MERCHANT FOCUS: JEWSON CIVILS FRAZER
A VERY CIVIL PARTNERSHIP
Take the heavier end of a builders’ merchant’s civils offering and combine it with the expertise of a utilities and infrastructure specialist distributor and what do you get? Fiona Russell Horne talked to Jewson Civils Frazer to find out.
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When is a stockist not a stockist? When it’s a solution provider. Jewson Civils Frazer, the specialist civils arm of Saint Gobain
Building Distribution, was formed two years ago by the coming together of the heavier end of the Jewson civils offer and Frazer, the sister company that specialised in solutions for utilities and infrastructure. Its aim is to be less a specialist distributor and more a specialist solutions provider.
That’s according to Nick Boyle, Jewson Civils Frazer sales director. “We saw an opportunity to create a truly national civils and utilities specialist network through refocussing large format generalist locations and merging them alongside our long standing Frazer brand. Thus Jewson Civils Frazer was born and is unique in being the UK’s only multi market civils and utilities specialist distributor,” he says. In 2019 the brand was given the opportunity to be a stand alone business within the contracts division, alongside the insulation and drylining business Minster. Frazer and Jewson
Civils may have both been businesses under the Saint Gobain umbrella, however bringing the two together as one company simplifies the offer both in terms of the wider market and within Saint Gobain as well. It brings in customers who would be customers of Jewson but who wouldn’t necessarily recognise the Frazer brand, and it also extends the wider offer to those big infrastructure customers who would recognise the Frazer brand but who wouldn’t automatically go to a Jewson branch.
There are now 24 Jewson Civils Frazer
branches across the country, the latest having just opened in Buckley, North Wales. On the commercial side the structure includes Boyle as sales director, with three regional sales directors covering Scotland & the North East, the North and Midlands, the South East and London, and the South West. There are also sector directors who deal with the specific needs of the utilities and multi-utilities sectors, while each branch has a branch sales manager and an operations manager, as well as a team, working with external key account managers out generating business. Boyle says all this is complemented by the operations structure, headed up by the operations and supply chain director Ricky Coakley.
Alex Davis, commercial business
development director – Saint Gobain Contracts Division says: “We believe strongly that our customer facing activities in terms of commercial should have an in-branch leader, and also that our operation fulfilment should also have a leader. We believe in letting people work with their specialist skills, so we will have a sales commercial specialist and a branch operations specialist.”
Within that structure, she adds, there will also sector specialisms. “Around 40% of our sales are orientated towards the infrastructure market, 23-25% to housebuilding and similar numbers with the RMI market. This means we are looking at the core civils sector, at the groundworkers who are working for housebuilders, civil engineers, specialist
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www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net September 2021
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