I’m not going to say happy New Year to you all, I’ve done it already. It’s the middle of January, it’s time to move on! But as we do, I think it’s worth taking a look back at the last month of 2016. A turbulent year for many reasons, and one we hope not to match in 2017.

On the glazing industry front, I think it was quite a finish. No quiet winding down towards the end of the year.

A month like any other

Usually by the end of November, maybe very early December at a push, you can most definitely see a drop in business level activity as home owners put home improvements further down the list of things to get done.

Not this time round. At our place, we had one of our best Decembers on record. By a mile. We were signing up the types of contracts that you normally see during the middle part of the year. The majority of contracts we signed up were big house fulls of windows and doors. No single windows or the odd back door. These were very high value, prestige contracts that we normally see more of during the summer. This meant a fantastic end of the year for me personally as they were mostly mine! And a brilliant end to the year for our business as we surpassed with time to spare our yearly target.

During December I spoke to a number of installer and fabricator friends of mine and all of them reported that despite the time of year, the amount of business they were doing meant it felt like any other month of the year. Assuming this was the same story across the whole sector, this was very good news for the industry heading into the New Year. Full order books, solid fitting schedules into and well beyond January, healthy lead levels. All positive symptoms.

I’m not quite sure why this December was so different to previous ones. It could be a mix of consumer confidence and pent up demand all coming good at the right time. Lets hope that if this is the case, it continues throughout 2017.

2016 National Fenestration Award winners announced

Perhaps one of the most anxious times for me as co-founder of the NFAs is when the winners are eventually announced. It’s an epic year-long campaign that sees so many people and companies put so much effort into getting the industry to engage with the awards during the nominations and voting phases. I almost don’t want it to ever end so we don’t have to tell people they didn’t win!

Obviously, each yearly campaign has to end, and the 2016 NFAs were easily the biggest and most engaged yet. The reaction on social media when we announced the shortlists and then the eventual winners during Winners Week was simply astounding. I ended up switching my phone on silent and leaving it in another room until the notifications stopped. Each year it gets bigger and it’s always humbling.

There are too many people and companies to mention here, but if you click this link you can go to the NFA 2016 dashboard and check them all out for yourselves. It was a very high class group of winners. The #NFA17 campaign has now begun and you can nominate in the Training Centre category so far.

DGB Features

DGB

I am currently producing a full DGB report on 2016 versus 2015, and it should be live in the next few days. But, I can bring you the data from December. And it seemed that a few of you took an early holiday!

It was a tad quiet on DGB in terms of traffic:

Visitors, Unique Visitors and Page views, all three major metrics took a dip in the last month of 2016 in comparison to 2015. Slightly disappointing, however, I was expecting a dip as given the energy sapping year we had just had, I didn’t expect many people to be looking at a website reporting on the window industry in the lead up to Christmas.

Still, the rest of the year was pretty solid, and I can say that all three major metrics grew in 2016 versus 2015. The full DGB year-on-year report will explore that data in more detail soon. As a result though, I have set myself some pretty high targets. It’s going to take some work to get there. But I have some ideas that I hope will attract even more traffic to DGB in the coming months.

More acquisitions

In the world of mergers and acquisitions, December did not disappoint. You can catch up with all the major industry acquisitions of 2016 if you click here. But there were three significant takeovers that happened in December:

Three pretty major deals in their own right, and it certainly brought December and the year of a year to a busy close. I suspect that during the course of 2017 we will see even more M&A activity as the bigger industry groups seek to buy up more market share and extend their influence now whilst Sterling is low and borrowing costs are even lower.

All in all a very busy December in the grand scheme of things, and I’m sure the Christmas break came as a great relief to everyone. It looks like the industry has already hit the ground running in January, so I suspect I’ll be reporting on a pretty good month all round for all!

To get weekly updates from DGB sent to your inbox, enter your email address in the space below to subscribe: