Insight
5 Minutes With Jordon Munro: Scaling Building Products Globally
Within Building Products, I’ve increasingly been working with manufacturers who are working with investment houses. Acquisition, diversification and cross-border expansion have been key themes of these.
Over recent years, Jordon Munro has played a pivotal role in Havwoods’ international expansion, most notably in his capacity as North America Managing Director. Under his leadership, the company has strengthened its position as a premium wood flooring provider. Along with this, he led the acquisition of Castle Bespoke Flooring.
Jordon’s journey offers valuable insight for leaders of SME Building Product manufacturers, and businesses backed by investment partners. His experience aligns closely with themes of sustainable growth, strategic scaling, and the realities of working within ambitious, fast-paced investors.
Collingwood: Havwoods has demonstrated the type of growth trajectory often seen in PE‑backed businesses: rapid scaling and internationalisation. What disciplines and metrics do you think SMEs should adopt, even if they’re not PE-backed, to create investor‑ready performance?
Jordon: The discipline that unlocks everything else is clean, consistent data. Not just revenue and margin, but the operational drivers beneath them: customer acquisition cost, repeat purchase behaviour, average order value by channel, and pipeline conversion.
At Havwoods, once we properly segmented performance by channel and audience, it became clear that our digital activity, while strong on surface metrics, was delivering inefficient conversion at a high acquisition cost. Reallocating investment into F2F channels resulted in conversion increasing fivefold. That decision wasn’t instinctive the data made it unavoidable.
Cohort thinking matters just as much. Managing the P&L as a single block hides structural truth. Without that level of visibility, businesses drift and that drift is exactly what gets exposed in a transaction process.
Collingwood: And from your experience, what traits distinguish companies that scale well from those that stall during investment‑driven growth phases?
Jordon: They solve the leadership bandwidth problem earlier than they think they need to.
During our North American expansion, I was still involved in approving pricing and key commercial decisions. That level of involvement made sense early on, but as volume increased it created bottlenecks. Decision velocity slowed, and the business was growing, but not at the pace it should have been.
The turning point was appointing strong in market leadership and fully empowering them on commercial decisions. Once that structure was in place, I could step back from operational execution and focus on the next phase of growth.
There is also a cultural dimension that is often underestimated. What works domestically does not automatically translate. The strongest teams enter new markets with curiosity rather than assumption. Investment led growth is rarely linear, and leaders need real tolerance for that complexity.
Collingwood: Havwoods has evolved from a UK flooring specialist into a global brand. What have been the most critical enablers of successfully scaling a building products company across foreign shores?
Jordon: Never assume the brand travels.
Havwoods was well established in the UK and worked with global clients, which created an assumption that recognition would carry into North America. It didn’t. We were largely unknown, which meant the first phase of growth was education and education is time intensive when your customer’s attention is the scarcest resource.
That reality extended the path to traction significantly.
The response was to prioritise depth before breadth. The US market rewards focus. Spread too thinly and capital is consumed without meaningful return. We established a physical presence in a high density, design-led locations and embedded the team directly into the market.
At scale, in market leadership becomes non-negotiable. There is a point where proximity to the customer cannot be replicated remotely, no matter how strong the central team is.
Collingwood: The acquisition of Castle Bespoke Flooring marked a major milestone for Havwoods’ expansion in North America. What operational or cultural integration lessons did this deal reinforce for you?
Jordon: The commercial rationale for Castle Bespoke was strong, but integration wasn’t seamless.
Early on, there were misalignments around roles, expectations, and ways of working. That is normal in any acquisition, particularly where two established teams are brought together quickly.
What becomes clear is that integration is not a moment in time it is a process. Alignment is built through repetition: clarity in communication, consistency in decisions, and clear ownership of responsibility.
The most important discipline is addressing uncertainty early. It is always better to understand quickly where alignment exists and where it does not, rather than allow ambiguity to embed and compound.
Collingwood: Many SMEs struggle with stretching resources while trying to expand. How did you prioritise investment – be this from a people, infrastructure, or market development perspective – during Havwoods’ North American growth push?
Jordon: People first, always.
You can operate with imperfect systems for a period, but you cannot build a market with the wrong people. Strong in market leadership enables everything else to follow.
Beyond that, sequencing is critical. Infrastructure and investment should follow proven demand, not precede it.
The ability to say “not yet” is one of the most underrated disciplines in scaling businesses. There was clear appetite to expand into Los Angeles during our growth phase, but we chose not to. We weren’t ready financially or organisationally and moving too early would have diluted performance across existing regions.
Depth before breadth, consistently applied, produces sustainable growth rather than expansion that is difficult to maintain.
