SAM KENNEDY, SPECTUS WINDOW SYSTEMS: We’ve dealt obviously with consolidation and the effect of that in the market itself. There are the negatives on that side. One of the areas that we really would like to look at as an industry as well are the growth opportunities. I believe there are quite a few out there. I just wonder, from an industry point of view, where we feel the new opportunities are going to be in the future. Would somebody like to open up on that one?
GORONWY JONES, WINDOWMAKER: Well, you have climate change next which, I think, leads to opportunities because people in warmer climates have different types of windows, either for keeping cooler or for keeping flies out. I have read something predicting the number of flies in the UK is going to double, so I would think there are good opportunities for bi-folds or sliding windows with fly screens incorporated, even for roller shutters. Not a lot of people realise roller shutters are not just for protection but they can be left slightly ajar at night so you can leave your window wide open and not let the flies come in. I think climate change definitely brings some opportunities.
SAM KENNEDY: All right. That’s really coming from climate change itself, looking at those products. What is the feel around the table on that one?
DAVID RUZICKA, SASH UK: With regard to climate change?
GORONWY JONES: With people buying different products if the climate is warmer and there are more flies. If one looks at other countries that are that bit warmer, they sell different styles of windows.
MICHAEL NAGLE, PROFITMAKER: Mosquitoes. I think on the continent you have to have fly screens in.
DAVID RUZICKA: Yes, it’s something we’ve looked at actually, the fly screen situation. I really don’t want to say this, but I had a look at a product and the fly screen was actually more expensive than the window that I was putting it on. So I thought, “We have a slight problem there”. But, no, I actually think fly screens are going to be something that again we should be developing, or as Richard keeps pointing out, blame everything on to the systems companies. It’s where the industry is led, I think, actually from these systems companies. I think it’s a brilliant idea. A bit like Mike was saying, that we maybe have something that’s designed and built in for modern day windows to have these on and not just as an add-on. It’s almost like SatNav that your car comes with standard now. It may be something that we look at as an industry. I think it’s a good opportunity.
We do look at lots of other different products. We’re just looking at banking and fencing products, as some of you are already aware. You’ve maybe seen some of our advertising that we’re doing, which is a great add-on to some of the maintenance-free products that we’re already selling out there. So there are some opportunities. It’s just that we’re trying not to over-develop the market at this moment in time so we can keep the pricing much better.
SAM KENNEDY: Going back to Alan again, I know Alan’s business quite well, but you started off with a niche product, you’ve stuck with that niche product itself. Where do you see yourself getting the growth from in the future?
ALAN BURGESS, MASTERFRAME: We’re not doing anything on fly screens, either! It’s got to be a huge opportunity. Climate change is affecting us, every single one of us. It is going to change the way in which products get sold in the UK, simple. When someone says it can’t be done you look at it and go, “Well, it can be done but it’s going to be more expensive”. Our standard pricing has hugely increased from two or three years ago and that’s just because we’ve included all the bits that you can possibly think of to put on to a window. Not every single window sells at those prices but there is a huge chunk of people that want to have something which is right for their home. They’re just not interested in - forgive me - white shiny plastic. They just don’t want white shiny plastic. Whether you can get an extra £100 a window for that glass or an extra £50 a window for an energy rating, but you either look at it and go, “This is doom and gloom”, or, “Hey, there’s an opportunity” and you’ve just got to market yourself in terms of - you have these opportunities that present themselves; what do we have to do differently to sell and get the reward for that investment?
SAM KENNEDY: So we’re saying don’t change the product, change the way we sell it, is that what we’re saying?
ALAN BURGESS: It comes back to the whole perception thing.
MICHAEL NAGLE: If you look at the white and the wood grain in those, I think the PVC guys need to look at that seriously.
ALAN BURGESS: I think you’ve gone down that route recently, haven’t you?
KEVIN HILL, JOHN FREDERICKS: Yes, and we have launched a range of foil products that are different from mahogany and cherry wood and I think it’s opened up new business to us. It’s not revolutionary. I was saying to Alan I think there’s a great opportunity in not a very crowded market area to make some good money. One of the debates around our board table was how long is that margin going to last before somebody comes in and ruins it?
ALAN BURGESS: Do you have exclusivity on that product as well?
KEVIN HILL: No. No, we don’t. I think it’s very difficult when you’re dealing with a profile company and a foiling company to say, “Can we have exclusivity on that?” because what is “that” that makes it so exclusive? It’s not that much of a different product to enable people to give you that exclusivity.
ALAN BURGESS: Do you have a finite period of time to make the most of that opportunity?
KEVIN HILL: No. We don’t have the luxury of that either. Competition is competition. People are going to either follow on or do something but we need to establish a market position and defend it with the usual ways of doing it: product quality, service and hopefully price being the last of them. But we won’t start a war.
ALAN BURGESS: No, exactly, we’ve had conversations just now about it. Take a foil product. If it became a standard within the industry that we no longer have white shiny plastic but we now have a foil product, are we all going to fight and bring it all back down to casement prices because it’s now the standard but it’s given away this extra that we’ve marketed, or are we going to bring the prices up because actually they were better value? Until people get their head round how can we ethically and morally charge the right price to get our investment back on the costs and things, whether it’s been glass or product improvement, until that happens you’re going to have people saying, “Yes, okay, if that’s £10 cheaper than that one we’ll ...”
KEVIN HILL: I think that’s a huge deal because it must make you guys wince or cry in your beer when you see direct sale companies offering self-cleaning glass, free. If these guys don’t control it at that level, with the best will in the world, in a fragmented, unconsolidated market like ours - excuse the phrase - we’re urinating in the wind.
