There’s an old saying – ‘it’s not what happens to you but how you respond that matters’.
Even in the trickiest of circumstances – such as the Covid-19 pandemic – there can be opportunities for businesses but it doesn’t come automatically and hard work and vision is required to reap the success.
West Sussex hardwood sawmiller and merchant English Woodlands Timber, winner of the 2020 TTJ Awards Small Timber Business of the Year category, is proving a good example of facing the pandemic challenge head-on and adapting its operations to grow the business.
Incredibly, its sales are now 30% above what they were pre-Covid levels and its online, retail operation is booming, with many new customers recruited in the past year. It also recently acquired the Northwood Forestry business.
Ian McNally, who leads the company with MD Tom Compton, explained how English Woodlands, which supplies the top end of the joinery, furniture and building markets, tackled the pandemic challenge with a growth mindset.
“I’ve never been in the situation when the business has been forced to close,” he said.
“In March [2020] when the pandemic started, we kept only a few staff working who we couldn’t furlough. We focused on re-negotiating creditor payments and worked very hard to get cash owed to us from our debtors.
“We also worked very hard on increasing our marketing at a time when everything stopped and we called all our customers.”
At the first opportunity half the staff were brought back from furlough to work on existing orders and a Covid-safe working environment was implemented.
“We were one of the few that was able to respond as quickly as that. We had people coming up the drive because they heard we were open and had started delivering. It was that availability that enabled us to keep a lot of the small trade, as a lot of our customers are single, manager-owner businesses and they needed to keep operating.
“Many of the big players were still closed and we were able to capture quite a large number of new customers. Then slowly we brought more staff back into the business as demand increased.”
By July last year incoming orders were in excess of a normal pre-Covid month. Initially, the company thought the orders it was receiving was an overflow of the orders it would have expected in April and May but record volumes continued in every month following, apart from a small blip in November. “There was a big demand increase and our web presence was fundamental. If you looked at the web traffic it was phenomenal in that patch, with a huge wave of people wanting to improve their homes. Because of our web presence we seemed to get a fair share of that and we were running 10-20% ahead of pre-Covid levels. Now in spring 2021, we are more than 30% ahead of pre-Covid levels.”
Pre-Covid, English Woodlands was a £3m turnover business. For the financial year ended September 30, 2020, the company recorded annual turnover of £3m, despite having recorded Covid-related sales decreases in the March-May of that year after lockdown was first introduced.
Sales levels have continued to grow and over £1m of business was recorded in the first 10 weeks of 2021, with February sales up 50% on typical pre-Covid levels. A turnover for the current year of £4m is projected, which would be a 33% uplift on 2020.
Part of that increase is due to the acquisition of the Northwood Forestry business in January.
Northwood owner James Burnford announced to his customers in November, 2020 that he was retiring and would be closing the business. Northwood, based at Pulborough, about 10 miles from English Woodlands, supplied hardwood including beams, cladding and flooring to mainly the builder market and was a notable local supplier of good quality French oak.
English Woodlands purchased its stock and assisted with the employment of two key Northwood workers (sales manager and stock manager) and looked to service many of Northwood’s customers.
ONLINE TRADING
Instead of cutting its marketing costs during the pandemic, English Woodlands doubled its marketing and sales spending.
“Unless you have sales you have nothing in a business and we focused very hard on our digital applications,” Mr McNally explained.
“We always had a good digital presence, but what was difficult was you could not buy timber from us digitally. What has fundamentally shifted is we have customers from all over the country now buying boards and products from us online.
“This transition in the way people are engaging with us over the last six months, I reckon would have taken six years or more to achieve [under normal trading conditions].
Mr McNally said the company’s experience mirrored digital transition trends cited in Prof Scott Galloway’s book, ‘Post Corona – From Crisis to Opportunity’. In the book Prof Galloway says it took many years for our online retail sales to get to about 6-8% of total sales, then it got to about 18% over the last decade and then in one period of eight weeks it jumped to 28%.”
It is not only the facility of having a web shop but the information, photos and logistics software that makes it possible to sell individual timber boards and packs.
The company’s logistics system can show how many boards are in a pack at any one time and the measurements of each board. When boards are sold, the system removes the boards from the pack.
“At any one time we are able to sell the pack knowing whatever is left in it, whereas in previous situations you would have no idea. We’ve started marketing that with videos to push pack sales.”
