Which supplier should I use? Part 1 (Light Building Materials)

Today I will be talking about what you should look out for when it comes to choosing your merchant for light building materials (Shop floor goods).

It may not seem overly important to you if your choosing a merchant for LBM but every penny counts and believe it or not LBM does mount up and when you think about it, its part of everyone of your orders.

Just look at your delivery order and tally up the LBM and you can see that its not the bulk of the cost but its still a big part of the money that your spending.

For instance:-

3 x Packs of blocks (216)
2 x Holm sand LBB
10 x Cement
5 x Celotex 8x4 50mm
20 x Celotex 450x1200 50mm
10 x 47x100 sawn treated 3.6m

So that's an order for heavy side and may cost between £400-£600 roughly.

So the LBM for this would be:-

Mortar plasticisers,
cement colouring
fur fixes (wall starters)
wall ties
retaining clips
screws
saw
trowel

And this would cost depending on the quantities around £60-£130.

So LBM makes up between 20-30% of your spend, all subject to your trade but regardless even if we went as low as 10% of a £10'000 job it's still £1000.

So what do you look for if your choosing your merchant for the light side materials?

First off you want a builders merchant or supplier to trade on "EVERYTHING" this is extremely difficult to get this attitude out of a nation merchant, The ones I've worked in have restrictions on shop items, you name it and they want a very high mark up on about 95% of the shop items, I used to get embarrassed to serve a customer at one particular merchant because we were next to a independent fixings and fastenings shop, when one of my high spending customers has spent £2000 with me on one order and they bring a box of screws to the counter and ask "how much?" and my price was 5 times more than a stand alone small fixings shop and I was unable to reduce the price it makes you want the ground below to swallow you up!

Then there are the regional merchants and some you are able to get a great deal in for the smaller items, just be careful though some are getting a little to confident and are trying the same tactics as the nationals and believe me it will come back around and bite them on the backside, nationals can fall back on other large orders taken from there 100's of branches, regionals don't have that luxury.

Then we have the independents who i have explained before in a previous post but not in much detail, they have there feet firmly planted on the ground, with this in mind they may not be able to offer the most show stopping deals on HBM they can certainly wipe the floor with bigger greedier merchants on LBM.

Finally there is the "non traders" don't be fooled by the name, there a national but wont trade and the reason for this is? there prices are low to start with, some tradesmen I've come across turn there noses up at these guys because they feel that they as the "tradesman" should be entitled to a better deal but they wont budge, everyone gets the same cheap deal, take it or leave it attitude.

There is one final one i forgot to mention but you have to be extremely organised to pull this one off:-

The Internet!

A tough one but with technology being as good as it is nowadays and the fact an online shop can be just as ridiculed as a physical shop most are legit and the overheads are almost non-existent so the costs of running an online supplier is minimal and this leads to prices being low, down side? If you forget an item you have to wait for it to be delivered.

To summarise its a tough call but if you put the leg work in when you start your shopping you can relax a bit more when you have identified who is the cheapest and what it takes in terms of time when you have to start the process again.

A word of warning, make sure that the items your buying don't slow up the job, there is no point in saving money on LBM if the items your using that are the cheapest around and with good reason, if an adhesive doesn't stick but is half the price of one that does which would you buy? it's all to do with trail and error initially.

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