RON HAMILTON, PILKINGTON: The difficulty that I have is why the lowest common denominator, the rest of the market, the rest of the suppliers, move to that.
KEVIN HILL: Yes, straight away.
RON HAMILTON: Because, in the end, they are small and they shouldn’t really be able to extort a marketplace.
MICHAEL NAGLE: But they did. Isn’t that how the PVC resi door ended up where it is? Buy five windows and get the door free.
KEVIN HILL: Is the composite door going to be the next one? I don’t know. We’ve all seen a few adverts, haven’t we? I don’t know. You tell me.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Can you stop these guys advertising?
RON HAMILTON: Maybe I don’t understand the market enough, I would accept that, but I just don’t know how big they are. I’m sure they can grow to a size but the natural tendency is to react to the giveaway and match that. I’m just questioning that conceptually, that’s all.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes, but surely what they’re doing is misleading. Could you not say under the Sales of Goods Act, “We don’t want you doing our product and say it’s free because it’s very expensive for us to do and you’re misleading the public”?
KEVIN HILL: The whole industry, not just this industry, it’s every industry, everybody. It’s always free. It’s a pull on to the consumer.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes, but the point that they’re making here is it has no value. If they give it away free then he’s trying to sell at an extra ...
RON HAMILTON: But you’ve got a fantastic product and you move into “pound stretcher, buy one, get one free” mentality and you’re just in the wrong industry if you’re doing that.
JAMES HURST, WINKHAUS: But we’re only going to change that behaviour by doing something, and I think Mike had it right earlier this morning when he said training. If they offered free training or whatever to every window company, maybe most window companies would send someone along and they’d come away with a bit more of an idea how to sell the product. We would be delighted to support that initiative.
MICHAEL NAGLE: What would it cost to do, between the extruders and the profilers, to set up a college or set up training? I’d be amazed. I’d say a whole lot of guys would go on it.
WOLFGANG GORNER, REHAU: It doesn’t cost big bucks and we as a company, in fact, are offering now sales training to customers. The biggest issue in this industry - and you touched on it, Alan - is this industry just wants to sell miles and miles of white plastic. I’m talking now about the people who sell to the end consumer. Let’s leave the commercial market to one side, but the people who sell to Mr and Mrs Jones in their living room, it’s a fairly unsophisticated market and you can give them as much choice as possible and they go down route one, which is lots and lots of white plastic, lowest common denominator. If you look at it, the biggest thing that is lacking in the industry is professionalism. Sorry if I say that, but sales training.
MICHAEL NAGLE: That’s what we were saying this morning, training, yes, the whole gamut.
WOLFGANG GORNER: There are companies out there who offer very, very good retail and trade sales training. We as a company have said, “Fine, we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is and prepared to invest in our customers because if they can sell better we can command a slightly higher price”. The thing that worries me is we can have lots of ideas around this table in terms of new products, new markets, but unless you change the people who are selling in the living room on whatever evening of the week it is, it’s dead in the water.
RICHARD SCHWARZ, THE GLAZINE: Isn’t it also about the product itself having a value because everybody’s got double glazing now so the double glazing itself is history, isn’t it?
WOLFGANG GORNER: There are plenty of products out there with value and the UK consumer is probably one of the most sophisticated consumers in the world. The problem, however, is we are not selling these products to the end consumer, and where they are they’re not being sold correctly, such as glass being offered. It’s ridiculous. Look at BMW, they don’t go and sell you a 3-Series at Ford Mondeo prices. What’s that frightening statistic that is bandied around that there are more 3-Series BMWs sold in this country than Ford Mondeos? That makes you sit up and think, “Hang on a minute, people are prepared to pay”, but they have to be sold to correctly. Unfortunately, the infrastructure of the industry is not there. It’s a shame all the profile companies aren’t here, but if you look at the structure of your customers it’s incredibly fragmented and those who sell professionally are streets ahead of those who don’t. There are products there and there are products that we could pull in from the rest of Europe that could be marketed in the UK. But the market at this present moment is not ready, in my opinion, to actually do anything with it.
RICHARD SCHWARZ: Isn’t that where the climate change and the energy ratings could be a driver for growth in terms of making the householder want energy products?
WOLFGANG GORNER: We talked about climate change and we talked about fly screens. Climate change actually will encompass extremes of weather. On the one hand, you are going to have very hot summers but you can also, on the flipside, have very cold winters, so you need products that can cope with both extremes. But let’s be honest, you have companies out there now who are giving away energy efficient windows. I was with a customer in Scotland yesterday who’s talking, “Well, my standard window is going to be a B”. “Are you going to get a premium for it?” “No.” “What planet are you on?” So, already the danger there is they’re grabbing anything that they see and, “What can I do with it?” You experience it on the glass side as well.
SAM KENNEDY: Peter, just bringing you into it, is this happening on the hardware side as well? Do you find that that’s happening on that side?
PETER HUNT, MILLENCO: Yes, for sure. The products coming in from China and Taiwan are just depressing the UK prices and unfortunately it’s one of those opportunities that the only way you can compete is to actually get on a plane yourself. We’ve had to start importing product from China, whereas everything was sourced in UK. We’ve had to go to China to bring the product over with all the problems that that gets you on your stocking and your delivery performances. But if you can’t do that then you’re not in the marketplace.
SAM KENNEDY: Do you find the same? Are a lot of your products still made in continental Europe?
