MERCHANT FOCUS: NEIL LAWRENCE
ended up as operations director, effectively running Jewson, a role that expanded to include sales director when the incumbent, Tony Newman, was arrested for fraud. A further juggling around of management saw Lawrence deciding to take on the role of managing director of the Local Merchant Group. This was made up of the builders’ merchant brands that the group had bought, but which they didn’t want to fold into Jewson, and included Gibbs & Dandy, JP Corry, Normans, DHS, Matthew Charlton, Chadwicks, Roger W Jones and Benchmark.
“That was the best decision I ever made,” he says. “I’ve loved so much of what this career has been, but those nine years at the helm of the LMG were the best nine years of my life. I absolutely loved it there.
“We tried to run it like an independent, or the way I thought an independent business should run, which was to concentrate on customer service, keeping things as simple as possible. I used to say to people when you communicate with staff keep things simple, don’t over complicate them with management words that no-one really understands.” It’s important, he says, not to get too bogged down with processes. “Relying on departments like HR, for example, for support, is fine. However, as managing director, you need to be aware that if people don’t have the tools to do the job you’ve employed them to do, that’s on you. At the LMG we brought in our own appraisal scheme, which was one page and very simple because I dont think you need pages and pages of questions to work out if someone is performing.
“I used to have all these appraisal pages spread out over the dining room table, and I’d write a little piece on each of them. The questions I was interested in were: what would you do if you were the boss? What three things would you like, and what do you like to do? That’s what you need to understand where people are at. We had some amazing conversations on the back of those questions.” He adds that some really good initiatives can come out of asking the right questions
“What I want my legacy to be, if I can put it like that, is the coaching and mentoring. I would love people to look back and think oh yes, Neil. I learned a lot from him.”
of people at the sharp end. “For example, someone asked why credit control didn’t work on a Saturday. When we drilled down into it, we realised that the staff always had issues on the Saturday after the accounts had gone on stop. Credit control didn’t want to work on Saturdays; however, we realised that what was needed was someone to be available for the Saturday people to contact if they had a problem. So that’s what we brought in.” Lawrence says that the LMG tended to operate slightly under the radar within the wider SGBD stable. “We were left to get on with running that part of the business the way we thought was best. When you think that the LMG was the second most profitable business in that stable, it was probably the right way to do it. You need to understand what kind of company you want to run, as a business leader. I always wanted people to feel proud of the company they work for. And I think we achieved that with the LMG. I’m certainly very proud of what we achieved.”
So proud in fact that, after yet another round of management reshuffling, when Lawrence was asked to go back to Jewson as chief operating officer, he did it on the proviso that he kept hold of the LMG as well. “By then my boss was Mike Newman, who was head of SGBD, managing the other distribution businesses and dealing with Paris, while I was running the business here. He said he wanted to run a company based on good, solid core values of people and service. Which was exactly how I’d been running Gibbs &
February 2024
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
Dandy and the other LMG businesses for years. So, we put the same ethos in. It’s more difficult because it’s a bigger more cumbersome beast, but we did it, and the way we turned the business round got noticed in Paris.” One of the great pieces of advice that Lawrence says he was given over the years was by a former chairman, who advised him to focus on the things that he could influence. This was in reference to the low morale that can hit a team or a business at times of big change. “He told me that whenever there is a big corporate change, as we’ve been through so many times in this industry and this business, you can’t do much about other people’s morale. There are always going to be those who take it personally and who are unhappy. The important thing is to crack on with the changes, and get the project done as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, so that you can then let those people who are going to stay - because not everyone will - get on with building the business.”
Health issues in 2021 made Lawrence start to think about slowing down, but with the business being sold to the Danish Stark group, he agreed to stay on until February 2024 to help the transition period. The Gibbs & Dandy business is in the process of being folded into Jewson, and Lawrence says he knows that the time to go is now.
“I will miss the people I’ve met through this business. And I’ll miss meeting the people who will be joining the business in the future. Some of the things I definitely won’t miss are the politics, the meetings and the budgets. “What I want my legacy to be, if I can put it like that, is the coaching and mentoring. I would love people to look back and think oh yes, Neil. I learned a lot from him. I can’t remember the exact quote, but I remember hearing someone say that you can’t help everyone, but there are some people you can help a lot. I’m really proud of the people that I have managed to help.” BMJ
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