supplychain


INTERVIEW with


Vince Caldicott


GEORGE SELL meets Vince Caldicott,


managing director of


Premier Contract Supplies – the contract-only supplier of bathroomware.


Toughing it out through not one, but two recessions, is a trait most successful suppliers to the housebuilding industry seem to share, and Vince Caldicott, managing director of Premier Contract Supplies, certainly qualifies for membership of this exclusive club. After leaving school and carrying out an apprenticeship with British Gas as a gas engineer, Caldicott took the path of an entrepreneur, as many in his family had before him.


“I come from a family who have always had their own businesses, so I expected that one day I’d have my own business,” he says. “I left British Gas, and set up my own heating company, which ultimately grew to about 50 direct and indirect employees.” It was here that Caldicott spotted


the first in a series of business opportunities. “I soon realised that I was spending a huge amount of money with merchants such as Plumb Center, Drakes Plumbing and similar companies. My turnover


seemed to be sufficient for me to set up


my own merchants, so I decided to branch out with my brother-in-law, and set up a plumbers merchants called Premier Heating Supplies. This was in the late 1980s – just at the beginning of the last recession – but it worked for us because a lot of the national merchants were closing accounts


96| May 2013 showhouse


left, right and centre, meaning we gained a lot of new customers early on. Although we took a large bad debt in the first year, at the business’ height we had three branches in the South East; each with a steady flow of business.” Premier Heating Supplies, although successful, soon reached its potential limits, leading to the next phase in Caldicott’s career. “We found that we could never compete on the nice juicy contracts, and whenever we went for any volume business we were blown out of the water by the nationals on price. It was time for us to get in on the contract action. We began investigating the few independent contract supplies that were doing quite well and approaching manufacturers. Though hesitant to give us direct accounts as second line merchants, we were told by many manufacturers that if we developed a contract only line of business they would be prepared to talk about supplying us. So it was that in 1998 we set up the initial branch of Premier Contract Supplies – a contract-only supplier of bathroomware.” “It took a long time to break in to the business, it was very hard and we had to add lots of additional services to tempt people to use us,” says Caldicott. “For the first five or six years we lost money, but we started to do really well in the mid-2000s. From day one we’d been growing turnover by 30% to 40% per annum. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 we started to make a decent profit and were doing really well... then along came the recession.” In common with most suppliers to the sector, life


changed dramatically for the worse in a short space of time. “We used invoice discounts from an American bank, which decided in 2008 that it no longer wanted to be involved in the UK construction industry, and pulled our funding. That ripped the floor out from under our feet, and we had to really struggle to survive. But one thing that we didn’t do was get rid of any of our sales team. We had to cut costs – everybody took a pay cut and everybody felt the pain – but the sales team stayed in place and that proved to be the right decision. We also took on an interior designer during the recession, and opened a new branch in the north-west.” Caldicott says: “We started dealing with a new Israeli bank, which does our invoice discounting, and


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