JAMES HURST: Yes, everything is made in Germany and some assembly is done in Poland and that’s it. We can’t compete with China on price so we have to do other things. We’ve talked about it all, service. We also have a very wide range of stuff so someone can start at the bottom of the range with us and they will definitely be able to buy that cheaper. But then they can upgrade with the same preparation in the door or just by modifying the product to give them other things, which is leading, actually, on to something I was going to say. Another big opportunity I think is the ageing population, with money, and the DDA Act has brought in all sorts of opportunities for improving the value of a door particularly, but also windows, and making it easier to operate. You were saying earlier, David, about press button switch. We can do that now but because no one has the capability to create the market, apart from the small efforts we’re doing, it’s very hard to grow the volumes to a stage where you can bring the price down. But it’s all possible, technically, and we are doing it in a small way at the moment.
ALAN BURGESS: But is that your fault for not educating the client?
JAMES HURST: Yes.
ALAN BURGESS: Or is it the installer’s fault for not educating the client, or is it the fabricator/manufacturer’s fault for not educating the client?
JAMES HURST: My marketing budget is really small. I use what I can to try to develop ideas, and actually we have some very good customers who buy into the idea and help us to develop it as well. We actually found our customers are the best marketing tool once we’ve persuaded them, but it takes time and they have to be able to make that leap of faith and have the margins to do it as well. But there is an awful lot of technology that’s available in the world now which we are not applying to this industry because of the money side, the profit issue, I think. It’s not because we’re stupid.
NIGEL RICHMOND, FENSA & BOWATER BUILDING PRODUCTS: I think there’s a bit more on security as well. We’ve pushed security several years ago and the problem came that there was a demand for it, there were a lot of people saying, “Yes, as well as wanting this and that, I want more security in my house”, but the problem with some of our fabricators and some of our manufacturers was that they thought they were selling the most secure window anyway and all the features that they were trying to sell on to their customers was secured by design, various security standards. So, therefore, how do you then go and say, “Well, you also need a security system on top of that as well”? It’s got some legs but they’ve faded away two or three years ago. I think Siegenia were pushing one of either Glassex or Interbuild who had an “all electronic, turn the front key, shoot bolts everywhere” sort of thing, and that was really hot but it just died a death.
JAMES HURST: Yes, because everyone, every managing director of every manufacturing company, wants one for his house and that’s the only one you ever sell!
GORONWY JONES: Just an aside, combining the fly screens and the security, I’ve just come back from Australia and security doors are very big business there, which are ones that are physically secure but can let the air blow through on hot summer days.
SAM KENNEDY: Has there been a reason for that? Has somebody been promoting security doors?
GORONWY JONES: I don’t know that level of detail. I know that one of our customers is a specialist manufacturer of them who does some subcontract work for the other window companies.
MARTIN ALTHORPE, BPF WINDOW GROUP: It’s interesting we’re talking about new products and new ideas, new concepts, and yet, at the same time, just earlier we were talking about a fantastic new product that’s come in that people just give away. So, why do we think that if it includes a fly screen in a product that anybody is actually going to want to pay for it? You didn’t.
DAVID RUZICKA: They won’t.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: That £80-odd fly screen, that’s probably the real price of a fly screen. Your £70 window might not really be the real price of a window. You should be charging a lot more. The fly screen guy might have got it right; you’ve got it wrong. What about that?
TOM RITCHIE, CGI: Sam, you don’t think the elephant in the room, to use that expression - if everyone knows what it means - is that this particular segment of the window business has been one that’s always allowed the salesman in the living room to be the driver of what deal is done?
SAM KENNEDY: Yes.
TOM RITCHIE: That’s the elephant in the room. I think if you go into the curtain wall business, it’s the most expensive curtain walls that you will sell to Norman Foster for their jobs in London. Not the cheapest. It will be the features, the benefits, the type of glass and everything. As some of you might know, I’m a little bit aside from this particular business. I’ve been in the glass business many, many years but I’m a little bit not involved in this particular segment of the market and it astonishes me the doom and gloom. I think what you’re talking about is the manufacturer, the fabricators as you’re calling them, can’t turn a shilling. That’s because, guys, you’ve given up the control of the pricing to your sales guys.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Absolutely correct.
TOM RITCHIE: That was always the case. You didn’t care as long as you kept the volumes up. I’m going back now to the Coldshield days, that’s how far back I go, Lenny Morris days, when as long as the 30% deposit was covering the material costs everyone was happy, and as long as the sales volume line was going up, and we all know the story. In any selling industry, if you don’t control what price the sales guys are selling it at, how can you get a margin? Just take that power back. It’s a huge job but you’ve got to start somewhere. Don’t let them sell it for £800. Just don’t give them the power to sign up on that basis.
JAMES HURST: But be prepared to live with the volume fall.
TOM RITCHIE: Maybe, maybe. We’re all skating around about why’s it happening? Everyone in this room who either has customers or themselves who are selling directly, the guys who know, they’ve made the call, they’re there for the evening, they’re a commission only guy, he doesn’t give a monkeys whether he’s getting his 15% on £1,000 or on £900. It matters very little to him, but that’s a hell of a lot to you because that £100 is your margin.
MICHAEL NAGLE: You’re promoting Profitmaker software very well! You shouldn’t take an order without looking at the contribution, end of story. But nobody does it.
SAM KENNEDY: Somebody made a comment to me the other night there that a lot of the people who were in the industry in the 1980s and the 1990s in the halcyon days, people who made a lot of good money in those days, who were probably consummate salesmen but very much direct salesmen, they’ve all moved on and what’s replaced them is people who are untrained. One of the other things I was going to try and bring up is the way that we get leads as well. The fact that legislation is acting against us with regard to telephone calling, Zenith used to make, what was it, 500,000 calls a week, a month?
NIGEL RICHMOND: A month.
SAM KENNEDY: Of course, that’s disappeared now. They were trained salesmen, weren’t they? Has that disappeared in the industry?
