Two years on from its creation and the Timber Buying Group is continuing to grow strongly as awareness of the benefits it can provide to members increases, as Allan Durning, Director, outlined to Construction Industry News when we caught up with him recently.
“The progression we’ve seen has been in-line with our business plan expectations,” explains Mr Durning. “We’ve been very pleased with the response of independent timber and the builder’s merchants to the concept of a net price buying group with no heavy administration involved. Our membership levels demonstrate how well received our offer is, as we now have 35 members on board trading from 64 locations throughout the UK, in addition to a 54-strong supplier base that is also still growing.”
As the rapid growth indicates, there’s still plenty of potential for TBG to go at as it looks to add further to its membership numbers. “We’ve got a target of 120 suppliers to get into the group and we believe we will have covered the timber, joinery, sheet material manufacture and finished timber goods areas,” adds Mr Durning. “There’s still some work to be done but in-line with our expectations and the business objectives.”
In order to not become a victim of its own success, TBG has invested in its infrastructure to support the impressive growth it has been seeing including opening a new office in Milton Keynes, which gives the organisation a centrally located operation to cover the whole of the country. This is in addition to the IT and back office e-commerce support it receives from Northstar in Manchester. It has also established a relationship with an e-commerce partner called TimberClick.com, which provides a front of house e-commerce package enabling small to medium-sized timber and builder’s merchants to start trading with the online market. This is something that TBG has been keen to arrange for its members. “It’s very important that we get the small and medium players engaged in the e-commerce aspect of online trading because it’s such a rapidly growing space,” says Mr Durning. “We’ve had the TimberClick.com relationship in place for a year now and it’s really starting to pick up traction.”
“We’ve got a target of 120 suppliers to get into the group and we believe we will have covered the timber, joinery, sheet material manufacture and finished timber goods areas. There’s still some work to be done but in-line with our expectations and the business objectives.”
Allan Durning, Director
Despite the seemingly unstoppable rise of TBG, Mr Durning remains wary of the potential hurdles that lie in wait. “When you’re dealing with a potential market of 1,200 timber and builders merchants and are also having to deal with enquiries from the likes of garden centres, which are morphing into micro building material outlets covering landscaping products such as natural stone paving, fencing panels, concrete block paving and other aggregates, we have to make sure that we remain focused on our core market, which is timber and builder merchants. That said, we cannot ignore the opportunities that a growing garden centre market can offer.
“Thankfully with the assistance of Northstar we’re able to carry out a high degree of e-communication. We have e-bulletins and an e-newsletter that go out on a regular basis, the newsletter called Off Cuts, that’s put together by Northstar to give people a feel for how the buying group is developing. It’s all about a light touch in my view, if you build it they will come, it also outlines how a small business could benefit from what we call the ‘put less in, get more out’ approach of a buying group structure that isn’t overly complex. We don’t get involved in our members’ business other than wanting to be fully supportive in the buying process, nothing else. The other buying groups are involved in conferences, meetings and marketing and all that kind of activity but that’s not for us. Instead we’re just about buying better, putting less in, and getting more out.
“Well we’re definitely off the beach and we’re progressing in land towards our objective to use a military analogy. However, we must not be complacent and we must not overstretch ourselves.”
Allan Durning, Director
“As we grow our membership base further and awareness spreads things become easier in some regards and more difficult in others. As we become more widely known more people want to know about TBG and want to have more time to talk about it when you visit them. As we grow the team we will be able to dedicate more time and resources to further expansion but we’re not keen on overstretching ourselves at the moment.”
When Construction Industry News last caught up with Mr Durning 12 months ago he felt that TBG had put a flag on the beach so to speak, so how would he sum up the progress that has been made since? “Well we’re definitely off the beach and we’re progressing in land towards our objective to use a military analogy. However, we must not be complacent and we must not overstretch ourselves. Looking at a map of the UK we’re seeing a strong presence developing in the Midlands, the North-West and in the South-West and encouragingly new members in the South East, Scotland and Northern Ireland signing up, so we’re looking to connect more of those dots on the map. We’re therefore encouraging our members to talk to each other and where it’s applicable do a bit of inter-trading. At the end of the day we’re all small to medium-sized organisations. We’re not complicated so we can make decisions quite quickly. The owners can decide to trade or not to trade, so we’re encouraging inter-trading as we grow stronger as an organisation and playing to our collective strength.”
With such a positive outlook and plenty of potential to go at, it’s clear that TBG can already look forward to another strong 12 months of trading in its third year with further growth to come.