BMF CONFERENCE 2019 BUILDING EXCELLENCE AT THE BMF


The Builders Merchants Federation’s All-Industry Conference in Dubrovnik in June focussed on building excellence in business and in people.


In terms of membership numbers, the Builders Merchants Federation is in good shape, CEO John Newcomb told delegates at the trade association’s biennial conference last month. “The BMF now has 684 member companies, 355 merchants and 240 suppliers and our merchants have over 5,000 branches. So numbers are continuing to grow which is great and last year, of course, was a big year for us as we celebrated our 110th anniversary.”


Newcomb said he was incredibly proud of the growth the BMF has been through, “Most trade associations are either static or declining, so the fact that we basically doubled our membership to the point where there are 360 companies in the BMF now that weren’t there six or seven years ago, is something I’m incredibly proud of.” That happens, he said, because of hard work, engagement, physically getting around to see people and using every opportunity to communicate and show them what the BMF are about.


Chairman Peter Hindle MBE said that deeper segmentation of the membership is going to be vital moving forward.


“We have a varied membership from family owned businesses up to the nationals and the manufacturers and the service members as well. Each of them is looking for something different out of the BMF. For me, the BMF has to continue to add value for members, and each member will have something different that they value. So the results of the segmentation work, which will be launched in the next three or four months, will help us to understand what individual members want out of the BMF. The rest of it will follow on from that.”


A Q&A session with the audience threw up the point that one of the main challenges for the BMF is that the industry doesn’t attract enough people. Newcomb said: “If there was anything I could change, it would be to have a proper apprenticeship scheme across the industry. Entrants could come in and get a good grounding in the whole supply chain, before


then deciding if they wanted to continue with manufacturing or merchanting. We should also remember that apprentices don’t


have to be 16 or 17. They can be 40 years old.” Hindle’s answer to a question on Brexit was that the politicians really don’t understand the difficulties that businesses are under with this uncertainty. “If I were to place a bet, it would be that we will not get a deal through by October 31st. It’s too late to get it all sorted out.” He pointed out that many manufacturers in this sector are foreign owned and that they will be looking hard at capital expenditure, “If I were sitting round a board table in Paris now, for example, and asking for the money for a new glass plant, and there was a guy from India asking for something similar, with India’s 9% GDP growth, I’m pretty sure that he would get the money and I wouldn’t.”


BMJ BUILDING CHANGES LIVES


TV presenter Nick Knowles opened his presentation by saying thank you to all the people and businesses in the room who had contributed to the BBC’s DIY SOS programme, which he presents, over the past 20 years. “During that time, we have worked with 23,000 builders who gave their time free of charge and have built £17m of homes and respite centres and we couldn’t have done that without the help of the suppliers, and that includes the merchants.”


Knowles said the DIY SOS programme helps to show that the world is a slightly better place than we think it is. “Politicians spend their time trying to separate us and the newspapers follow that up, turning the world into fat cat tax avoiders and council house benefit scroungers. “When we do our programmes we find that we get the chap who owns the company sitting down in his jeans with the plasterers to eat their lunch together and you see their differences disappear. “We all spend so much time doing stuff without having to talk to everyone else, yet look at the way we interact at an event like this when we get together. As a society we are isolating ourselves then we are surprised that our children are suffering anxiety.”


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Knowles pointed out that over last 30 years Comic Relief has raised £1bn through 2 recession, Children In Need raises £50m a year and that there are 220,000 charities that survive on donations and every hospitals round the country with MRI scanners raised by donations. “That’s all through two recessions. We are an unbelievably generous nation.”


Let’s try and shift the landscape away from politicians who are trying to deal with Brexit, he added. “There isn’t a negotiator or a businessman among them. Yet this industry is the industry that drags the country off its arse, every time there’s a recession. You guys are the ones with the courage to nvest in stock.” Knowles said that he is starting to mentor other groups who have come together to emulate the DIY SOS formula, such as Band of Builders and Hull for Heroes. “Every week on social media we see a call-out that someone is ‘doing a DIYSOS thing’ because alas, we can’t do it all.”


The building industry does have problems with mental health, Knowles said, reporting that initiatives like the DIY SOS


builds and Band of Builders don’t just help the headline families or the individuals. “What we do allows people to fall back in love with what they do and what they in turn can do for other people. They get to see how what they do can change someone’s life. That is wonderful for their mental health. We need emotional reward as well as being able to pay our bills.” Knowles told a story about a builder with anxiety issues aound being in crowds, who wanted to help out on a DIYSOS Big Build and turned around three times in his car before finally being able to help out on site. “In doing helping us, he managed to change his own life” he said. “We get builders at the end of the first day who look at what we have achieved and say how is this all possible. But it’s because we have 100 builders here all working towards the same aim. We get 1,000 man hours on these jobs, allowing us to complete builds in nine days.


“This is an amazing country, full of incredible people who make a wonderful difference,” he said. “Thousands of lives have been changed by all our builders and who supplied the products – you guys did.” BMJ


www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2019


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