The English Woodlands website has been fine-tuned, with the ‘Shop’ and Stock’ buttons taking more prominence on the home page. A ‘Get a Quote’ app button has also been created to capture enquiry data and allow customers to build their quote for different products, rather than just sending a form.
“There is the ability to add a product to a basket and get a delivery price. We are selling timber this way literally all over the country.”
Mr McNally cites the wine industry as an example for the timber sector to follow.
“The wine industry has been way ahead of us as an industry. If you are going to spend £135 on a bottle of wine, you get the whole treatment, such as a visit to the wine cave and you are treated like royalty.”
Some individual timber boards cost many hundreds of pounds and are unique wood to make high end furniture and joinery. A bespoke shopping experience with all information, and photos with a zoom function is necessary to encourage these kinds of purchases.
“Our challenge at the moment is what is the ability in terms of logistics technology to pick, pack and despatch – it’s the ‘Amazon’ technology.
“It has taken five years to get to this point and people thought we were ridiculous trying to sell one board at a time. But many of our customers who are coming to buy one board, then end up buying more than one board, they click and buy a number of boards. The delivery/collection side isn’t the constraint we thought it would be and people are happy to pay the price.”
Typically, web shop orders have a three to five day turnaround.
The work on making the website smooth and easy to navigate is shown in the growth of visitor stats – traffic has increased from 557,000 in March 2020 to 1 million in February 2021, while the stock/shop section has grown 135% to 592,000 in that time frame. The packs section alone has seen 934% growth to 2,000.
VIDEOS AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Videos and social media interaction are also key areas developed by English Woodlands.
A video professional comes to the Cocking site every six weeks and films about 10 videos at a time. Some 60 videos are now on the company’s YouTube channel, including customer testimonials, like that of house renovator Brian Kelly. Mr Kelly has spent considerable amounts on hardwood from English Woodlands for his house project in Richmond and the video clip has seen thousands of views.
English Woodlands MD Tom Compton is also a media star, with his immense hardwood knowledge making for some popular videos on individual species. This also provides an educational resource where the next generation of timber users can gain knowledge – such as furniture students at nearby West Dean College of Arts & Conservation using it to swot up on oak and how to use it.
The company has a five-pronged approach to social media – LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Of these Twitter and Instagram have the biggest reach, with 4,329 followers on Twitter, 5,361 on Instagram and 983 on FaceBook, while YouTube has had 26,000 views from March 2020 to February 2021. Instagram has yielded the biggest level of engagement, while FaceBook has seen a great growth in activity over the past year.
Elsewhere, in the area of digital technology, there is use of tablets, video conferencing and WhatsApp by staff to interact with customers.
“We use every single communications tool to liaise with our customers and show them timber,” Mr McNally added.
English Woodlands’ digital wizard Sarah Farmer said the company had embraced technology over the past year in a way that might otherwise have taken years.
“And because of the change in dynamic with the customers, we now spend more time in development mode, lean thinking and training,” she said. “We have made space for daily change and development. It’s become natural to us.”
STOCKS
English Woodlands has trimmed its stock levels down to be more efficient, balancing its Super Prime and Prime Oak S/E across the range, redefining pricing to improve competitiveness for oak W/E and S/E, with oak, ash, elm and chestnut being the core ranges.
“The trigger for buying new stock is not to buffer our stock but to service new orders,” said Mr McNally. “We have eaten up a lot of the buffer we had within the system. Basically, we only order when we need to, whereas before we ordered speculatively.”
This didn’t create too many problems when some items go out of stock – customers were understanding and flexible when it occurred.
French mills supplying oak have remained open during the pandemic – in fact, Covid has proved easier than Brexit in terms of ease of supplies. Logistics and cost of transport from the supplier mills has caused some issues due to availability of lorry drivers and other factors. In terms of managing customer visits on site, English Woodlands is looking at visits to be more controlled in the future, which will help productivity. In the past, the company gave extraordinary latitude to view boards out of packs and compare products in other packs. The combination of Covid-19 guidance and increased product information and photos on the website have led to better efficiency.
“Our business has achieved a 30% growth rate, which for a small business like this is significant and we foresee achieving a turnover approaching £5m in the next 18 months. In January, February and March we were running at that sort of level. The volume of orders coming into the business is something we haven’t seen before. We have transformed it.
“We’ve used the Covid crisis as a catapult on the digital side,” concluded Mr McNally