ALAN BURGESS: It’s not just the window industry. It’s throughout building products. If you look now at the big, what we call the blue chip companies, how many of them actually bring somebody in at grass roots level and actually train them and invest in them? They don’t. We as a company are as guilty as anybody. You look for somebody who’s got the requisite skills. But the level of experience is falling all the time. It’s not just windows. It’s everywhere you look.
NIGEL RICHMOND: I think, speaking from personal experience, we do an awful lot of training at manufacturing level, even in the processing level as well, but perhaps the area that’s come over today - and you cycle your mind that, yes, actually, maybe that is the area we don’t do - is sales training. That really is the area that’s probably the weakest of all of our training regimes.
ALAN BURGESS: It is.
MICHAEL NAGLE: And technical knowledge.
NIGEL RICHMOND: I can only speak from personal experience. I think we’re not bad on that, but certainly the sales, if you were to go across all the disciplines, that would be the one area where you probably spend least on your training.
GORONWY JONES: There’s sales training; there’s also the training on costing and pricing. Who does it? The profile company? Machinery company? Software company? It’s not clear. It often falls between the stools. Generally there are two ways of pricing windows: cost plus or some price list and some formula. Cost plus, we need to have the right costs.
DAVID RUZICKA: No, you need to have the right “plus”!
WOLFGANG GORNER: If you’ve got both, you’re flying.
GORONWY JONES: We have a German customer. He calculates labour costs for 50 different operations in his factory. Nobody in the UK comes remotely close to that. The UK is slightly better than China; it just does it in square meterage. But it’s totally haphazard and if it’s based on a price list it’s, “Take a competitor’s price list, knock 5% off”, or somebody is given a formula from somewhere and they implement it. They haven’t got a clue whether it makes sense. Then they have to adapt it for the fact that it has to handle one-off designs. I could give loads of examples of the random ways in which people price windows. I once found a manufacturer where if they made the windows slightly wider and higher it became 40% cheaper. Mark-up structures where you mark up design 10 by 150% but design 11 by 180% and you trace it back to something that happened 15 years ago. It would be helpful to actually try and decide who should fill that gap. Who should do that training on how to do costing and, having done your costing, how to do pricing?
ALAN BURGESS: This is a freebie for all of you: because it’s a special product that we manufacture, I won’t bore you with the detail, but the average guy who sells one of our windows is very unfamiliar with sash windows, “Oh, I haven’t sold one of those for a while”. He dreads the questions that are going to come to him because, “I can’t remember whether it’s got double glazing” or, “I don’t know the technical detail of it”, but we’re expecting a trade installer to be educated on our product. Every other day of the week he’s out selling his doors, casements, conservatories. Once a month or once every three months he’s trying to sell a sash window and the pitch would go, “Well, I brought you two windows. The one on the right is the Masterframe one with all those bells and whistles and the BBA ... and the one on the left is also a white shiny plastic window but it’s half the price”. I might be doing some people a disservice but that’s the level of the pitch and he’s hoping to God there aren’t any questions. Which one are you going to buy? “Well, if that’s all you’re communicating, I’ll have the one on the left because it’s half the price”.
The point we were making earlier about the presentation of quotations, we offer our trade customers what we call our twin pack. We already do a very nice, fully documented quotation pack to the installer. But that’s for his use to make sure the specifications are right. Because we’re already doing that, we give the opportunity, if somebody wants it, to have a twin pack which is a pack identical to the quotation, so it has all the pretty pictures, sizes, specifications, it’s a mirror image, it just doesn’t have any prices on it, coupled with a glossary of terms, and the glossary of terms are all the things I want to communicate: baffles, limit stops, tilt restrictor arms and the reason why they’re important, so that that person then can present that. They just have to say, covering letter, “You can have all of this for that price”. That way you are communicating to the end user your value proposition. You don’t get them all, but at least there’s then a conversation and as a spin-off, because we haven’t actually sent anyone away to a college to get trained, most of the reps go, “Oh, this is really good, I’m going to keep the first one to myself because now I know all the things that are different between these windows and somebody else’s windows”. I promise you it’s changed our conversion rates immensely because you’re getting your value across. I’m not saying you’re bypassing the installer, but you’re helping the installer become more confident and ask for more money so that they’re happy and we’re happy.
MIKE RIGBY, MRA: I think the solution you’ve followed is one that other industries faced with similar problems of lack of control have also implemented. Think back to the car industry, it was in absolutely terrible shape, not just the cars themselves but the way of selling. It was a complete shambles at the level of the dealer. One by one most of the car manufacturers took control of absolutely everything. They just worked on the assumption that if they left it to them their margins would be cut to shreds and their complaints levels would be sky high, which they were. They still have a lot of problems but they’ve closed it down by training, by systems, by software, you name it, they’ve closed it down and held on to the way the product is marketed as well.
I think training is part of the answer, control is another one, but actually the way the product has been marketed for a long, long time has been completely left to people’s devices and I think when you do that you get glass given away free. In the early days, of course, they were making good margins on the product so what the hell, “Here’s the come-on, and I’ll make the money anyway”. They did it with hardware, with shoot bolts, this was going to save the day with security, and plastic product given away. Now they’re giving away Activ. It’s going to repeat itself and I think one of the difficulties is it’s not easy. You have to go to considerable lengths - and Alan has talked about some of those lengths - to control how it’s sold and how it’s marketed. I think unless the industry actually reaches down, individually or collectively, things are going to repeat themselves because why would they change?
MICHAEL NAGLE: As I said, the simple answer is if every company had a proper costing system and every order that landed on their desk, before it went into the system they did a contribution report on it, and all you have to say is, “We’re making nothing, we’ve no profit on it”, what’s so difficult about that? Then the free offers and all those things don’t exist. Very few of the companies in the UK are doing that.
