MERCHANT FOCUS: WILLIAMS & Co
try and open in all those areas at the same time, but we think that smaller gradual steps are preferable. Eat the pie a piece at a time if you like, rather than in one gulp.” Williams operates a pretty flat operational structure. The board comprises Stafford, business improvement director Rachel Moore, commercial director Steve Tarrant and Mick Williams as a non-exec. Around 55% of the employees are shareholders and Stafford and Moore holding the majority share between them. There’s no real intermediate level of management for branches, which means that there isn’t always a defined career path for those who want it on.
Staff development “
Acquisitions are good in that they get you turnover and goodwill from day one, but they have to be the right purchase.
”
probably isn’t workable in the long term, depending how quickly we expand. “So, the idea is that we take a really great branch manager who already works for us, who doesn’t want to be a standard middle manager but who wants to still run a great operation up there for us, and wants to really make a name for the business. We put him somewhere new where there is huge potential – somewhere with a lot of chimneypots. Hence, Manchester. So he will run a great branch for us, but will also be able to help us to find other people to expand in that area, bringing in Bolton, Bury etc into the Williams mix. We are doing the same thing in Milton Keynes: recruiting a talented individual in who will run a branch and build up a network of other branches around the area. And, if those two work, you only have to look at the bits of the map that we aren’t in to see where the potential next steps would be. Sure, we could
Stafford says: “These branches and their managers will then become the centre of the new areas, running their own operation whilst selecting and mentoring the branches they bring along. What I don’t want to do is keep adding a 34th, 35th, 36th direct reporting branch. If a new branch manager asks me what the career path is, I always tell him, make me buy the building next door. Build your business so that I have to do that. But there are a number of people working for us who are ready to move beyond that. So we will have a team of four guys who are responsible for supporting branches which have specific needs. Not every branch will need the same amount of help or support at the same time, so we will be sending in the right horse for the course. One of the four guys is great at developing people, for example, others specialise in sales development. So some of our new branches will have people who will mentor the new managers for a set period of time.” Moving into a new area with a name that’s well established elsewhere but relatively unknown could be problematic but Stafford believes that the company’s marketing will mean that it is an easier journey. “We advertise every issue in Gas Installer magazine,” he says. “We take the centre spread and the back cover and we use those pages to advertise our products and our prices. There won’t be many gas engineers in Manchester who won’t have seen our adverts and who won’t recognise the name with a bit of prompting.” The company has also grown on the back of a huge effort into social media. “We are members of dozens of specialist Facebook groups to do with plumbing and heating who might have 5000 members – trade-only, not open to the public. At first, you have to spend a great deal of time monitoring those groups, and reading threads but then you start to find
March 2018
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
people will become advocates or ambassadors for your brand. If there’s something that someone thinks relates to us or that we may be able to help with, one of our existing customers who is active on Facebook will tag us in it and we’ll pick it up. This doesn’t just happen, of course. We have spent a lot of time building up that kind of recognition and relationships. It works for us but only because we put the ground work over a long period of time, we are consistent with our message and it’s managed by decision makers. The people who use those groups know that they can get hold of a branch manager and get a driver on the road to sort a problem out if that’s what it takes. It’s not going to have to get filtered responding, queries and requests won’t get passed up the line and filtered up the chain and down again somewhere else in the company.”
Trusted brand
Stafford believes the company’s growth will be underpinned by the customers’ trust in the brand and the knowledge that when they say they will do something they do it. “Take our commitment to only selling to the trade,” he says.
Knowingly selling to a retail customer is a transgression of the highest order, akin only to dipping your hands in the till. “Our customers know that when we say that we only sell to the trade, we really mean and that we won’t be going behind their back to their customers or even muddying the waters between them and their own customer.
“Our commitment to net prices is the same. They know we won’t be undercutting them by selling the same thing cheaper to the guy standing next in the queue at the trade counter. Fair prices, that make everyone a bit of profit, on items that are in stock or delivered when we say they will be. That’s how we intend to grow.” BMJ
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