MERCHANT FOCUS: BROWNS BUILDERS MERCHANTS
THE ACCIDENTAL MERCHANT
Not having a clear career path at 16 isn’t the worst thing. Fiona Russell Horne meets a builder’s merchant who just stumbled into the industry and doesn’t regret it for a moment.
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hen Jim Parlato left school, he had two things clear in his mind. He knew he didn’t want to stay on in further education, but he
also knew that he didn’t want to sign on and do nothing all summer. So a friend, whose father was working at a Derby builders merchants suggested that Parlato go in for a chat. “So I did. We chatted on the Friday and I started in the yard on the Monday. I thought it would see me through the summer and then I could do something else.”
That was 40 years ago. Parlato is now director and owner of Browns Builders Merchants, based on Nottingham Road in Derby, which has just opened its second branch barely 200 yards down the road from that first yard where he started on the Monday. “I really did think it was just going to be a summer job,” he says. “Then somehow it was Christmas, then the next summer and I just
sort of stayed on. The branch manager then offered me a job on the trade counter and when I said I quite liked it out in the yard, he pushed me to try the new job, with a promise that I could always go back to the old one if it didn’t work out. It did and I’m still here.” From there, Parlato developed through the business, working in most of the departments, and the business changed hands a couple of times, but Parlato stayed with it.
“In about the late 1980s, our then owner decided that he wanted to sell up to a larger group and two of the directors here decided that that wasn’t for them. So they then acquired a local depot from another group - AAH -, and that became our Nottingham Road depot,” he says. “I and another manager went along as part of the management team to run that depot in 1990, which meant we were more or less working for ourselves and were in charge of our own destiny, which was great.”
By 2004, the business structure had
changed and Parlato and Gerry Wheeler were both joint shareholders and owners, having bought further into the business when their then major shareholder sadly passed away. Parlato was mainly in charge of the operations and logistics side and Wheeler more on the sales side.
“That’s how it’s remains to this day. We both have our areas that we are most suited to: Gerry on sales and me handling the
operations side,” he says. “It must be working well as this will be our 42nd year of working together.”
Four years ago, they brought a full-time financial director, Neil Myers, on board, partly because the company needed someone to do the day-to-day number-crunching and partly because they needed someone to help with the structure of the business going forward. In terms of succession planning and the future of the business, Parlato’s son Edd joined the business seven years ago. Browns sponsored him through his business management degree and he is now involved with the NBG buying group on one of the smaller category management teams. “That helps to give him a fair bit of exposure to other similar businesses, which is helpful not just to
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net October 2019
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