Shopfloor analysis // Business improvements
Shaun Lenane, Audus Kitchens
We’ve spent a lot of time recently refining how we operate as a business. Rather than, for instance, the salesperson having to do the ordering and juggling, we’ve taken a lot of those things away from them. So we’ve got a staff member who – by the end of this year – will eventually be ordering all of the appliances in our projects, and she’ll be responsible for all of that herself. She can go into the CRM system and take all of the information for that order there. That means the only thing our designers would order would essentially be the furniture, on software like Winner Flex, and even then we do that in pairs to try and hopefully mitigate the number of mistakes that could happen. Then, we check it again when it comes through, because we’re all human, and of course it’s not infallible. It can be easy to put the wrong lighting or the wrong colour furniture, so you’ve just got to triple check everything. The idea is that the salespeople will have more time for selling, so we’re trying to make it a bit more old-school without all of the dross. When it comes to social media, we’re also trying to do a lot more with that as well, and we also use an agency for that. Now, when we do a client handover at the end of a project, we hand them a nice little goody bag – and they love that, by the way – and we talk them through any appliance issues, and then we sign off with them. At that moment, we now always ask if we can take some pictures of the project. We then send them on to the agency, along with a list of the make
and model of the kitchen, and then that’ll go on the socials. We also have someone in-house for Instagram and Facebook, and it’s great because we now get loads of clients coming in saying they’ve seen our recent work through social media, so we’re very pleased with how that’s going.
Tom Baldwin, Paragon Designs
One of the biggest things I’m doing is that I’ve signed up for two learning programmes, one that’s dedicated to the KBB industry, and one that’s more industry-generic. That’s been a really positive thing. It’s helped us really look at things in a different way, it’s given us more confidence to understand how to push things to the next level. The more general business coaching one is run by Joseph Valente, The Apprentice winner, and it’s all about showing you how he did that and how you can apply that to your own business. For instance, we used to wear polo shirts and jeans to work, and now we make sure we’re always wearing shirts, jackets and proper trousers. Making subtle changes like that can really change how customers see you. We’ve also taken out some investment money to put into
the business. So we’re expanding our studio space and we’ve got more office space and parking. We’re also taking our own deliveries in-house now with our own delivery vehicles, rather than using a third-party delivery company. That means we now have total control of that element of the business, where we didn’t before, and it helps us have a bit more control over the whole process. It’s amazing how after making just a few small changes, already we’ve had a much better year already. kbbr
It’s amazing how after making just a few small changes, we've already we’ve had a much better year
Tom Baldwin
" May 2026 kbbreview 49
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