JAMES HURST: Because they can’t contemplate not having the number of frames, the turnover. Their turnover ledger, not profit ledger.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes, and that’s a fact. It’s an absolute fact. As big as your companies are, that’s a simple fact.
DAVID RUZICKA: I guarantee that the number of people that will come up to you, as manufacturers in our industry, and always ask you the question, “How many window frames are you making?” You go, “2,500”. They go, “That’s brilliant”. I go, “How do you know that’s brilliant? We might be making nothing. Why don’t you ask me how much profit I’m making?” In America what they do is they’ll ask you, “How much profit are you making? What is your bottom line?” It doesn’t matter how many you make, it’s what your bottom line is. But that is exactly, again, one of the symptoms of our industry, it is all related to volume. Again, I come back to saying this is being pushed by the systems companies to generate bigger volume.
I agree with Mike’s analogy of the car industry. The car industry did go through a period - and I agree it’s not out of it yet - but what it did realise is that, first of all, to sell your product you need the right person to sell it. If you want to be a BMW dealer you’d better come to the table with a decent budget, decent business plan, otherwise you’re not going to get it. You’re not going to sell BMWs out the back of some shed, out of some pokey drive. You’ve got to commit. In our industry, you don’t have to commit, you just have to turn up and basically make a few windows. They then started to take out the fact that there weren’t the big margins in there for the guy to actually give away any more. The other thing that they did is they stopped saturating an area with the same people selling the same product. Again, I come back to systems companies.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: How does your analogy work? In your analogy who is BMW? Is it the systems company or is it the fabricator?
DAVID RUZICKA: No, I see that as the systems company.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Oh, I see that as the fabricator. I think the systems companies don’t make anything. They supply you with parts. You make the BMW.
DAVID RUZICKA: Yes, true.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: You make the BMW. The installers are the showrooms and the dealers. The sales guys are the installers. I think that’s where the problem is.
DAVID RUZICKA: You could be right.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Martin, you’re absolutely right because the order as it lands from the installer is not checked for contribution as it hits the production plant and it’s made. If you don’t make money before it lands, you can’t make money after the event.
ALAN BURGESS: But the other interesting thing on the analogy is the car plant, BMW, how many price rises do they have a year? Have you ever tried going back and saying, “Well, can I ...?” “No, no, that was before the price rise.” Every six months certainly, but two or three times a year you get a price increase. Okay, they might put some more goodies in it, the free glass, this, that and the other, but they are putting on more money.
WOLFGANG GORNER: It also works the other way because about a third of our business worldwide goes into automotive, and Ford will turn round and say, “If you want to keep that part, we want a 3% price reduction now” and you can’t argue about it. Well, if you do, you lose the business; it’s as simple as that.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: The thing as well when you’re talking about cars, Gareth was saying actually he’d like to run a sweep the next time we have one of those meetings about how long it takes for somebody to compare our industry to the car industry. We always end up talking about cars.
What we have to be conscious of is if we take the analogy of you’re the BMW and you’re the installers or the showrooms, we’re 20-odd people sat around here talking about what should happen. I think FENSA has 9,400 installers. We’d better start thinking about how we’re going to influence those guys because there’s an awful big volume of people there and if we’re not careful, we’re not talking about survival of the fittest, we’re talking about mass extinction and start again, like the timber industry because that’s actually what happened. So, it’s going to take more than 20 people sat around a table talking about it, a lot more.
TOM RITCHIE: Yes, but there’s no alternative.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: There isn’t. So how do we do it?
TOM RITCHIE: You were talking there about having cost plus. Tell me, just from those of you who are still involved, do they still take the deposit on the night?
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Yes.
TOM RITCHIE: They do? Well, that’s the second elephant in the room because when the sales guy comes in and he gives you this order that you don’t like the price of, he then gives you a cheque for £1,000, what do you do, send the cheque back?
MICHAEL NAGLE: You should send it back, yes.
TOM RITCHIE: That’s what you should do.
GORONWY JONES: Yes, that’s what we do.
TOM RITCHIE: That’s what people don’t do. I would suggest most people don’t do. The fact is your cost base, to get into the retail business, you should be talking about a mark-up of something like 100%.
MICHAEL NAGLE: It’s about 130% if you’re in the retail business.
TOM RITCHIE: Because you’re going to take 15% off the top of that for the commissions and so on. You have advertising, the cost of the lead. How many people are actually doing that costing?
MICHAEL NAGLE: Not only that, if your sales guys are operating like that, they should be on a commission based on the contribution, not on the sales price.
TOM RITCHIE: Yes, but that might get a bit unwieldy. You need something that works.
MICHAEL NAGLE: But you can do that.
TOM RITCHIE: If the price is higher it doesn’t really matter.
MICHAEL NAGLE: But you can do that.
GORONWY JONES: That can work as long as you have computers.
MICHAEL NAGLE: You can do that, but when you stop the orders where they’re undersold, that will be the big start. One of the difficulties in the industry over the years is that people had price books when they started off years ago in the early 1980s. They copied it from Anglian or they copied it from somebody else and they didn’t understand about costs and they got software to put in that just reproduced the price book. They didn’t want to know about cost plus, and when you told them about cost plus nobody had the bottle to stop it. That’s really what it is. So, if you turn around and make a decision from here, say somebody like Sash does, and you ran a contribution report on every single product that you produce tomorrow and had it on your desk first thing tomorrow and said, “Stop that, stop that, stop that” just because it’s coming out of your pocket now instead of somebody else’s, that would make a big difference.
DAVID RUZICKA: All our processes do before any window hits the factory.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes. That’s what’s needed.
