BUYING GROUP FOCUS: FORTIS
Right: Fortis members have a total turnover of around £1.6bn - comparable with some of the national merchant chains.
NOT ALL CATS ARE GREY
Independent merchant buying groups work best when the members all understand the benefits of moving in the same direction, Fiona Russell Horne finds out how Fortis operates
I
t’s the age-old cliché, that bringing any number of independent businesses together is like herding cats. Fine, as long as the cats in question see the benefit of the direction in which you are trying to take them.
“One of the benefits of our organisation is that we are all like-minded and we do understand that by working together we can move all out businesses forward more profitably,” says Andrew Cope, managing director of Sussex merchants Chandlers Building Supplies and chairman of Fortis.
Cope took over as chairman at the turn of last year from EH Smith’s John Parker, who had steered the group through its formative years as it brought together a membership of likeminded businesses that had previously either been members of other buying organisations or had pursued their own strategy. ”One of the important points is that Fortis is run by the members for the members and that is a core principle for us,” Cope says. “We do have a small team running the back-office function, who support the efforts of the organisation and those members working for it, but the main thrust of the group comes from the members. So we have chairman, board members and category directors who are all people who work for member organisation. They give their time to Fortis on the understanding that at some point you need to step forward in an organisation and play your part. I think it’s very important in an organisation like this that you have a degree of rotation and movement of people and ideas.”
The Fortis business is structured with a chairman, and an executive board of six in total, with two divisions: building and timber and
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www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net March 2018
plumbing and heating and the two are run separately as they have separate needs and challenge, coming together at the top where it makes organisational sense for them to do so. The chairmen of each division sit on the executive board – Mark Davies for Lightside and Kevin Fenlon Building and Timber. Members of Fortis are expected to put their business through both divisions. Under the chairmen are trading directors who steer the strategic direction of the negotiations and then, in common with other buying groups, there are category directors. “One thing we do that we believe adds particular value is that we have established a separate company which the members are invested in,” Cope says. “This gives us a platform from which to look overseas to source product– it’s only what our competitors are doing after all. You go to factories in China and there you’ll see own branded boxes of product for an array of our national competitors trading both online and via branch networks. We have to say to ourselves, we are a group of builder’s merchants, this is what the competition are doing, and we need to find ways to compete.”
Total sales turnover of Fortis is around £1.6bn which Cope points out
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