MERCHANT FOCUS: NEIL LAWRENCE
LOOKING BACK ON A MERCHANTING CAREER
N to retire.
“This job’s been good to me, and it’s all down to the people. They’re what makes it work. Without them, we’d all have give up many years ago.”
Like many people, Lawrence, who retired as COO of Stark UK, including Jewson, at the beginning of this month, never intended to spend 50 years working in the industry. He never intended to become a builder’s merchant at all. It just happened.
“My first job was with Gifco, a division of Nicholls and Clarke,” he says.” A friend of mine was already working there, and he rang me up to say that they were looking for someone in one of the other departments. So, I went along and got a job starting as a yard boy. It didn’t take me long to realise that I’m not really one for working outside in the cold, and I moved into the office. I ended up running the sanitaryware department, which was the company’s biggest, and it was obviously the right move for me, as I became their youngest department manager.“
Family plans then took him to Cornwall, to join the Truro branch of merchant company UBM, where, once again he found himself specialising in the kitchens and bathrooms side, running the showroom. “I was kitchen planning as well, which, in those days was something you did with a ruler, graph paper and a pen. There was no CAD system to do it all for you.” He says that every role he did taught him more, whether it was managing the people around him, or the people he worked for.
eil Lawrence leans back in his chair and blames the people he’s worked for, and with, over the past 50 years for the fact that he is only now able
Fiona Russell Horne chats to Neil Lawrence, the just-retired COO of Stark UK, about his years in merchanting.
out of a job. Funnily enough, that was enough to get them to deal with it. I moved out of the sales office and into the manager’s office after that. It taught me that you need to delegate. If you are going to employ people then you need to allow them to do the jobs. Put good people into roles, delegate to them, and that allows you to get on with your job.”
“This job’s been good to me, and it’s all down to the people. They’re what makes it work.”
“Eventually, I was promoted to assistant branch manager, and, like the person I was taking over from I sat in the sales office. Although I had come up through the kitchen and bathroom side, I was, as assistant manager, having to answer the phone to questions about all sorts of products. Every question I was asked, and managed to answer, taught me more. That’s how you learn.”
He recalls a particular instance which, he says, taught him about management. “There was one issue with a product, I don’t remember what it was about now, but this issue sat there and sat there, and eventually I picked up on it. The sales office guys asked whether I could deal with it, which, I realised was what they’d been hoping all along I would do. I told them I didn’t know anything about that particular product – I’d been the kitchens and bathrooms man remember – but that if I dealt with it, I’d learn. However I also told them, if I did sort it out then I wouldn’t need them, so they’d be
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Lawrence came into the Jewson fold when UBM was acquired, eventually becoming manager of the Truro branch, one of the group’s south west flagship branches. At the time, there was a real push amongst UBM to develop a more retail appeal, and there were some product sectors, such as soft furnishings and garden seeds which he says felt “very unmerchanty, more the sort of things you’d expect to see in Homebase now”. That said, there were things, such as the computer system and electronic point of sale, that UBM were operating with which they were able to port over to the Jewson branch.
Lawrence then moved round more locations in the southwest, having gained, he says, something of a reputation for turning branches around. “We’d had a recession at the time, but down in our part of the south west my team didn’t really notice it. It sounds weird to say that, but we put good people into the right roles, and we sailed through. We almost became the place that people wanted to work, because we were doing so well.” When a new level of management was brought in, Lawrence’s boss - one Peter Hindle - moved up to an operations director role, leaving Lawrence to fill in the area director gap, initially for the South Wales region, but almost overnight things changed and he ended up in that role for the Midlands. “I discovered afterwards that it was because I’d got the reputation for turning things around, and not being afraid to give anyone who needed it a good kick up the backside. I suppose that’s a good thing.”
When Saint Gobain bought Jewson in 2000 there were new opportunities, and Lawrence
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net February 2024
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