Issues 16: Nuke the whales!

NUKE THE WHALES!

THERE'S NO SHORTAGE of reports, telling us what we already know. That's why we pay the extraordinary money for them - because we know they must be right. Basically, most people in the retail sector have had their windows renewed and are quite happy, thanks very much. Drive around any medium-sized private housing estate and you can see for yourself - there's only two houses in need of replacement windows, and you can tell neither of them are likely customers. It's the cars on the drive that do it. One's a 2CV, with Nuclear Power No Thanks (looks even better in French) and a Greenpeace sticker; the other is a D-reg Montego Estate with a coffee jar label where the tax disc should be. The driver of the Hoppity would rather eat worms than have PVC windows, and there ain't a salesman in this country that could be bothered to argue the toss into the wee small hours because he's terrified he'd be the one to end up signing a piece of paper, and leaving with a Save the Whales sticker for the back bumper of his M3. As for Mr Montego, his car's on the drive because the garage is full of kids' toys and old kitchen units that might come in handy one day. His salary as a local government officer isn't quite enough to cover the cost of sending all three kids to Stowe, but the missus says they're going, and that's that. He'd love some new windows but, unless he wins the National Lottery, things like that, and a new pair of underpants, will have to wait. Just down the road, in Winnie Mandela Way, where all the kids hang around on the corner wearing £75 Reeboks, playing Game Boys and snorting top quality stuff, the houses are getting new windows, and the parents aren't paying a penny. The landlord's £12 million programme takes care of it. Composite doors to follow, probably. This is Council Estate Land, where it's the right-to-buys that make the street look shoddy. Except, in a lot of cases, it isn't council any more, because they became a housing association and borrowed like it's going out of fashion. The Baker Housing Trust - because that's where the bread is! We've all known for ages that the retail window market is drying up quicker than water holes in the Serengeti. Who's going to die of thirst? Stay put, advertise even more offers, and hope that someone will realise you're cutting your own throat . . . or move on to pastures new? Anyone who reads G&GP will have noted Winston Duguid's article about the Public Sector and New Build. Basically, the market's growing by the best part of 10% this year. Windowbase knew that and so did you, if you ordered the Specifiers database. If you've steered clear of the commercial window market in the past, it would be for all the usual reasons: rates versus margin, payments versus cashflow and so on - but profile suppliers deal with this sort of stuff all the time. Look at it this way - they need to sell profile so they'd be mugs not to help you make windows from it.

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL

MR DUGUID'S WORDS, in G&GP, are that system suppliers "give fabricators and installers the right tools to exploit these marketing opportunities, the right product, delivered with a consistent product quality, and delivered efficiently and on time." The right tools - in other words, they have to be geared up to helping fabricators adapt to different markets and, if next year's windows are going to be installed in rented housing, that's what they need to know about... for your benefit as well as theirs. To put it another way, profile suppliers can't take a share of that market without the fabricators' help, so they have to help fabricators help themselves. Symbiosis. The old Serengeti story hasn't changed in the last ten years... the sun rising on another wonderful dawn, its first rays warming the back of a lioness. She yawns, stretches and thinks: "Ye gods, I'm bloody hungry." Meanwhile, the sun's rays reach a gazelle who gets to his feet, has a bit of a scratch, and says to himself: "if I don't get moving, I'm going to be breakfast." And the moral of the story? The moral of the story is that, when the sun comes up every morning, you had better start running. Easy said, but it's knowing where to run that makes the difference. Round and round in circles isn't a lot of use.

THE RIGHT STUFF

WHATEVER PROBLEMS fabricators might have, their suppliers have it worse. Ten times worse. A hundred times worse, maybe. Take the mainstream profile system suppliers. For the sake of argument, let's say there's ten of them and they each have ten fabricators actively interested in social housing. That's one hundred companies hitting the market hard. An awful lot of people depend on these fabricators to come up with orders. The fabricator is on the Front Line and, if he's to live to fight another day, he needs State-of-the-Art weapons, not something out of the Soviet spares bin. If fabricators are front-liner paratroops, and they're to hit the ground running, it helps to know which direction. It's a good idea to know exactly where the enemy is, but even better to know as much as you can about him - his way of doing things - because you can target him very, very specifically indeed. Get his chops in your cross hairs and squeeze the trigger . . . We're talking about local authorities and housing associations, and we're talking especially about local authorities who are moving their stock into newly-formed housing associations, in order to get their hands on spending capacity. A typical district council might have 5,000 dwellings and a £10 million shopping list, probably at a rate of something like £1.5 million a year. - and that's a lot of windows. And handles, and sealed units, and hinges, and ventilators and . . . hang on a minute. Handles might mean cockspurs (unlikely in this day and age), or operating handles for shootbolts or espags. It would be nice to know which. Actually, it could be difference between success and failure to know which. All very well, but there's about fifteen hundred of these specifiers out there, so you can't be expected to know precisely who wants what. Wanna bet? For exact details of who's spending what, the Windowbase data has local authority budgets, and the figures are extremely impressive. There's an awful lot of money out there. For exact details of who wants espags and who wants shootbolts, Windowbase tells you the person's name, his job title (his address and phone number obviously) and his preferences. Whether he goes for a general performance spec or whether he names specific products. It's all in there. (And whether he's a she.) Divide the cost of that extremely specific information between, say, ten fabricators, and the system supplier's marketing or sales budget is paying pennies for top quality information. It's one thing to arm a squaddie with £15,000 worth of infra-red laser-guided hardware to get results but it's far easier - and far cheaper - to supply a rep with the names and details he needs. As Mr Duguid says: "give them the right tools."

THE WRONG STUFF

RETAIL FABRICATORS KNOW the retail market and they aren't interested in commercial work, or so conventional wisdom goes. For further advice, ask the National Union of Lamplighters. If the retail market, like gas street lamps, just isn't there, it's time to shut up shop or look at something else. All the old arguments were used, in the past, as excuses for not getting into commercial but it isn't so different from supplying trade windows. With the right installer, and there's plenty of em, it can be like trade windows, only ten times more. There's a trade window supplier in Birmingham who's just picked up a £600,000 order for windows - in the North East of England. Kitemarked, of course. All he has to do is make them, pile them into the back of Trannies, and ship them up the A1. Easy as that. A local authority that used to make its own windows now buys in for its own installation teams to fit. Where's the difference between that and supplying a medium-sized installer? The six hundred grand might be one difference. The main problem facing some fabricators is that they can't be certain there won't be all manner of expensive problems to put right, a long way from home. They would be the first to offer all sorts of assurances they make top quality windows, though. If they don't believe it enough to put their money where their mouth is, who else is going to? Anyone with reasonable confidence in their product can be making - well, not quite a packet - but a tidy mark-up on a fair old turnover. You know, like Tesco versus the corner shop. Economy of scale. Nothing new in that. Do it right, first time every time, and reap the rewards. Even if the profit is only a tenner a window, a £600,000 order is worth forty grand. There are enough specialist installers these days, experienced in social housing windows, for even trade window suppliers to be looking hard at the commercial side. When so many Direct Labour Organisations fit windows, surely they have to be at least as good a bet. When DLOs are fitting £600,000 worth of windows (and that's just ONE order), they might be better than Eezilite (1998) Ltd, who buy ten or twenty at a time. Makes yer fink, dunnit? It's one thing to think about it but, with Windowbase data, little snippets of information like that become extremely serious sales leads. You have the name of the authority and, seconds later, you have on screen the phone number and the name of the person to talk to. Send some information, request a tender form, send a rep in... whatever. Just like that.

Call Mike Davis on 01706 644308 - Just like that.