by Serguey Shinder
Our business has been organised by trade since before I joined it. Plumbing and heating is one department, electrical is another, building materials a third. Each has its own buyers, its own section of the catalogue, its own staff at the counter, and its own trade discounts, negotiated customer by customer with the people in that department. For forty years that matched the way our customers worked. A heating engineer bought heating.
In 2025 our sales team noticed that heating engineers had started buying from the electrical side, and buying badly. A heat pump installation is not a boiler swap. Alongside the unit there is a hot water cylinder, often larger radiators, controls that have to talk to each other, a dedicated electrical supply, sometimes a new consumer unit, and commissioning through a manufacturer's app. Half of that lives in a department the engineer had never had an account with.
So the engineer paid walk in prices on the electrical lines, because his trade discount belonged to the heating department. A quote for one job came from three people who did not compare notes. And when he asked our electrical counter whether a particular controller would work with the pump he had bought from our heating counter, nobody on either side of the building could tell him. Several of our best heating accounts told us they now bought complete installations from a specialist distributor who sold the whole job as one list. They had not left us. Our structure had sent them away one job at a time.
I think this is the shape of the next ten years for anyone who supplies trades. Heat pumps are the first, but solar panels with batteries, car chargers on the same supply, and homes where heating, electrics and controls are designed together all point the same way. The jobs are converging faster than the trades, and much faster than the companies that supply them.
We have started on the parts we can control. For each heat pump range we sell, we now keep a job list: everything an installation of that model typically needs, across every department, with the compatibility between items recorded once rather than known by one person. Trade terms are set per customer for the whole business, not per department. Two people in each branch have been trained across both counters. And a heat pump enquiry now produces one quote from one person.
None of this was difficult. It was simply never needed while the trades stayed in their lanes.
We were organised around the trades our customers used to have. The work they are doing now crosses all three of our departments.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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