MERCHANT FOCUS
LOCAL HEROES
A Somerset merchant has proved that it’s the people in the branch that makes the difference as Fiona Russell-Horne finds out.
W
hen Somerset builders merchant business CRS was set up, the directors thought they would probably open two or
three branches. Maybe five, if they got lucky. “We didn’t so much have a plan for a specific number, more a gut feeling of what we thought we could manage,” says director Richard Liddle. This January the company opened its 11th branch in Evercreech and May will see a 12th in Keynsham, between Bath and Bristol. The company started up in 2005 when the former Travis Perkins managers decided they had had enough of toeing the corporate line and wanted to try working for themselves. “We started out with one small branch in Cheddar and it went from there,” Liddle says. He believes that much of the growth and success of the £35m company is down to the policy of employing local people to run the branches.
“Our aim has always been to keep things as simple as possible. This is not a very sophisticated process. We buy building materials in bulk, break that bulk and sell the goods on, adding a bit of margin so that we can buy more materials and do it all over again. That’s it really. That’s builder’s merchanting. Everything else is just noise.” Although Liddle says the directors relish the life as their own bosses, in charge of their
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own business, their time at Travis Perkins has stood them in very good stead when it came to setting up the business. “Thanks to our time there we had a good grounding in health and safety, transport, managing stock. All that stuff you need to know about which is on top of the selling process.”
The real key, Liddle says, is to have someone managing the branch or in the role of the key branch sales person who is local to that branch. “Someone who understands the customers and the products that will be right for that area. That is our main tactic. The staff are the best asset. We trust them to run their branch the way they see fit, the way they would if it were their business. “If we have a disagreement about the way to do something, then we will do it the manager’s way. I don’t want to be micromanaging things. If it goes wrong, I can say ‘I told you so’, but to be fair, that very rarely happens. It’s rare because we put the right people in place. Why would I know better than the guy in the branch every day what the right decision for that branch is? Why bother to employ someone with all those attendant costs if you are just going to micromanage them? It makes no sense.” Liddle points out that, for a £35m company, CRS is a really lean operation: two directors, the branch managers and six people in head
office administration roles. We actually run a very small head office function, with the two directors, and then the managers, plus six people in the administration side of things and only 150 people across the whole of the business. It means we can keep that real family feel about the place. Everyone knows everyone else and we are all local, so we know the area and the customers.”
In 2008 a second CRS branch in Wells was opened and then moved a few years later to the current larger site - which also houses the head office – when one became available. Liddle says they have opened about a branch a year since then. Expansion has been done via a mixture of personal approaches from people in the industry looking for a new opportunity and strategic gap-filling via the trusted map-on- the-wall method. “If we believe there is a gap
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net March 2020
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