62 | Feature: English Woodlands
INTO HARDWOOD DIGITAL WORLD
COVID CATAPULT
Hardwood timber business English Woodlands has grown its business during the Covid-19 pandemic and seen a great increase in online purchases. Stephen Powney talked to company director Ian McNally
Above: The English Woodlands Timber team celebrate their TTJ Awards 2020 win
There’s an old saying – ‘it’s not what happens to you but how you respond that matters’.
Even in the trickiest of circumstances – such as the Covid-19 pandemic – there can be opportunities for businesses but it doesn’t come automatically and hard work and vision is required to reap the success. West Sussex hardwood sawmiller and merchant English Woodlands Timber, winner of the 2020 TTJ Awards Small Timber Business of the Year category, is proving a good example of facing the pandemic challenge head-on and adapting its operations to grow the business. Incredibly, its sales are now 30% above what they were pre-Covid levels and its online, retail operation is booming, with many new customers recruited in the past year. It also recently acquired the Northwood Forestry business.
TTJ | May/June 2021 |
www.ttjonline.com
Ian McNally, who leads the company with
MD Tom Compton, explained how English Woodlands, which supplies the top end of the joinery, furniture and building markets, tackled the pandemic challenge with a growth mindset.
“I’ve never been in the situation when the business has been forced to close,” he said. “In March [2020] when the pandemic started, we kept only a few staff working who we couldn’t furlough. We focused on re-negotiating creditor payments and worked very hard to get cash owed to us from our debtors. “We also worked very hard on increasing our marketing at a time when everything stopped and we called all our customers.” At the first opportunity half the staff were brought back from furlough to work on existing orders and a Covid-safe working environment was implemented.
“We were one of the few that was able to respond as quickly as that. We had people coming up the drive because they heard we were open and had started delivering. It was that availability that enabled us to keep a lot of the small trade, as a lot of our customers are single, manager-owner businesses and they needed to keep operating.
“Many of the big players were still closed and we were able to capture quite a large number of new customers. Then slowly we brought more staff back into the business as demand increased.”
By July last year incoming orders were in
excess of a normal pre-Covid month. Initially, the company thought the orders it was receiving was an overflow of the orders it would have expected in April and May but record volumes continued in every month following, apart from a small blip in November.
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