DAVID RUZICKA: Sometimes I get our guys walking in and they’ll try and say a sales guy has done a deal on this particular product and it is below our levels so it gets stopped before we actually put it into production.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes, but there’s a difference there between what’s set as a level and a contribution report. What most guys don’t see is that contribution report which should be run instantly. You go into any company, they’ll all tell you about the discount off the price list. Who tells you about the margin on the cost? No one. It’s all over the same, Ireland, it’s everywhere the same.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: I think we’re all in agreement that the biggest single ingredient that we could bring to the industry is to bring more professionalism into it. The big question is how we do that.
MICHAEL NAGLE: Is it possible - I don’t know how FENSA work or somebody that’s a neutral body as opposed to Rehau or Spectus - that they have buildings that they could run courses in?
MARTIN ALTHORPE: FENSA do training seminars for the technicality of installation, don’t they, and compliance with regulations?
NIGEL RICHMOND: That’s purely building regulation compliance.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Yes.
NIGEL RICHMOND: FENSA is authorised by government so it has a remit which it must stay within as well. It’s not a commercial body as such, but I guess somebody like the GGF or the BPF could do those as well. But I would suggest the take-up would be pretty low and has been pretty low when we have done these. The FENSA training, because it’s been mandatory and been backed by government, has been fantastic. Getting back to your legislation again, it’s a lot easier to do that when you’ve got a huge great stick to wield.
WOLFGANG GORNER: You have to ask yourself what’s in it for the installer. There’s no motivation for them.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Yes, what’s in it for them? What’s the penalty of not going?
WOLFGANG GORNER: There isn’t.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: That’s your point. It’s just too easy.
NIGEL RICHMOND: I don’t know Dave’s business, but Sash, I presume you supply to a whole lot of these installer guys. So, in conjunction with your profile supplier, these guys would have to go and spend one day a month or one day as they came on board, go to recognised training where they could learn about new product, what you were talking about, bringing new product on to the market. It’s a totally different thing to send a leaflet to some company than have somebody go along and you’ve got 50 guys in a class and you send one of your guys and explain how this new product works. So, it’s a matter of getting the information on to the table.
MICHAEL NAGLE: A good example is when we put our stuff into a company, I say it’s critical that the MD sees the result. “It’s important, guys, when you put it in that he mustn’t look like an idiot when he goes down on the floor. He should be able to pick up anything and it should be so clear to him that the dates are wrong, this should have been delivered two days ago, and it should be absolutely idiot-proof.” That’s what you need in relation to training.
WOLFGANG GORNER: A possible way forward is if you were to get all the system companies in the UK to sign up to a scheme which could be administered by somebody like the British Plastics Federation but something that could be marketed to the end consumer. So it would mean something with accreditation. Charge a levy on the product, and that levy goes towards training of the customers.
MICHAEL NAGLE: You have an advantage in that at the moment because Sam said earlier there were 40 extruders and now there are only 14. So, it’s a more controllable problem, isn’t it?
WOLFGANG GORNER: It is, but if the industry does something together. As I said, we’re prepared and we’ve started now paying for some of our customers to go on to have sales training, as one example. There is a lot of other business advice that we can give, but it’s a drop in the ocean. All the hard work you do on one customer is ruined because you’ve got half a dozen idiots down the road who will go and do something different. It’s trying to find some way whereby the whole industry could pull together. I’m wondering whether the group needs to operate some form of central fund which is then used for training, which will be a long, drawn-out affair and will take several years to pull the industry. But if we don’t do something now, again, I repeat, all the good ideas that we bring to the table in terms of products and new markets, we might as well forget about it and just carry on selling metres of white plastic.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: The British Plastics Federation this year has carried out a number of seminars around the country about sustainability involving various people doing presentations aimed at specifiers, really, about educating specifiers. I think next year there’s going to be a question of what is the British Plastics Federation going to do next year? I definitely think that it should be aiming at installers and raising the competence level of installers. The British Plastics Federation Code for Survey and Installation is being transferred to the British Standard by BSI. That will be something that people can get accredited to and I think it’s a good idea, but there has to be some value for the installer in it. There has to be some badge, something that says, “Yes, I’m better than the man down the road because ...” The thing is that’s not going to be something that’s going to take a small contribution. It’s something that will take a very high contribution. The seminars this year have cost £50,000 all in. There have been five of them. The British Woodworking Federation “Wood. for good” scheme spends about £2 million to £3 million a year, something like that.
MIKE RIGBY: £3 million, and they have been doing it for about six years.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: That’s the level. That’s the scale.
MIKE RIGBY: A lot of money and they put a lot of thought into it and the timber industry had to get down to a very low level before they actually got their act together and came back.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: This is the thing. If we don’t get our act together we’ll get down to that low level.
MICHAEL NAGLE: What’s interesting about that is that it was the plastics industry that pushed the wooden industry down to that level. They have come back fighting and they’ve beaten you guys at your own game because of the retained intelligence that they had. Fundamentally what I said earlier, a guy has to serve five years of time to work in the wood industry. Here it’s two minutes. In fact, he can be a window company, go bust, have screwed you for £10,000, and you’ll set him up tomorrow and give him a loan of machinery and you’ll run an advertising budget for him!
MARTIN ALTHORPE: You could provide the software!
MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes. I thought they were all in Ireland but there’s a few over here as well!
MARTIN ALTHORPE: And you encourage them to do it.
MIKE RIGBY: Isn’t it the case, though, that Wolfgang’s idea is combined in some form so you have more momentum. Round the table we also have the rest of the window; we have glass and hardware. Michael has already reminded us that the number of systems companies is shrinking. So if the industry is actually going to fight its way out of this and really make a change, it really has to look at and take a lesson from the timber guys and say, “Right, we’re making a commitment for so many years, we are going to put in sensible money”, and then you have to look sensibly at the amount of money, who’s got it and how you can share it out. My feeling would be if you just dump it on the systems companies’ doorstep, then it’s going to end up with not enough firepower, it will be a token gesture.
