Issues 10: Housing specifiers

HOUSING SPECIFIERS

£4.5 million buys a lot of windows in one year, by anyone's standards. Someone with that kind of money to spend would be worth knowing, right? Any sales manager should be able to find out the name of someone handling that amount of work, by asking the technical sales people. They should now the answer straight away, shouldn't they? If YOUR company claims it knows all about him, and that you're doing everything you can to pull in a slice of that action, the odds are you're kidding yourself. Almost nobody gets in touch with him. The Windowfab exhibition, at Old Trafford this May, is one of those events where companies interested in local authority work show their wares. Specifiers attend it - quite a few. Systems suppliers take names and pass them to their fabricators - that sort of thing. Windowfab also offers specialist lectures, one of them being about CDM Regs. To those who know about these things, the speaker is quite a big wheel in his way. He's an extremely busy specifier because, this year, he's handling well over £4.5 million worth of windows, plus patio doors and an awful lot of porches. And almost nobody gets in touch with him. So, if you think your data on specifiers is good enough, you have a way to find out. Ask the guy who wrote this! How would he know? Two ways. No 1: he's that specifier. No 2: the Windowbase Housing Specifiers data gives you direct access to the names of his clients, all of whom refer technical and commercial queries to their specialist - him - Martin Harrison. That database, the names of 1500 housing specifiers, is being sold at HALF PRICE for the next six months. Only 14 companies keep contact with him so the odds are yours isn't one of them. Most sales managers wouldn't think that was good enough.

SUNDAY TIMES APPOINTMENTS

Not everyone reads The Sunday Times appointments section. We've all got lives, so we're out three-putting, looking for a cattle egret in Lancashire, buying double fuchsias, mowing the lawn or whatever. But, in March, an advert said data management is becoming Big Business. The very first advert on the front page. A blue chip company, an autonomous division of one of the UK's foremost PLC's, it said. One of the most established and recognised brands in the country needs someone with "commercial appreciation of how effective database management can add value to business," someone of graduate calibre, with a clear under-standing of relational database technologies. Whoever gets the job, which comes with the usual excellent package, will "quickly understand the data needs of the business (particularly sales and marketing)." There's no getting away from it, it's the only way to go, these days. You might disagree, believing instead that your company does all right and that, though sales have been a little disappointing over the last quarter, the market's slow and if the business isn't there, you can't do it. Sorry to have to tell you this but the business IS there, and people ARE doing it. Another advert says it all: "it's no longer the big eating the small - it's the quick eating the slow." Not surprisingly, the advertiser offers specialist computer software for use, in this case, by surveyors. With the right technology, an architectural/ surveying practice can easily turn over £250k a year without the need for any staff at all, and that's a lot of money for one person to earn in a year.

QUALITY ASSURANCE WEBSITE

Quality Assurance has been one of those fashionable buzz-word terms for quite a while. First there was BS 5750, then ISO 9000. If we believe everything we read, QA fever swept the country at the same rate as The Spice Girls. What a load of rubbish. There's eight or nine thousand window companies out there today and only two or three hundred of them have any sort of QA certification. Three per cent. For an industry that prides itself on offering quality products, it's a bit odd that 97% of them offer no QA whatsoever. In other words, them as has it are still at a bit of a premium, to say the least. At the last count, some time ago, 57% of specifiers actually require (that's require, not prefer) QA suppliers, yet they can only use 3% of the industry. If that isn't room for growth, I don't know what is. QA window fabricators are very much at a premium but it isn't the easiest job in the world to find out who has it. Assessors compete among themselves and very few (if any) of them do anything to promote QA to the end user. Try finding out who's got ISO 9000 with LRQA. Needle in a haystack, if ever there was one. www.winbase.co.uk - the Windowbase website will be offering, in the near future, The Quality Index - free access to anyone who needs the details of window suppliers actually known to have achieved quality certification. Those who have it will, at long last, have their names displayed for all to see. The names of those who claim their windows are BBA-certificated, because the system supplier has done the tests, will not. Slight problem for one or two companies, of course, who'll have to explain why their names aren't shown. Good news or bad news? It depends on how you look at it. 3% of the industry chasing 57% of the specifier market . . . makes you think, dunnit? And one interesting point. The Windowbase Housing Specifiers database already has a field, showing who requires quality, who prefers it and who doesn't much care. Something for everybody there, then! That's an awful lot of market data for only £765.

WIRRAL POSTCODES

Unless you're actively doing business with someone on the Wirral, you won't know that they've recently cut loose from Liverpool. At least as far as Royal Mail's concerned. The dreams of all those oh-so-smart ladies from Neston and Heswall, driving their Porsche Boxsters to Cheshire Oaks on a Sunday afternoon, have finally come true. Their postcodes have changed from L (you know, as in Toxteth and Edge Hill) to the far more tasteful CH of Chester. There's posh, now. Did your database manager pick it up? No problem to Windowbase users, of course. Their data comes automatically updated every quarter. Now, there IS posh! And it's not just the Wirral…

NEW BT AREA CODES

What's your company doing about what British Telecom calls The Countdown? No, not the Millennium this time. This is the countdown to what they call The BIG Number. You do know about the Big number, don't you? According to BT, it's the biggest reorganisation of the UK telephone numbering system ever, creating hundreds of millions of new phone numbers for future use. To make this possible, BT remind us ominously, certain groups of phone codes and numbers will be changing. The last lot of changes didn't make life easier. Leeds, with 0532, was easy to remember because 5 is L and 3 is E. Instead of 01532, we got 0113. Is that right? Can't remember. From June 1st, you'll need to know about 029, 024 and, of course, the big 020's because they're London. What you once kept in your head is going to be more difficult to remember. Having all the numbers on your monitor makes life easier but it'll cost your company a few bob to make sure someone's gone through all the numbers and changed the 01705's to 023's. It sure is another one of those cost-effective times to be moving over to Windowbase, so that it's all done for you. Never mind the hassle. It's the time lost waiting for someone to finish the job because, as we all know, Tracy has lots of more important things to do. (Which reminds me . . . where's MY coffee?)

THINKING ABOUT IRELAND

If you believe success breeds success, then you might like to think about this. Imagine making your first tentative steps into penetrating the Irish market. From having one rep based over there part-time, you then have someone there all the time. A small sales office follows. That office could be key to your future because, in its recent Finance Bill, the Irish Government committed itself to lowering corporate tax rates, on a phased basis, down to 12.5% in 2003. From next year, Irish Corp-oration Tax for most traders will be 24%, reducing to 20% by the end of 2001, and 16% at the close of 2002. From 1st January 2003, it will be 12.5%. For some manufacturing, computer software and financial sectors, a taxation rate of 10% has applied for some time and will continue to do so to 2010. They aren't doing this for fun. The Irish are serious about attracting your business. Apart from economic conditions, the benefits of Ireland are becoming something to look at closely. Having an Irish subsidiary in an international group structure now makes more sense than ever for anyone looking at how to expand profitably.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Windowbase data, visit the website: www.winbase.co.uk, phone Martin Harrison on 01691 829201 about specifiers or Mike Davis on 01706 644308 about fabricators and installers in the UK and Ireland.