April 2025 he started Focus Acoustics. At some point, he wanted to build one that was his.
Sound advice, made simple
The tagline of Focus Acoustics is not decorative. It has three distinct layers and Jon is precise about all of them.
The first is that the advice has to be right. Technically thorough, accurate and backed by the appropriate level of assessment. Modelling where modelling is warranted, measurement where measurement is warranted, and no guessing dressed up as judgement.
The second is that it has to be usable. Simple does not mean simplified. The work behind the advice stays at full depth. What changes is the delivery. A developer does not want to know the specific rating of a party wall. They want to know whether they will be dealing with complaints from the apartment next door after handover, what it costs to avoid that, and what it costs to fix if they do not. Same technical result. Completely different answer.
The third is knowing who you are talking to. Focus Acoustics works with architects and interior designers, engineers, developers, contractors and individual property owners. What each of them needs from the same piece of work is different. Understanding exactly what the client wants comes before you put pen to paper, not after.
Doing it well, as Jon defines it, means the client can act on what they have been given without needing it explained twice.
The invisible discipline
The challenge Jon thinks about most right now is one the built environment has been quietly failing to address for years. Acoustics, as he describes it, is the invisible discipline. You cannot walk a site and see it the way you can see a facade or a finish. You cannot demonstrate it on a drawing in a way that makes a non-specialist react. So it gets deferred. And it stays deferred until the space is complete and occupied.
That is when the problems start. And by then everybody is in the expensive part of the process.
The enquiries that have grown fastest at Focus Acoustics are from individual property owners who are unhappy with the acoustic conditions they are living in. Environmental noise ingress. Construction noise. Building services noise and vibration from plant rooms next door or overhead. The causes, in Jon’s experience, come down to three things consistently: acoustics was not designed properly, it was designed and then value-engineered out, or nobody was appointed to look at it at all until the building was finished. The last one is the most common.
The design stages are unforgiving about this. By schematic design the partition strategy is set and plant locations are fixed. By the end of detailed design every acoustic decision should be locked, because that is the last point at which a change can be absorbed without hitting cost or programme. After IFC it becomes a contractor variation. Remediation after handover costs a multiple of what the design input would have cost, and that is before accounting for opening up finished ceilings, relocating commissioned plant and doing all of it in an occupied building.
Jon’s response is twofold. The first is getting acousticians into the conversation at pre-concept and concept design, which mostly means education. He runs lunch and learn sessions with design studios. The most recent is called Acoustics for Humans, which tells you the level it is pitched at. The second is verification: moving further into accredited testing so that advice at design stage is backed by proof that the building actually performs at the end of it. Closing the loop between what was specified and what was built.
Being technically right is not enough
If there is one thing Jon wishes someone had told him earlier in his career, it is this: being technically right does not always protect you. Scope does.
He spent a long time believing that if the engineering was sound, everything else would follow. It does not. The projects that hurt are not the ones where the acoustics were wrong. They are the ones where nobody agreed what was in and what was out before the work started, so the scope quietly expanded, the fee did not, and the relationship soured over something that had nothing to do with acoustics.
His advice is direct: define the scope, write it down, be specific about what you are not doing and be willing to say no. That last part takes the longest to learn because saying no feels like losing work. It is not.
For anyone thinking about entering the field, he is equally direct: study it properly. An acoustics degree or a postgraduate diploma is necessary to understand the fundamentals of why the work is done the way it is. Plenty of people pick up the software. Far fewer understand what is happening underneath it, and that gap shows up the moment a project goes sideways.
And for anyone thinking about going out on their own: the only reason not to make the jump is financial security. Plan that properly and there is nothing holding you back. Ignore the inner doubts, the questions, the imposter syndrome. Go and do it.
Building something that does not depend on you
Focus Acoustics launched in April 2025 and has already shape-shifted from what Jon had in mind at the outset.
At the start, success looked like technical output. Being the person who gets the answer right, produces the best report, solves the problem nobody else could. Eighteen years in consultancy trains you to value exactly that.
Now it looks like building something that is not dependent on him. That is a harder target and he is honest that he is not there yet. Every opportunity in the pipeline was created by him personally, and that is the constraint on everything else the business wants to do.
The hard part is staying on the strategic targets without getting pulled into the detail. As a small business owner that is difficult, because you want every single thing running perfectly and you know exactly how to make it run perfectly yourself. Learning that this is not the same as running the business well is the shift. There is a team and there are partner companies now. Getting work to the right place within that is a large part of what he actually does.
The definition of success, for Jon, has moved from getting the answer right to building something that can get answers right without him. He is working on it.
A word of thanks
Jon closes with one credit and no more. His wife, Alison, who supported him to start what he is doing and to keep doing it. Without her, he says plainly, he would probably still be working at someone else’s desk.
That sentence, short and unadorned, carries the full weight of what it actually takes to leave security and build something of your own.
Jon Lee is the Principal Consultant and Founder of Focus Acoustics, Dubai. This piece is part of The Minds Behind the Build, PAGES’ ongoing series celebrating the founders and leaders shaping the built environment.
