VIEW FROM THE TOP
NBG: MOVING FORWARDS N
BG is a collaborative organisation, run by the Partners, for the Partners. Each member organisation plays a part, whether on the Category Management Teams, or the Executive Board. In advance of this year’s AGM and Conference, the Board spent time reassessing its strategy, ensuring that it remains fit for purpose as the industry changes. “Strategically, what the Board has done is looked at where we have come and where we should be going,” Managing Director Nick Oates says. “One of the questions we asked is whether we are any different to any other buying group. Every buying group wants the best terms, the best deals, the best prices for its members. However, we do think NBG is a bit different, and what we are essentially doing with the new strategy is trying to articulate that in a really simple way.” NBG’s purpose is to support Partners in sustaining and expanding their business within the NBG Partnership. That means Suppliers, the NBG Central Team and the wider industry all feed in to that.
“NBG is a buying group, so achieving the best possible agreement and prices does remain our primary responsibility. We urgently need those prices to be right, so that we can remain competitive. Of course, those are difficult decisions for many Suppliers, we recognise that. We continue to be brand supporters, and we want strong relationships with all our Suppliers. That means we need those new products and services to promote and sell, because, after negotiations finish, growing together then becomes our primary focus,” Oates says.
He continues: “For NBG I think there is a genuine belief in partnership. Our job is simple: it’s to get product to market, but we need the tools to make sure that we can sell them, and we need the Suppliers to help us achieve that. Therefore, yes, we want to have a tough negotiation, but after that, we want to be working very collaboratively in a structured way.”
He says that this underpins the way NBG operates, and is why the group holds the Conference and Supplier Summit every year.
January 2024
“It pulls everyone together. The type of merchant in NBG is one that is open, prepared to share information. They want to help each other, and that sense of community I think is massive.”
As independents, NBG’s Partners care about the service they offer because they have to, Oates continues: “They aren’t part of a huge corporation that is tracking a number centrally, and checking that the set stock turn target is hit. Our merchants are businesses, that actually have a customer who’s been screaming for some products and it’s up to our Partners to find them a solution.” He continues: “We call it a Supportive Community – that’s the second pillar in our reassessed strategy. We have articulated what we have been doing in a very unstructured way into something that says yes this is what we are about. This is key to NBG.” Oates points out that one of the key facets of NBG’s ethos is that it doesn’t just touch on the business principals. “One of our speakers in the Supplier Summit talked about the importance of networking across the business, and we see that in things like our technology groups. Most of those people wouldn’t be coming to the Conference, but you get them on a WhatsApp group talking about the problems they have sourcing a printer or asking how to do XYZ on the business system or the Hub, and suddenly they’ve found some commonality, a peer and support group,” he says. “These are all things that are an integral part of how you run a successful business; just because they aren’t done round a negotiating table with a Supplier doesn’t mean that the buying group can’t have an input into solving those issues.
“That’s almost our next challenge,” Oates continues. “We have this community of Partners, and we need to stretch that ethos into the Supplier base. We want our Supplier base to feel that they can work with our Partners. We want them to think, ‘yes, I can go and test things, I can try things out. I have got a new product; I am going to bring that to NBG first because I know they will give it a go.’ That’s what we have done with a number of Suppliers in the past, notably Mannok with
NBG Managing Director Nick Oates tells Fiona Russell Horne about the buying group’s reassessed strategy.
the MasterGrade cement in plastic bags. We are doing trials with other Suppliers like Velux, trying out different ways of selling products and ordering products.”
That said, the adoption of change can be terrifyingly slow, unless there’s a crisis in which case it’s terrifyingly quick, Oates points out. “A lot of the time we need to be much more open to trials, to trying new things out. Covid was a case in point. It really was incredible, moving the industry forward probably 10 years in the space of 10 weeks. It shows that you can do it if the will is there. Things changed – the speedy adoption of ecommerce and click-and-collect for example – because they had to change. The independents that stayed open saved so many jobs across the supply chain. They said ‘no, we’re not closing. We will find a way to carry on because our customers need us to.’ Yes, they did well out of the situation, some of them extremely well. But it wasn’t just about the Partners’ businesses, they were thinking about their customers first, and what those customers’ needs were. Then they thought about how to make it all happen.”
Oates believes that one of the biggest challenges for the independents in the future will be how they market themselves. He says: “A local business working in the local community using local product, and providing local jobs for local people, training up local young people into apprenticeships is far more sustainable than any other business model, and we need to get government and the wider market to realise that.”
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