MERCHANT FOCUS: ELLIOTTS
DEFINITELY NOT REVERTING TO TYPE
L
ike many people, Lauren Haines’ first job at a builders merchants was supposed to be a starting point, until she could move onto something else. It was, but not in the way
she envisaged.
That builders’ merchant was Elliotts in Southampton. “It was 1979. I was looking for a job and they were advertising for typist. It really wasn’t going to be a long term job for me, but the fact that it was a family-run business that treated you very much as an individual and gave you opportunities made me think that actually, I could probably build a career here, or at least begin a career here.”
Sales promotion
Haines was working as a typist in the brick department, when a role came up in the sales team. “Because I had been typing everything working in that department the names all meant something to me and I thought it might be interesting to pursue a different avenue, so I asked the then sales director if I could be considered for the role. He wasn’t too sure - I don’t think it was just because he wondered who would do his typing - but in the end he agreed that he would take me on in that role and really it just went from there.”
Haines says she really enjoyed the brick side of things to the extent that when she found herself driving round looking at buildings, wondering
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what that brick was that they’d used and, eventually, recognising them, she knew she’d found her metier.
“In those days, the brick industry was totally different. There were numerous small brick companies that produced a much wider range of bricks than we get now. We didn’t deal with imported bricks particularly for example. There was a lot more brick specification in those days too,” she says.
Wanting to spread her wings a bit, Haines moved into running the Elliotts’ brick library, as well as calling on architects and some of Elliotts’ larger customers getting specifications. “I stayed in that role for quite a while, then I got asked to run our direct to site office which was much much smaller than what it is now and it really covered a wider range of products. We did roofing, we did lintels, civils, aggregates etc. Pretty much everything that went into the build. Although I knew what I was doing with the bricks, it meant having to learn my way round the other sectors, so that was challenging. At the time we probably only had about four branches so we were a smaller organisation, but it gave me the opportunity to try and grow my sector of the business further.”
As a business, Elliotts started to develop more specialist areas. For example, they started to import French tiles and Haines was involved in selling them to Elliotts’ customers. “Then they
Fiona Russell Horne talks to Elliott’s directs director Lauren Haines about her 45 years in the merchant industry.
became a bigger part of the business and got put into stock at the branches, so I lost that from the direct to site channel. That meant we were constantly looking for new areas to take the directs business, including new products to replace business that we had grown into and moved over to the branches. That was great in terms of my career development, as it meant having to learn about so many more sectors. Timber is a prime example. We were just doing a little bit of timber but then we took on someone who knew a lot more about it, so we started to develop it much more. Then it moved into being a really big part of our business; we now have a really big timber yard we import timber and we hold stock at the docks. Again, it was something that I was doing on a small basis that then grow into a larger part of the business.
“In much the same way, I guess I have helped to develop some of the specialist areas that the business has; insulation and dry lining is another example that started small as direct-to-site and then grew and grew.”
Following the recession of the early 1990s, Haines was invited, along with Paul Cleary and Tony Adams, to become directors of the business. “That was partly driven by the fact that there had been quite a few redundancies during the recession that flattened the hierarchy of the business. It was very much Stuart Mason-Elliott and our financial director, David Platt, who were
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net May 2019
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