WOLFGANG GORNER: I think it’s got to be all-encompassing in some form. I looked towards the warranty side because our experience is - and I’ll be interested to see how it is from the Spectus side - the end consumer sees our name on the window. If anything goes wrong they phone Rehau. They don’t phone the window company that’s put it in. I don’t know if it’s the same with you guys.
ALAN BURGESS: To an extent, yes.
WOLFGANG GORNER: Because, let’s be honest, anybody can go out there and buy a Rehau window and put it in, and the vast majority of the end consumers think that we underwrite, warranty, authorise - whatever you want to say - that practice. It’s awful when you’re in the position, as I’ve been in before, where you’re writing a letter to somebody to say, “I’m sorry, it’s not actually our responsibility because we don’t accredit who fits our windows”. But if the industry were to be able to say if you buy a window product, whether it is a standard casement, vertical slider, whatever, through a recognised route, you’ve got the system house standing behind it, you’ve got the glass company standing behind it, you’ve got the hardware company standing behind it, you’ve got the fabricator, and it’s a centrally administered, recognised warranty that can be marketed, that people can recognise the benefits. It immediately cuts out all the cowboys in the industry because they can’t offer this.
I go back to the point that the UK consumer is very sophisticated. If they recognise that there is something of value there, they’re immediately going to ask the question, “Well, is that the situation with FENSA? Is it FENSA approved?” You’re already creating that differentiation which doesn’t exist at the moment. If we could do that as an industry, in my opinion that would be the biggest fundamental change that you could do within the UK market.
ALAN BURGESS: We have taken that on board and we have made that commitment on two levels. We’re talking about education, and rather than sending somebody away to a college we are sponsoring all of our Bygone Preferred Installers to go on to an NVQ for installation because it sets them apart from the one who is going to fit it cheap. They feel locked into us, they feel much more valued, they’re much more knowledgeable and a more professional company. The point we made earlier today was that we have to change the image from being a double-glazing industry to being professional replacement window installation companies. That’s chalk and cheese; that’s huge. Our commitment to anybody buying a Bygone Preferred Installer window is, “If, for whatever reason, that installer lets you down, we’ll appoint somebody else. If they don’t do a good job for you, we will give you back your deposit”. We actually haven’t had the deposit ourselves, but I want that customer to be totally 100% confident that they’re not going to get shafted. They’re going to get looked after and for that they pay a premium. We’re not being clever and working out how many we’re going to do. It’s just a commitment. What would you do anyway? If you’re a decent company you would go and sort out that customer anyway. If you’re going to do it, why don’t you market the thing and make it an advantage?
This is partly the issue of pinking; we haven’t spoken about that this year. I don’t know what other people’s experiences have been, but it really, really miffs me when extruders will perhaps hide behind, “Well, we want to offer a coating service”. That’s actually not what the retail customer wants because the retail customer is seven years into their ten-year guarantee and they want a ten-year guarantee and you’ve only got a three-year warranty left. No. What they really want is the peace of mind that it’s never going to reoccur. “Will you give me a new ten-year guarantee?” and you’re not able to. Replace the windows and they think, “Wow”, and they go talk to somebody else. Maybe I’m in a very luxurious position of being able to charge better prices than casement guys, but it is this mentality. Unless each of us are going to step up to the mark and say, “Yes, that’s the right thing to do. It’s my own company, it’s my family business. I haven’t got VCs, I haven’t got other people, I haven’t got shareholders, so I’m in a very, very fortunate position”. But doing it right will carry you forward.
JAMES HURST: Alan is very lucky there and also very successful because he can control his market. What we have been talking about is controlling the uncontrollable. I agree with everything Wolfgang said and that is a good idea and we’d be very happy to put a levy on our products if that was the way to go. But he’s wrong in one respect because only 10% of the customers ring Rehau. The other 90% ring the hardware companies.
WOLFGANG GORNER: It just feels like it!
JAMES HURST: We’re the ones, “Your bloody door, your lock is rubbish” and so on, and I’m afraid nine times out of ten, isn’t it, Peter, we go there and we find there’s something wrong with the installation or whatever.
ALAN BURGESS: Excuse me, that’s because the installers are riding on your name. They’re not buying. The retail customer isn’t buying an ABC Window Company; they’re buying a Rehau product. They’re buying whatever door lock because nobody has branded themselves. It’s not even a Masterframe product, it’s a Bygone product. So, unless you get that branding, if it’s a Sash product, you’ve got to come back to Sash as the manufacturer.
JAMES HURST: That’s why we have to help everybody create a brand which says, “I’m a professional window replacement operative” or whatever, or not, and that’s it.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: What if it was Network VEKA because that’s the closest thing to what we’ve been talking about. What’s your experience with that?
DAVID RUZICKA: It’s very, very similar. Network, for those of you who don’t know, has been going now ten years, I think, since we first started off. I’m a director of Network VEKA, by the way. It was in a room very similar to this with a bunch of guys who all had different ideas but collectively were annoyed with always competing with a similar sort of product but with inferior companies undercutting them on price.
The problem with any organisation - and I have to be careful what I say about Network - is you need to be totally independent. That independence is sometimes difficult to attain when it’s funded by a systems company. If you lay a set of rules down you have to implement those rules, and if somebody breaks them you have to be strong enough, no matter how big that company is, to turn round and say, “We’re going to lose volume on the extrusion and somebody’s going to lose volume on hardware” and you’ve got to be strong to implement them.
