Dealer Profile: One Office
David Martin from Belfast-based One Office is not afraid to ring the changes at his business in order to find the best way forward. Austin Clark, Editor at Dealer Support, caught up with David to find out more about the latest developments.
One Way Forward
Since opening for business in February 2008, plenty of changes have taken place at One Office. Never afraid to make changes in order to secure long-term success, David Martin, has successfully steered the business through what were undoubtedly difficult trading conditions in Northern Ireland. Now, with staff recruitment in full swing and a recent move to Office Power all progressing nicely, the business is all set up for growth over the coming months and years.
“You can’t stand still in this business,” says David. “If you do you’ll struggle to survive, especially given the fact we’ve only just started to recover from the recession that hit us badly here in Northern Ireland. For example, at one stage we sold a lot of high-end furniture. When the recession hit the bottom fell right out of it so we had to adjust the business and it became more of an office supplies company rather than a furniture and office supplies business.”
For David and his team of seven that meant a serious shift of focus and, most recently, a move towards a more Internet-savvy approach to business.
“Today we’re very much taking business to the internet and are aiming to get the vast majority of our customers ordering online,” explains David. “We have a new website – www.oneofficeproducts.co.uk – up and running, which is a fantastic website that customers are really responding to. It went live in March and since we’ve changed our model so we don’t touch the goods in the majority of cases. We do however still have a driver on our team because there are a number of really big organisations in Belfast who still insist on having a driver that they know, so we’ve retained the service for those customers.”
Power to The Office
As mentioned earlier, One Office recently took the decision to sign up to the Office Power initiative. David explains:
“We were very impressed with Office Power and what they were doing, the business needed the skills that they were offering and we also needed to bring margin back into the business. Office Power allowed us to do that and, aside from anything else, they’re a great bunch of people.
“We liked that we retain our independence but we were blown away by the website and their modern way of thinking. We knew that what they were offering was the route we needed to go down so we decided to go for it. Since then we haven’t looked back and they were great during the switch.”
David says that the best thing about the switch is that margin has shot up – by at least six points since the move.
“The margin growth has been tremendous and is down to a combination of us being able to buy better and run the business in a more efficient way,” David tells me. “There’s a lot of talk about the need to strip out costs and that’s exactly what we’ve been able to do.”
Staff Recruitment
With better margins, greater efficiencies and a website that is much more responsive, David now has the ability to invest time in developing sales and, crucially, his sales team, which is why when I visited he was in the middle of recruiting a new customer service representative to the team. David says:
“We want to have a member of staff that our customers can get to know. We already have one member of staff who does it while everybody else concentrates on field sales or telesales, but we see the value in customer relationships and need somebody else to build that all-important rapport with customers so that they can’t leave! Office Power offers order processing skills but we need to retain a customer service presence in Belfast. We don’t want to sound just like a call centre. We retain customers because we know them very well and look after them. The Office Power sales analysis tools are great in showing the sales team what people are buying and, on the other hand, what they’re not.”
While One Office is encouraging customers to switch to online ordering, David and the team are smart enough to know that customer engagement comes in many forms – which means they’re not shutting off traditional methods of contact such as fax.
“Some of our customers are still very traditional in their ways,” David comments. “We still receive faxed orders with no product descriptions because we’ve known customers for so long. That’s fine when their point of contact is available but it’s of no use when they’re away on holiday or off sick. That’s why we’re using the close relationships we’ve built over time to re-educate customers and get them ordering with product codes or online.”
Continuing Demand
When asked if he’s seeing changes in terms of what people are buying, David says that, while there are small shifts, the change isn’t anywhere near as dramatic as some in the industry would have us believe. He says:
“We’re selling more and more toner and other print consumables but traditional office supplies are still our bread and butter. People are starting to order more furniture again but not top end. It tends to be the more basic items rather than the high-end Scandinavian items that customers used to want. Still, it’s good to see, as furniture was dead in the water for a long time.
“Otherwise we continue to see plenty of demand for traditional office products. One thing we have noticed however is that brand has become less important since the recession kicked in. Before the recession we would never have sold white box but now people don’t care as the quality matches expectations. We’ve changed wholesalers many times and people don’t bat an eyelid when the brand name changes.”
When it comes to current challenges, David says the biggest struggle is with the corporate who still employ sales reps who go in and get the business at any cost.
“While they don’t get the business from us they do cost us margin,” he explains. “You’ll never be able to do anything about that so we definitely get to the stage where we’ll just walk away from a business. If we’re not going to make money we’re not interested.”
Never Forget
Another recent change at One Office is the introduction of a new logo and corporate look. The new elephant logo comes complete with the strapline ‘We never forget our customers’.
“We’re about to run a big customer campaign to find a name for the elephant,” says David, “and we’ve already got a competition running to find a colour for the elephant. This encourages customers and their children to get colouring in over the summer holiday period, so it’s a bit of fun that gets us noticed.
“We’re keen to have fun at work and with our customers and this is one of doing it. It makes our communication so much less stuffy. We already use Twitter a lot to announce deals and the like but we want to increase our number of followers and we can do that by introducing some personality. The staff here have strong personalities – which works with customers and we do have fun and enjoy working together as a team.”
Charity Work
This team ethos extends to the charity work One Office gets involved in. David is braving aching limbs and saddle sores to raise money for a teenager suffering from a rare blood disorder later this month when he completes an 85 mile, one-day cycle ride around Lough Neagh.
“A local teenager, Tom Simpson, suffers from a very rare blood disorder known as Diamond Blackfan Anaemia, which means he has needed a five-hour blood transfusion every two or three weeks throughout his life. In the hope of improving his health, Tom is set to undergo a bone marrow transplant which will mean that he and his mum need to move to London for six months. People can donate by contacting me at david@oneofficeproducts.co.uk.”
Expansion plans
David has plans to be growing the business by the end of the year. There could well be more salespeople added to the team and there’s going to be much more focus on selling more of the products One Office currently doesnt do too well with.
Looking to the future I asked David where he hopes to see the business go in the future. In typical, positive fashion, David answers:
“We are looking to expand and hopefully, in five years time you’ll see a much bigger operation and I’ll be in Hawaii, so you won’t see me!”
