Simon Monks, MD of hardware company VBH, tells us why having the right people in the right place is vital to the success of any business, and how a smile can help, too.
Many factors make up a successful business.
Three of the most obvious are to have products that people want to buy, to have stock available for your customers to order (even in the most trying of times such as we have recently experienced), and thirdly, procedures to make sure that those piles of excellent goods get to the customer when they want them.
A fourth factor is ‘people’; your staff is vital in bringing all these strands together and that’s why it’s important to get your recruitment right.
It’s not always easy, as not only does the team need to be efficient, but also the individuals need to be a pleasure to deal with for customers, suppliers and indeed, colleagues. I am sure that we all have experience of companies who get the job done, but who we don’t particularly enjoy dealing with. I refer to companies outside of the industry, of course…
At VBH, we believe that we have the best team of any hardware company. It is a mix of (lots of) experience and youth, with all the new ideas and working practices that youth brings.
2021 was a fantastic year for VBH with our sales figures exceeding those of 2019 by 40%. Our existing team members in all departments did a great job of ensuring that we kept up with customer demand, with only a few glitches along the way.
We have spent the last few months recruiting new people and moving existing staff into positions where their abilities can have a big positive impact on our performance, to make us easy to deal with.
Steve Thomas has moved from our Swansea sales office to the position of Area Sales Representative for South West England. Our customers are already benefitting from Steve’s years of experience running the production line at one of our PVCu fabricator customers.
Tyler Shutts, Earl Tate and Colin Thomas have all been promoted to Regional Manager, for Northern England, Wales and South East England respectively. This follows massive increases in business on their sales areas. Tyler is the National Fenestration Awards Young Person of the Year for 2020 and 2021, and has been building her customer base since joining VBH straight from university. Colin has been looking after fabricators in Wales since 1989 and his area has never looked so healthy, whilst Earl is a ‘new boy’, having joined VBH in 2020 following many years industry experience both at a fabricator and at another hardware company. He is now doing great things for VBH. All have different strengths but all are well liked by their customers.
In Scotland Pamela Paterson is now Operations Manager at our East Kilbride site, with responsibility for the day-to-day running of the depot. Pamela is in her third decade with VBH.
Karen Campbell moves to the position of Internal Sales-Co-ordinator in Gillingham, linking the activities of our sales and marketing teams. She is relishing the new challenge and it is already bearing fruit.
Simon Eshelby returns to VBH in the new position of Distribution & Systems House Manager, following six years away. Simon brings all his technical knowledge to bear in his new role.
Lastly, we have bolstered our Customer Service team with the recruitment of Leah Organ and Georgia Rowlatt at our Gillingham head office. Both are new to the industry having previously worked in banking and retail, but both are bringing their people-skills to the job and are attracting rave reviews from customers. Along with Tyler, they are great examples of the new younger people that we need to attract to our fantastic industry.
In summary, you need to have all your pillars in place, but perhaps the most important things in these days of technology are to make sure that your systems are customer-focused and that you have people who are efficient and a pleasure to deal with. People buy from people at the end of the day.
www.vbhgb.com