MD’S OVERVIEW
2020 “I
NBG MD ZOOMS IN ON
The year was challenging but NBG’s Managing Director Nick Oates tells Fiona Russell Horne that he thinks the organisation has coped pretty well, considering.
believe we are in really good shape at NBG. Without a doubt, it’s been a very challenging and, at times, very exciting year. The amount we’ve managed to do,
I think we have to be pretty pleased with how we’ve come through it,” he says. When the UK first went into lockdown, it looked as though the biggest issue for the buying group was going to be cashflow, Oates says. “So, we moved very quickly to put in a whole new system on our intranet to manage rebates under the new circumstances. That worked really well.
“Then we moved into a phase of ensuring we had clear lines of communication. At the beginning of the first lockdown, Suppliers didn’t know whether Partners were open or closed, whether sales people were OK to go in or not. So, we did a lot of surveys amongst our Partners to work out what stage each one was at, and we held a lot of Zoom calls with Suppliers, to ensure everyone knew the situation.”
Short supply
Lockdown also came with another problem though, and that was shortages, something Oates says has carried on. “Indeed, if anything, the issue is worse now than it was then, because we’ve had another increase in volumes, another lockdown-boosted sales spike.” On the plus side, though, he says that NBG is probably going to end up - despite the massive drop in turnover in the middle of the year - getting close to what it did last year in terms of Partners’ total turnover.
That said there are still Partners and Suppliers who have been badly hit by everything that has happened during the year, others who
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are doing brilliantly well and everything in between. “Early on, someone said to me that because of the pace of change there aren’t any good decisions through this; we just make decisions and hope that they turn out to be good ones.”
The experiences of NBG’s Partners and Suppliers varied widely throughout the worst of the lockdowns and their aftermath. Some Partners had no choice but to close, others were able to work all through, so long as they took the right precautions. Then there was a split by the sort of product areas that businesses specialised in, Oates says. “If you sell landscaping and fencing or decking then chances are you had a great run in 2020, despite everything. Lightside products that are trade counter-based or which require the merchants’ customers to actually go into homes to be able to use them, were more badly hit. Partners who focus on those products were probably six to eight weeks behind in terms of recovery.”
Proactive Partners
Oates says one thing that became clear throughout the pandemic was that there is a clear split between companies who are proactive and those that simply react to what the Government decides day to day. “There is always a big difference between company cultures and that has never been more apparent than this year. I mean, there were companies that had staff on furlough and yet they had product shortages and no-one to answer the phone.”
Oates says that NBG has always prided itself on being a strong community. “The events this year have really brought that aspect of NBG into focus. We’re talking
more, even if we aren’t meeting up in person. Since March we’ve been holding monthly regional meetings, often in the evenings to allow Partners to concentrate on their own businesses during the day. It’s during these meetings that we all learn from each other. That’s where the Partners share best practice and ideas about what the latest legislation is, or how they go about furloughing staff, or deal with track and trace when it tells you your whole branch has to close because one customer has tested positive and named everyone in the branch as a contact. “We got more WhatsApp groups than ever, we’ve got Zoom groups, we’ve got regional meetings every month. In some ways, our communications have probably never been better.”
Stepping up
Another thing that has come out of the pandemic is the way the NBG Central Team has stepped up, Oates says. “Partners, quite rightly, had to focus on their own businesses. So, centrally we have done everything we can to take workload away from them and ensuring that we have good deals in place, good communications and that we follow through with everything that Partners need us to.
“Partnership is a massively overused word, but this year we’ve really been able to see those Partners and Suppliers who understand its true importance. We’ve been able to really see where we have strong relationships and strong partnerships. They’ve helped us out, and that’s massively appreciated. We know more than ever that we have to work together to get through this period. NBG always had that as philosophy, and this has demonstrated it really,
January 2021
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