So, for me, Network is probably the nearest thing to what you guys are actually talking about. It does work. There’s training. We inspect installations randomly to make sure. We do kick people out. But my argument is we don’t make enough song and dance about the ones that we kick out, so nobody ever sees them going. So, people go, “Okay, I know you tell us that you kick people out, but I haven’t seen anything”. I say it should be in the press, he’s out and that’s it. But you’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to have dedicated people and it’s got to be run independently.
Because some of the directors are from manufacturing, some are from the retail, some are from the extrusion company, you have to turn up at that meeting with your Network VEKA hat on and not your own company hat on because there are different things that you discuss there that probably your company doesn’t actually like. But Network does work. It gives that guarantee to the consumer if anything goes wrong. If that guy isn’t there for whatever reason - even if he retires, he doesn’t have to go bust - that’s the unique thing with Network, if the guy decides he wants to start doing kitchens instead of windows, there’s somebody there to pick the warranty problem up.
The hardware people then came to the table probably five years ago and we started to talk about a real ten-year product warranty, not, “Yes, it is but that bit’s not covered”, because I said, “I don’t want that. What I want is if I buy that from you and you tell me it’s covered for ten years, I want it covered for ten years”. So, I have to say that the hardware people stepped up to it and said, “Fine”. Then we started getting issues where if it is a hardware problem what happens then? Do you go and fix it at your cost when it’s not your fault? Then Network got them to eventually agree that there would be a fee paid and there’s a maintenance thing in there. It does do a lot of good things and that’s, as I say, similar to what you guys are talking about here.
ALAN BURGESS: Is that the future of the industry? Is the Network VEKA model the future for the industry?
MICHAEL NAGLE: Can I suggest an alternative to you now, going back 10 or 15 years ago? In 1980 I introduced into Ireland a maintenance agreement and shelved the ten-year guarantee and said the ten-year guarantee crucified this industry because of what went on. In that maintenance agreement the guy paid an annual charge for somebody to come out and visit the house and was all hooked to the software, but everything was fixed free. So, in that visit that cost £30 or £40 or whatever it was at the time, they had the handles, they had the gear, they replaced everything and they did it on an annual basis. So, over ten years it would have cost maybe £300. It was a small cost and I tried to get the whole industry in Ireland to do it and the only company I could get to do it was Fairco in the north. But the software did automatic billing, everything else, and there was a huge uptake.
DAVID RUZICKA: Again, that’s something that Network does. We actually mail the consumer as Network. We offer a maintenance yearly check-up on their product. We actually mail the consumer after the installer has been and installed, and we do an independent questionnaire which comes back to Network. It’s then formulated and it’s then sent out as a score chart to the installer and it tells him how he’s ranked. Every year we hold the awards for the company that’s achieved the highest overall ratings throughout the year. They actually use that as a sales tool because, “Look, this is independently assessed. This is my score of ...” “Did the salesman do what he was asked to do? Did the installers do it? Did they tidy up?” and what have you. They can show that and say, “That’s not me saying my company is good. This is Network as an independent organisation”. So maybe it is something that we should look at.
MICHAEL NAGLE: The beauty about the maintenance agreement was anybody could pick it up. You could pick it up. It was a controlled cost. You had the information of the job. It was standard all across the whole system. It wasn’t expensive, but it stopped the lie, because the ten-year guarantee was another lie in this industry. Absolutely, there’s no doubt, it still is.
SAM KENNEDY: You mentioned, Alan, is that the route? You’ve got, shall we say, a slightly similar system as well with the Bygone installers. They’re independent, aren’t they?
ALAN BURGESS: Yes.
SAM KENNEDY: They’re independent but you do all the training for them?
ALAN BURGESS: Yes. Make no bones about it, we’ve copied the Network VEKA system as far as we can. We only have 50 installers. You have significantly more than that. You have a bigger budget than we have. Ultimately, selfishly, we can’t control the trade. They’re fickle. Maybe they’ll buy from me; maybe they’ll buy from somebody else. The only way that we can have good repeat business that your fax goes and there’s another casement order, the only way we can get the security is by tying in a network of organisations. By that, we have held seminars at Cranfield two or three times a year, sales training, professional bodies, we’ve had GGF, we’ve had Secured by Design people down. We want to train them because my future, my livelihood, depends on how well they can sell my product. From there, the whole installation competency has developed and what would you do in a warranty. There’s my brochure there and at the back of it, it says, “If anything goes wrong it’s down to me”. Yes, we have also kicked people off. We don’t make a big song and dance of it, but there are formal contracts. I do genuinely, passionately believe it is the way forward for reputable replacement window installers.
RICHARD SCHWARZ: So is Network VEKA working for Sash?
DAVID RUZICKA: Sorry, I don’t get that one, Richard.
RICHARD SCHWARZ: Well, I mean you’ve been very downbeat about the business.
DAVID RUZICKA: No. When I get downbeat and annoyed about certain things, it’s sectors of our industry. Just so that you understand, we have our trade side to our industry, we have our commercial side, we have our new build side, we have our timber kit side, we have fencing and decking. We have lots of divisions. It's the main core. My Network VEKA people don’t screw me like the non-Network VEKA people do. Because to people that are not in Network I only give a five-year product warranty; to people that are in Network I give a ten-year product warranty. There are lots of sales things, sales training courses that we run and what have you, that the other people that don’t want to join don’t get to. Now, the other people will say, “I’ll join if you give me it” and I say, “Why should I give you it? It’s a benefit. You're going to get more business from it. Why should I give you that?” So, of our trade customers, probably about 40% of them will be Network people and the other 60% at this moment in time don’t see the benefit of joining.
