It’s always pleasing to work with successful smaller companies to help consolidate their success and to open up new business streams to enable them to grow further in a safe and controlled way.

This case study relates to a successful electrical contractor. They have grown to a £2m turnover over the last ten years specialising in retail fit-out work.

The objective is to take them to a £3m + turnover by working on much larger jobs with main contractors in targeted areas. We're on target to do this in a little over a year, even in the teeth of a recession, on just three days sales a month!!

Background
Having grown to a substantial £2m, this company had begun to plateau and were keen to break through to the next stage of growth. Their speciality is retail fit outs, carried out nationwide. It's fast-track work with contracts often lasting just a week, combining electrical, plumbing and ventilation work as required. They are very successful at this type of work.

However, the Managing Director was concerned about several problems and potential vulnerabilities. He reasoned that if the retail sector slowed, the number of fit outs would also fall, negatively affecting their growth. Additionally, this type of retail fitout tends to be seasonal, dropping off during the winter months from December to February. Therefore they were also looking for ways to smooth out the workload to give their teams work over this slack period.

Their business model also tends to enforce a relatively slow growth pattern. This is due to the relatively low value of the orders compared to the electrical packages involved in larger building contracts. For example a fit-out order could be around £20,000 – nice work but it takes fifty to get to a million £. The major school contracts we’re now securing can be up to £250,000 each – and they are proving very keen on price while still maintaining a 10-12.5% margin. As I write, they are just under way with a substantial £200,000 contract for a school in the South East.

How are we doing this?
We booked in a sales consultant to work from their offices three days a month. He had two objectives:

• Primarily to develop key contractor accounts for larger jobs, particularly aiming to cover work during the 2008/9 winter months.
• Secondly, to start generating fit-out work with retail chains they hadn't worked with before but wanted to penetrate – such as Starbucks.

Over the last five months since the start in June 08, we've used market intelligence on tenders and contracts awarded from Builders Conference to identify:

• Building projects in selected areas to tender for the electrical installations
• Building contractors who might not necessarily have jobs at the moment but who would certainly have a stream of work that they could lock into at a later date

Results
During this time we've worked a total of fifteen days on site sales for them. Taking a snapshot of our progress so far, we're now:

• Developing over 85 key contractor and shopfiitter accounts across London and the northern Home Counties
• Securing between 10 and 12 targeted enquiries per month, enhancing these with further detail on other contractor tenderers, setting appointments and chasing up the tenders once submitted.
• Developing a straightforward and very cost-effective sales followup system and database which will become increasingly effective

Up to the present time work won is in excess of £300,000 and work tendered for in excess of £1,000,000. Given that this work began from a completely cold start, we are well on track to meet the target of a £3m+ and smoothed turnover in not much over a year.

Now that the sales have matured, a typical days work has between 22-24 separate different company contacts a day, including 4-5 new contacts a day, letters, emails and tender research. One of the particularly powerful aspects of the Builders Conference element is the ability to identify other main contractors tendering for contracts over and above the one who sent the enquiry in the first place - and then additionally to identify the company that wins the work. Which means that one good enquiry can easily lead to two or three more high quality contacts.

Unexpected benefit
An unexpected benefit of the work we've done for them has been the discovery of a genuine competitiveness in tendering for schools work. They've now won over £200,000 of schools work in the five months since we started working for them, over and above the other jobs they have won.

Boost your sales
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