Commercial Director, Building Product Manufacturer | Collingwood

The Client

Collingwood Executive Search had already successfully partnered the wider Group, which includes household brands from within the building materials industry, in headhunting two previous directors. As a group they are market leaders across several subsectors within building products.

The individual business manufacturers numerous cementitious based products for the construction market; to include specification, retail, housing developer, and merchant.

Over the past six years, this individual manufacturer had trebled turnover, with a hardened business strategy in place to push revenue figures by an extra 40% inside five years.

The Position & Its Challenges

The Managing Director recognised that in order to realise this ambitious growth, there was a need to bring in an additional member to their board, in the shape of a Commercial Director.

Key strengths of this individual and areas of focus were highlighted as:

• Build and implement pricing strategies
• Differentiation across accounts held on what makes for profitable business
• A more robust strategy across the Sheds (the likes of Homebase and B&Q) and trade accounts (Jewson, TP etc) which, at that point, had been too scatter gun
• Strategic development across Housing Developers
• Across all of the above, stronger relationships were needed at Category Director level
• Across all commercial functions there needed to be a shift to gaining maximum value from the CRM / ERP systems invested in
• For more than five years the business had outsourced its marketing function. There was an appetite for bringing this back in house and for this person to take ownership of marketing strategy moving forward

Upon meeting to discuss the brief, it was clear to Collingwood’s Head of Building Products & Construction that there were a number of key attributes required in this person: blending what would be a more traditional Commercial Director, together with that of a Sales and Marketing Director too. Additionally, and to fit in line with other directors, salary was fixed at a challenging rate. As achieved previously, Collingwood highlighted that Collingwood would feedback on conversations held and share intelligence on salary demands and skillsets.

Furthermore, this was to be a sensitive search, due to an existing director internally not being aware of the MD’s intentions and this person would need to live within commuting distance of their midlands base.