A Lot Of The Glazing Industry's Problems Are Most Likely It's Own Fault

There are a number of issues, critical ones, facing the industry right now; lack of youth and skilled workers, rising raw materials and price increases, reputation. For me, these are all problems that can be laid at our own feet.

It is very easy for us to look elsewhere and find blame, and yes, external factors do play a part, but in the problems stated above, I believe it is our actions as an industry that led to these problems becoming as serious as they are now.

Let me explain.

Pricing

This one is two-fold.

Right now our industry is going through an adjustment phase. Brexit, a lower value of Sterling and the general trend of higher production costs have all compounded at the same time, resulting in a spike in production costs because raw materials have gone up in cost. Fabricators, glass makers and syscos are now passing this down the chain. As to how much of this is actually reaching home owners.

And that is where I’m going with this. I was on the phone earlier on today with a friend of mine where we both agreed that as an industry we are far too cheap. For years our industry has destroyed itself from the inside out simply because we have all mostly been happy to undercut each other time after time to win business. All this simply leads to is massively eroded margins from installer all the way up to the start of the supply chain, where margins are thinner at times anyway.

This is firmly our fault. We as an industry chose to do this. We didn’t have to. We could have chosen to sell on things like build quality, service, customer service, and present prices to home owners that actually made us all money back when PVCu was starting to take over the residential part of the market.

However that is not what we did. We chose the foolish, short term option, and we are now in an environment where there will always be that company willing to undercut the competition to win business, keeping prices artificially depressed when they should be much higher than they are given the year and economic circumstances.

There is a balance to find of course. And after decades of pent up price increases, if we as an industry flooded home owners with enormous pre-dated price increases that in reality should have been passed down years ago sales of home improvement products would fall off a cliff.

There is one comparison I do like to make with this scenario though and that is the family car. A decent five door family car, perhaps German made, will cost a minimum of around around £25k-£30k and more. Prices of this particular product have risen in time. Ten years ago a good family car would have been cheaper. Now think about a house full of windows and doors. They’ve hardly budged in the same time period.

Why? The industry has chosen to cut it’s nose off to spite it’s face and make less and less profit as a sector, just to keep frames going through the factory. It’s no wonder when there is an economic bump to navigate there’s very little meat on the bone to help get through the rough times.

Reputation

This one is very simple:

too many commission-only sales people
too many large companies training sale staff devious hard-sell tactics
poor trades people carrying out shoddy work
generally poor customer service
poor product quality through selling things too cheap
too many companies going bust because their sales methods and lack of margin killed them

I probably don’t need to go on. All of the above is our fault. Of course not everyone is the same as those with the above traits. However, it’s the larger companies, the ones with the marketing budgets who manage to make a name for themselves, that have many of the above characteristics that ruin it for everyone else and give the industry a bad name.

If we wanted to, we could do something about it. In fact it would be simply doing the exact opposite. Very easy. Sell honestly. Produce quality. Make decent profit margins. Employ quality trades people. It’s not rocket science. But I guess when those quick £ signs start showing these things are easy to ignore.

Lack of youth and skilled workers

Lets face it, no one starts out in life thinking they want to work in the world of windows and doors, whatever part of the sector it might be in. It’s just not like working for Google, a big bank or running your own business.

Yet, as any good fitter will tell you, there is very good money to be made in this industry if you put a shift in, do the work, learn and tow your path. Whether it’s in sales, installation, fabrication, surveying or something else, there are many people who have made good money from this industry. A feature that I feel we have most certainly not shouted loud enough about as an industry to school leavers and those looking for a change in careers.

But now we find ourselves in a hole, the same hole as the rest of the construction sector, lacking enough skilled people across the board to get the work done. It has been a nightmare at our place finding a new installations team. Finally we have found what looks to be a really good team raring to go. We perhaps got lucky. I know of many that are struggling to find fitters for the work they keep signing up.

Where were partnerships with local education centres to catch some of the skilled youth leaving education to find their way in the world? I admit that there are external factors at play here. Namely a piss-poor education set up which completely ignored trades across the board to funnel everyone through University in search of degrees. The result being pent up demand for all things construction and a massively under-staffed industry to make it happen.

But, despite the talented minds in our industry and the various bodies doing various things, we have allowed ourselves to sleepwalk into a situation where if we had been more proactive with local schools and Sixth Form/Colleges we might have been able to establish labour channels. We could have established relationships with these places to provide on-site training and real world experience to help produce the next batch of installers, surveyors, service engineers and fabricators.

We haven’t. And now we’re all muddling through as best we can.

The more you examine the things we complain about as an industry, the more it becomes obvious that much of our problems are down to our very own actions. Often, the outside world has played very little part in the issues we face as a sector. If we are to address things like eroded margins, poor reputation and a lack of skills then it is going to have to be us to sort it. It won’t be easy. It will be a bumpy ride, and some may fall by the wayside.

What is more likely however, is that the industry will continue to bury it’s head in the sand, pretending these problems will just go away and sort themselves out. So, more of the same.