BMJ


BUILDERS MERCHANTS JOURNAL


I think even though we have the D-Day, if you like, of March 31st 2019, when Brexit actually happens, looming, people will still want to carry on living their lives.”


“


the Cambridgeshire market for us, without costing us the huge prices that Cambridge commands. We would have a lorry going down to Cambridge from Peterborough most days and the A14 being what it is, that’s that lorry pretty much written off for the rest of the day. However, it is very hard to find suitable affordable land in Cambridge. Huntington is half way and only 25 minutes from the main branch. We have a lot of customers already working in and around there, so there is an exisiting customer base and it really allows us to hit north Cambridge. We are on a site with lots of other merchants close by so we will relish being in the thick of it.


Diverse market “Cambridge has a slightly different economic climate to London but it is still very, very diverse, with a lot of wealth which that means that we will be able to sell the mid to high ranges more successfully than we can in Peterborough, though we are, of course, offering everything across the full range. Take landscaping for example. There are some really beautiful products coming through at the moment, for example, the porcelain products, but they are that little bit more money and I think in Huntingdon we will be able to sell them well.”


Huntingdon is a full mixed


merchant branch with timber, aggregates, bricks and blocks there as well and Rose says with the trade counter she has tried to think about the layout the way a supermarket would think about theirs – with the good, better, best offering and trying to apply that psychology of retail to the trade counter. “I wanted it


so that the trade counter is right at the front by the customer car parking so that if you are a retail customer you can go in easily and quickly without having to traipse through the yard,” she says.


“Or you can ask them to get your stuff for you, or have it delivered. On the counter, I have a 50/50 split between men and women in sales and the trade counter which just helps to make all our target customers feel welcome. For example, some builders are always going to want to be dealt with by a man.


Deal expansion “NBG deals were really helpful in getting us to the point where we could set up Huntingdon. As a group, we are always thinking in terms of expansion so the deals all have expansion potential built into them. All of those initial orders for Huntingdon had special discounts off them, because it was a new branch. That was hugely helpful. In a negotiation scenario, I probably wouldn’t have thought to ask what the deals were for a new branch, but because of the way the group is set up, there are people who’ve been through it before and they could advise us. Our NBG Suppliers want us to grow and they want to support us so there is plenty of help for us from them too. “The support with


merchandising, for example, is amazing. Merchandising has come on so much in the past few years and now the trade counter area just screams brand and professionalism in a way that it never did before. That’s thanks to being able to pull in the experts from being an NBG Partner.


“And the wonderful thing is that, even though we have our Huntingdon branch bang next to the big businesses, the national chains and the Screwfix and Toolstation, our NBG deals are so good that we can compete with those businesses. I am not scared to put in brands that I know are in other businesses because I know we can compete. I don’t know how you could have that confidence if you were outside a buying group.”


BMJ January 2018 Bigger, Bolder, Better 11


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