BMF All Industry Conference 2023 STRONGER TOGETHER
John Newcomb, BMF CEO, welcomed attendees on the first day of the conference highlighting the growth and importance of the trade association.
“STRONGER TOGETHER IS very much the theme of what we’re going to be talking about. We chose the city of Istanbul because it is the only city in the world that connects two continents, bringing together that microcosmos of society. It is a strategically important city and has been for many years. I’d like to think that the BMF, as your trade association, is strategically important in helping you develop your businesses. That stronger together theme is very important when you’re in a trade association,” said Newcomb. The BMF now has 880 member companies including just under 450 merchants and almost 290 suppliers. Collectively, the BMF has a turnover of over £44 billion and employs just over 205,000 people in the construction sector. Never has the recruitment and retention of people been more important than it is now, as Newcomb points out. “One of the things I’ve realised after being in the Construction Leadership Council is we never really understand the size of the sector we operate in. Following some recent work we’ve done with the NMBS, we now value the market at £27.3 billion and this is split into distinct categories. Taking the largest proportion of the market at 43% is the nationals, this is followed by the buying groups who account for around 27% of the sector, and then we have large independent groups who take around 13% of the market. We still have the independents who are not involved in a buying group and take up almost 18% of the sector. We also have private equity, which has been one of the key growths and trends over the years, and our estimate is that private equity accounts for around 16% of the total sector. It’s a very large market that we operate in.” “When competing with other trade associations, there are over
8
50 trade associations involved in the construction sector which is a staggering amount. We are competing with a lot of trade associations but I am really proud that the BMF is now the fourth largest trade association in the whole of the construction sector, as measured by our net assets and staff.”
Building excellence At the BMF’s Members’ Day conference last year, Newcomb shared the Board’s mission to help its members build excellence in the building materials sector. The trade association is providing essential business support to merchants, suppliers and service members through four key areas: 1. Member value 2. Skills development 3. Supply chain collaboration 4. Government influence “Supply chain collaboration, a relatively new strategy which we launched two years ago, is all about harnessing the power of our suppliers and merchants. This is not just at networking events but tackling the big issues that face the industry. In the area of supply chain collaboration, there are two great examples of how we have bought those various component parts of our membership together. We set up a working group, chaired by Jonathan Chard at Bradfords, looking at standardising data which is one of the biggest issues this industry faces. There is too much information in too many formats so the working group is focused on creating a data template. We will be launching this at Members’ Day in September. We then have Giles Bradford who is chairing our sustainability working group. Our focus is what constitutes sustainable products and how we can accelerate the move towards net zero,” said Newcomb.
John Newcomb, BMF CEO
Built on better “Around eight months ago, we also set up a coalition of eight organisations which include the likes of Travis Perkins, Wolseley, Wavin and Knauf Insulation. We’ve come together to look at the issue of diversity and inclusion. If we’re going to recruit the people we need, we need to be broader. We cannot continue to be a white male-dominated industry so in September we will be launching a built on better pledge. One thing I feel really passionate about is young people in this industry, particularly apprentices. We’re not doing enough to drive apprenticeships in this sector so we started to talk to a number of organisations about an apprenticeship pledge. In one week, we had 12 organisations, including NMBS, Travis Perkins, MKM and Kerridge, commit to this pledge. We want you to pledge a number of apprentices so that we
can achieve that target of 15,000 apprentices in our membership by 2030. With the organisations who have committed so far, we’re already at 11,300 apprentices,” said Newcomb.
“Finally, I wanted to share something we’re excited about; the Board has committed to a new sector awareness campaign. We face a number of issues in terms of attracting talent, it is a fantastic industry to work in but we struggle to get that message across. We’ve had a project group working on this for several months, and we want to put the building materials sector on the map. The project group have looked at how to develop a strategy, the key issues we will face as we move forward, why this is so important to do this now and why the BMF is the right organisation to drive this sector awareness campaign,” he concluded. BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2023
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