Management Interview
BMJ
BUILDERS MERCHANTS JOURNAL
NBG:
getting bigger by being bolder and better
It’s not enough to build your brand, you need to develop it continually, says NBG managing director Nick Oates.
T
he 2017 NBG Conference took the theme from the previous year and made more of it. Managing director Nick Oates says: “Last year we talked about Building Our Brands. This time around we said Bigger, Bolder, Better.” Oates says that NBG saw growth of 11.2% in the last year, a figure he estimates is around double the market average. The group added 26 new branches and three new Partners, with most of the branch increase coming via organic growth from existing Partners.
“One of the things we have done as
a Board is having a look at exactly what our core values are and what our core strategies are going forward. “Number One of our core values is that
we are a democratic partnership. That is critical. We are all in it together, all equal and we are all pulling in the same direction. “All our Partners agree that they will commit time and energy to the organisation; they give their expertise and their knowledge to help improve the deals. We believe that the great strength of NBG is that an individual will only work on a few deals so they are really focussed on their areas of expertise. It means we have this huge knowledge resource which is going out and trying to do the best for their group of deals. “Another core value is the network that we develop. All Partners actively bring benefits to NBG, not least of which is the willingness to be phoned up by another Partner for advice. There is a network of friends you have to call on who can help Partners in their business. “It’s not just about deals or buying, if someone has a problem that’s not cropped up before they can phone someone who has encountered it and ask what’s the best way of dealing with this. It’s the bank of business expertise that Partners can call upon that makes the difference.” One of the areas where Oates believes NBG can really add the most benefits for Partners is when they want to move into a
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new product sector. “A Partner who wants to set up a new, say, landscaping business, can contact a Partner who is already strong in that area, or attend the Marketing Forum where people share ideas about how they develop their businesses. Our last Forum, for example, looked at how to sell your brand better in the local community and compete against people like Selco as well as talking about CRM systems and gap analysis tools. All participants have a story to tell and experience to share. Virtually all attendees go back to their business with new ideas that they can implement.” Oates adds that NBG isn’t just about deals and networking. The infrastructure that Partners have access to can add serious benefit to the back office and to the way they move their businesses forward. “Last year we made huge strides ahead with our initiative Merchant Pages, which we worked with NMBS on, and the Hub,” he says. “We want to find ways of working better with suppliers. Agreeing the terms shouldn’t be the end of the deal, it should be the beginning. Our whole account management process is about helping suppliers work better with Partners. Last year we planned to run two workshops looking at that aspect; there was so much demand that we ended up running four. “They were attended by around 150 people and we ran a best practice presentation followed by the CMT Chairmen talking about how best to work with their teams, plus a presentation on the Hub, in particular the dashboard,” he says. The Hub dashboard allows visibility on
what’s performing well, who is performing well and who isn’t doing so well. “There’s a rating system a bit like a TripAdvisor rating, which in itself is a very powerful tool,” Oates adds, “along with other administration tools that mean we can check whether the Supplier’s own admin on the deal is working the way it needs to. The Suppliers all told us that they want more of this type of business information, so that is the direction we are taking it. “Our priority now is to make that
information much more personalised and tailored to the individual Supplier. So if, for example, they are a plumbing Supplier we can tailor it so that the dashboard is focusing on the branches that actually have plumbing within them. That’s really hard to keep track of with the number of our Partners who are going into new product sectors all the time. We now have an interface where the Partners can check their profile and performance at their branch level and the next stage will be to share that information with Suppliers, so they always have the most up-to-date inofrmation”
The second thing that NBG launched last year was their Merchant Pages price file product management system. Oates describes this as still a “work in progress” as it’s been a trickier proposition due to the myriad formats that different Suppliers hold their product data. “We will be giving that another push going forward this year because we want to have good data as that will make the biggest difference to how we work with our suppliers,” he says. The conference also looked at the key strategies that NBG is focussing on in 2018. “Relationships: how we continue to build strong relationships with our suppliers. Commitment: being committed to our deals. Competitive: making sure we have really good deals that are as good as or better than any national or other buying group. Democratic: we are a Partner-run organisation Informed: we want to ensure that we have best-in-class IT systems. We will be working on that even further with a new Hub in quarter 1 this year,” Oates says. “As a group we want to be professional, efficient, and progressive. What we have works really well, but we want to make sure we keep building on that, and always be improving it.
“And of course we want to be attracting
more members. We don’t want hundreds, but those we want are the ones that aim to be progressive who want to grow their businesses and have something special about them.”
Bigger, Bolder, Better January 2018 BMJ
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