MERCHANT FOCUS
Another aspect of the PGR offer that Anderson believes keeps Braintree and the other branches ahead of the rest of the pack is their commitment to their timber offer. “We keep all our timber inside as well, even the treated timber, which a lot of other merchants don’t have the luxury of doing. That is another reason we think that our customers like to come to us.” The customer base is very local, Anderson says, mainly builders developing a few houses a year and local RMI work. “It would be easy if everything we did was in the CM7 postcode area, but we will try and cover from Chelmsford to Sudbury and across nearly as far as Colchester. That said, with two lorries, it’s important that we try and keep one of them for local deliveries. It’s no good having both your vehicles out and about elsewhere in the county, if it means you can’t service your local customers because they will be the branch’s bread and butter.”
Having the branch in Braintree also means that it frees up the other PGR branches to concentrate on building up their local customers, rather than servicing the Braintree area. These are mostly around the A127 corridor, in Romford, Southend, Rayleigh, Laindon, Brentwood and Harold Hill, with one over in Egham, Surrey. “Every time that the Romford branch did a delivery for a customer in this area, it’s would be taking the lorry away from working with their other customers. So us being here allows the branches as a group to operate a bit more effectively together.” Eventually the plan is to add another lorry into Braintree to allow it to expand the area and service it more fully, Anderson says. PGR had already opened a few new branches over the last few years, so there was already a structure to how it would go about opening in Braintree, but of course there is always room for flexibility, depending on the local customers. Anderson says: “For example we have quite a lot of barns around here,
so we do a lot of cladding and timber out of Braintree, more so than some of our other branches. We have the standard products that all the branches do - the company is part of the NBG group so there are obviously products that we do as part of those agreed deals - and it is a really big selling point across PGR that we keep all our timber inside, so we knew we had to have the room to do that. We also keep longer lengths of timber, up to 6m, so that had to be included as part of the set-up. “The directors knew what the standard package they wanted was then George, the assistant manager and I went through it all supplier by supplier, getting to know the products and understanding what is and isn’t popular in this area. There are six people at the branch and they all put in a few extra hours
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net November 2019
to make sure that we got it all sorted and we did all get a sense of purpose and ownership about it. We knew that we wanted to get it right because, after all, we are the ones who have to be here every day, so we wanted to make sure it was right for us as well as the customers and the rest of the business.” Like the Egham branch, the Braintree branch is slightly out on a limb compared with the locations of the other branches and Anderson says there may well be the possibility to infill the gap with a branch somewhere between Braintree and the nearest branch. “That would then allow us to really improve the effectiveness of the way we operate out of here, but, like all these things, it would be dependent upon finding the right site and the right people.” BMJ
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