VIEW FROM THE TOP
BUILDERS MERCHANTS JOURNAL
BMJ
MOVING FORWARD BY WORKING TOGETHER
NBG Managing Director Nick Oates looks at where the organisation is going and how it plans to get there
“N “ 4
BG works incredibly hard on being a democracy and it’s easy to take that for granted but actually it means
everyone has a chance to sit on the board, to get involved in the negotiating teams and to play an active part in running the group. Many organisations don’t give their members that chance.
“For example, we have just had our first proper hustings for election to the board and that shows people want to be engaged with us. Too often, groups are driven by personal agendas and individual desires and actually in NBG we work hard to make sure that everyone has a voice. Doing that well gives us a brilliant base on which to build.
example, you know everyone in the group, as they have been there since day one and you all went on this exciting journey together to create
There’s a whole new generation out there and we will have to play to their strengths, we can’t expect them to just play to ours...
“Part of that process will be changing how we communicte with each other. Traditionally, merchants and buying groups meet and get together in person and that’s how they communicate. That’s great and it works. However, there is a whole new generation out there which wants to communicate in different ways. We will have to play to their strengths, we can’t expect them to just play to ours. Our Merchants of Change initiative - a forum for Partners to discuss the way forward, with the topics being driven by Partners themselves - for example, is about finding out the best way to make those new connections. If you are a Partner who was there at the start of NBG, for
NBG. But the independent market is about rebirth and growth, so we have to have new independents coming in. They don’t necessarily have the same connections and they will view things very differently. We have to create those networks and those connections for them but also give them the support to grow their business. In an organisation like this, the best support comes from the other partners. You will find some Partners saying that they’ve never had any business consultants in their business, because they have 80 of them in NBG. “So what we are trying to do is make sure that we remain relevant for the next generation of people who communicate in different ways.
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Of course a lot of older people wrestle with this too - how do we make our business more relevant to that younger community and they all want to think about passing their businesses on and making them more relevant to the next generation. So Merchants of Change is there to help facilitate that whole conversation. We are passing ownership of this down to the members who want to be a part of it. We aren’t saying this is NBG and Nick Oates telling you how to do this. We are letting them set the agenda.
“NBG has always taken issues out to Partners and suppliers. This is a great opportunity to ask: can we genuinely do something different in the industry? Not everything will work but if you don’t try, how will you find out what does work or not?
“That’s the other big thing about NBG, we are proactively looking to do different things. Electronic trading for example is a huge area and the industry is miles behind the rest of the world when it comes to this. In Italy, for example, next year, every business is going to have to trade electronically. Not just Partners, but suppliers too. When you think about all the things that can and do go wrong with the transfer of order information, there’s a huge opportunity to make the whole efficiency of the
January 2019
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