MERCHANT FOCUS: GRANT & STONE GROUP
businesses are very similar in outlook to Grant & Stone.
“Nick (House) and I have both worked for Grant & Stone for over 30 years and we have always prided ourselves on knowing the names of everyone working for us, we have a laugh and a chat with the people in the branches we visit. That was exactly the same feeling that we get from RGB and the other business that we have acquired. We know that Kevin Fenlon is exactly the same. That’s our culture, it’s their culture. we are all part of the team. It’s the same for all the acquisitions we have made.” That attitude is a key attraction from a Cairngorm Capital point of view, says Cairngorm managing director Alex Bayliss. “Like-minded businesses, committed to their customers and their suppliers are what we like to invest in. We have long admired RGB as an outstanding company and we have been talking to them for some time, just to let them know that, whenever the time was right for them, we would be interested in talking further. When that time came, they made the call and we moved pretty quickly from that point.”
By luck rather than strategic planning, the three latest acquisitions were announced to the market on March 1 2021. Bayliss says: “CRS, who joined us in January, are a lovely company and we ae thrilled to be partnering with Richard and Chris over in Somerset and we’re excited about the possibilities from bringing BuildIt and Total Plumbing Supplies into the fold, too.
“We admire all of those merchants for being outstanding businesses, great brands, offering excellent customer service and all the things you want from a business - good stock availability, employees who have been with the companies for a long time. The fact that they
all happened to be in the southwest is not by any great design that we had six months ago, it’s just the way that the opportunities have come along.”
New approach
Running a 74-branch business requires something of a different approach to running a 29-branch one, so Cudd says that there has been a good deal of rethinking and restructuring at an organisation level, to allow the larger group to operate to its full potential. “We have an operational board and now a Topco board overseeing that, which Kevin Fenlon has joined. We are having to look at how we organise things in terms of the to-day management of the group.”
Buying too, required a re-think from day one. The acquisition of RGB has brought together one of the founding companies in the Fortis buying group and one of the original NBG Partners; Grant & Stone having been members of Prospero before it grew into NBG. Baylis says RGB will migrate to NBG along with Total Plumbing Supplies; CRS, who were members of the H&B group had already moved across.
day-
Working together across the group will be key in moving the business forward, Cudd says, and there has already been some pooling of ideas and knowledge. “We do a lot of best practice sharing as a group anyway and this will continue. In the first few weeks of our acquisition of CRS we got our transport
June 2021
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
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