MERCHANT FOCUS: ELLIOTTS
running the business. Paul, Tony and I were initially made executive managers, really to help support the business, and following that we were made up to directors, which was really a lovely reward.”
The job was still quite hands on, Haines says she has always been the sort of person relishes such a role and the Sales Hub had developed from a small team to a much larger part of the operation. “I now have product managers for all our specialist areas and they work within our Sales Hub with their own teams, looking after their product categories for the whole business, ex-stock as well as direct to site. That’s another way we have developed the business over the past few years. My role has changed to looking after products as well as sales so I am much more involved in looking for opportunities with new products,” she says. “It’s all about ensuring that we have the products that our customers need to build, so that we can confidently say that we can help them build and supply what they need.”. Building relationships with suppliers has been a really important aspect of Haines’ role as it has developed, she says. “We certainly couldn’t do this job without the support of suppliers. We couldn’t do this role without their help and I like to think that we are a very honest and straightforward business in the way we deal with our suppliers.
Promises kept
“They know where they stand with us. We have never really been the sort to promise things and never deliver. That’s how we like to be with both our customers and our suppliers – it’s far better to under promise and over deliver.” The Sales Hub helped Elliotts to grow their branch business as well as vice versa, Haines says. “We get in at an early stage with our customers on their projects so that we can build that relationship with them and feed that through to the branches. Anything that is a little bit more complicated or needs a bit more specialist expertise: scheduling product for example or
negotiating on specials, we would do via the Sales Hub and then feed that out to the relevant branches.
“Most of our branches are general builders’ merchants, but some have areas of excellence rather than being specialist branches as such. For example, the Chandler’s Ford branch very much supports our civils business, and we also have our tool branches, but other than that, all our branches would support everything,” she explains.
A new development that falls under the aegis of the Sales Hub is Elliotts’ own I-joist manufacturing section. “That’s been a bit of a new venture for us. Bringing new products to market is a really quite exciting side of things.” For the last four or five years, Haines says the company has had a bigger focus on national housebuilders working within its areas, which the Sales Hub has been very active with. “We also have key accounts which tend to be more regional builders and we build up strong relationships with them. For example, at the moment there is some serious availability issues with bricks. We have worked very hard with suppliers and customers to ensure that we have bricks scheduled for the whole year for key customers and that we have back-up stock in so that, should anything fail, we would be able to keep customers’ sites running. I think that has really helped us to grow the business with other products as well. We have developed into plot banding on things like lintels and doors for our larger customers that again cements the relationship.”
In the intervening years since joining the company as a typist, Haines has seen that the general industry pace has got much faster. “You don’t get as much time to do things as you used to. That’s been the biggest change. Everyone wants their stuff doing now, or, preferably, yesterday. Customers have higher expectations of what they want and they do tend to rely on you as the builders merchant to make some of those decisions work for them,” she says.
There has, also, of course been a change in the number of women working in the industry and in the way they are viewed, both by suppliers and customers.
Decision makers
“We have found, particularly with renovation or self-build projects that it is the lady of the house that is making most of the decisions and they are far more well-informed these days. They research what they want and they want to talk to someone who is going to respect that and understand them. As a business we have women in most of our branches, many of them in quite specialist areas, so that works well for us. Years ago, even when I was running the brick library with a couple of young lads on trainee schemes or whatever, we would get some people coming in and going straight to the chaps who would then have to turn round to me and ask me to help the customer. We did used to get people ringing up and asking to speak to someone about bricks. And by someone, you knew that they meant a man. I don’t believe you get that happening so much, if at all, these days. It’s been gradual, but it’s happened, and that’s a good thing.” BMJ
May 2019
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
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