Paul Wheeler, Kitchen Lifestyles

“We’re in our third year in our second showroom now. The first year was quite tough, and we were constantly second guessing things like marketing, so we to decided use a specialsit marketing agency to help us out with that. When we were starting out, we used to effectively lease our website from a third-party provider, although the company we were using at the time wasn’t really working out for us. I’d also taken on a business partner, and that meant we had to effectively double the revenue to keep us afloat. Originally that was with him handling installation and me handling design, but we transitioned about a year ago to both of us designing, and we’ve seen a lot more enquiries from that. It ended up being a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, where we needed to do that to realise we really needed to partner with an agency, who then helped us build a new website that’s much more tailored to us and our needs. 

“We had to do a lot of thinking about what we wanted and what kind of clients we needed, and we decided to focus on finding “lookalike clients”. That involved us looking at the clients we’d sold to in the last 18 months, and trying to find people that were just like that. The agency have really helped us find people that fit that profile, then they run adverts directing them towards our website. 

It’s all about deciding ‘are we a victim of the market, or are we going to try and be in control?’. Because we know there’s always going to be people out there wanting a new kitchen, but you have to be proactive and find ways to put yourself in front of them instead of waiting for them to come to you.”

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Neil Fisher, NK Interior Solutions

“We’re still quite a new business, and until recently, I’d say we weren’t really reaching a very big audience. We got some help from an agency to do our social media and advertising, and that took a few months to pick up, but I’d say from the beginning of December we just took off. It was great for us, because a lot of other people were saying that at that time of year they were actually quite quiet – so we were clearly doing something right! 

“Also, we got two or three jobs under our belt that we made a real effort to photograph properly, and that meant people could really see what we were doing when we promoted it effectively.  Now we’ve had a few of those kinds of projects, it’s really built up momentum for us. There’s a lot still to be done, and I’d like it to move quicker, but there’s only so many hours in a day. Yes, we have to do some things differently, but at the moment, we’re just doing what we can.”

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Chris Knight, McManus Knight

“This time last year, we didn’t really do any social media – it was all word of mouth. As we’ve expanded, we’re doing a bit more of that. We are still predominantly recommendation-based, but through that we’ve been able to expand into opening a new larger showroom. So, business for us right now is good. It’s on the increase. And we’re hoping that with this expansion we’re going to be able to carry on that momentum upwards. The new showroom’s not open yet, but we’re hoping to be open around May or June this year. We didn’t have a specific plan for our social media content – we did just start posting more often. I’m not a massive fan of it myself, but on a few jobs now I’ve been getting my photographer and videographer in, just to do some behind the scenes stuff and walkthroughs. That then gets posted online, and it’s helped earn us some nice local traction.”

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Shaun Lenane, Audus Kitchens

“We’ve spent a lot of time recently refining how we operate as a business. Rather than, for instance, the salesperson having to do the ordering and juggling, we’ve taken a lot of those things away from them. So we’ve got a staff member who – by the end of this year – will eventually be ordering all of the appliances in our projects, and she’ll be responsible for all of that herself. She can go into the CRM system and take all of the information for that order there. That means the only thing our designers would order would essentially be the furniture, on software like Winner Flex, and even then we do that in pairs to try and hopefully mitigate the number of mistakes that could happen. Then, we check it again when it comes through, because we’re all human, and of course it’s not infallible. It can be easy to put the wrong lighting or the wrong colour furniture, so you’ve just got to triple check everything. The idea is that the salespeople will have more time for selling, so we’re trying to make it a bit more old-school without all of the dross. 

“When it comes to social media, we’re also trying to do a lot more with that as well, and we also use an agency for that. Now, when we do a client handover at the end of a project, we hand them a nice little goody bag – and they love that, by the way – and we talk them through any appliance issues, and then we sign off with them. At that moment, we now always ask if we can take some pictures of the project. 

“We then send them on to the agency, along with a list of the make and model of the kitchen, and then that’ll go on the socials. We also have someone in-house for Instagram and Facebook, and it’s great because we now get loads of clients coming in saying they’ve seen our recent work through social media, so we’re very pleased with how that’s going.”

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Tom Baldwin, Paragon Designs

“One of the biggest things I’m doing is that I’ve signed up for two learning programmes, one that’s dedicated to the KBB industry, and one that’s more industry-generic. That’s been a really positive thing. It’s helped us really look at things in a different way, it’s given us more confidence to understand how to push things to the next level. The more general business coaching one is run by Joseph Valente, The Apprentice winner, and it’s all about showing you how he did that and how you can apply that to your own business. For instance, we used to wear polo shirts and jeans to work, and now we make sure we’re always wearing shirts, jackets and proper trousers. Making subtle changes like that can really change how customers see you. 

“We’ve also taken out some investment money to put into the business. So we’re expanding our studio space and we’ve got more office space and parking. We’re also taking our own deliveries in-house now with our own delivery vehicles, rather than using a third-party delivery company. That means we now have total control of that element of the business, where we didn’t before, and it helps us have a bit more control over the whole process. It’s amazing how after making just a few small changes, already we’ve had a much better year already.”