Wow, what a month October was. As far as news and industry activity goes, this has to be the standout month of the year. So before we look to November and the final few weeks of the year, lets take a look back at what was a romping Halloween month!
The only news
As if I really needed to remind you of what the main news story of the month was, it was the culmination of the Safestyle vs SafeGlaze story. It has been the battle we have all been watching from the side lines for most of the year, and it all came to a close at the end of October as SafeGlaze entered into administration. If you haven’t yet read up on that post click here to catch yourself up.
Whilst it made for compelling reading as a story, these are the events that have very serious real-world impacts. People will lose their jobs. Home owners will be left high and dry. Suppliers will be left out of pocket. The feedback from those who worked for the company and the home owners who had bought from them has not been positive at all. Chaos is probably the best word to use to describe the situation. And consider that although they were growing, they still weren’t a true “national” as we know that term. Imagine what would happen if a really big one was to go.
The other thing to consider is the reputational damage this is going to do to our industry. The online discussion around this issue from home owners is deeply negative. So whilst most installers I am sure go out about their daily business in a perfectly professional manner, it only takes one or two companies to spoil it for the rest of the sector. This was of course a very public story, more than usual, so any damage this is going to do will be amplified further.
In more positive news, Winners Week in the 2018 National Fenestration Awards campaign began on Monday 29th October, where a batch of winners were announced each day of that week. Head on over to the NFA website to catch up on who won what. I will be doing a special post on those winners on here in the next few days.
The other big news away from Safestyle vs SafeGlaze was when tech failed Yale and saw it encounter some widespread and fairly serious issues with their smart lock devices. It was a reminder that whilst tech is great when it works, our reliance on it is exposed badly when it fails. Click here to catch up on that post.
Busy sales month
I always I use our own family run installations business as a bit of a bell-weather for the industry, as well as the conversations I have with my regular industry contacts, and it’s safe to say that October seemed to be pretty good on the sales front.
It is of course month 2 of silly season, with November the final month of that very busy period for the industry. We found ourselves filling in the final few spaces in the fitting schedules up to Christmas, with work booked well into January and into February for some clients. The difficulty we found, as we have done for much of the year, was whether to muddle on through with the fitters we have, or attempt to find good ones out there to help bring down the lead time further. We decided to stick to the status quo. We know there is a very shallow talent pool out there to pick from, and we didn’t want to risk ruining perfectly good contracts through poor installation.
The general industry picture away from the nationals was a pretty positive one. Many small to medium sized installers and fabricators sound upbeat at the moment. Lets hope that this momentum is carried on strongly into the New Year.
I’ll say this though, some are already sounding warnings about 2019 and it being a tough year for the industry. Not because of Brexit, but that there are some concrete signs that this current economic cycle is now coming to an end, which means we could see some slowing down in the general economy overall.
How DGB did
October was already a good month. Then we got the news on SafeGlaze, and then it went off the rails…
Some of the stats coming out of October at the end were astounding. Obviously it was all down to one story, which also began pulling in a fair bit of traffic from home owners, which normally doesn’t happen. Still, it resulted in a month which shattered all long standing metric records. Page views, visitors, unique visitors both in daily and monthly forms were broken.
It means that I am pushed much closer to achieving my yearly goals well before the end of the year. DGB has already passed 250k page views in a single year, and is already in it’s best ever year.
I can also say that I have carried this traffic into the early part of November. Again, I suspect that a lot of it will be people associated with either Safestyle or SafeGlaze looking for news and information.
Top 5 most read
These are the top 5 most read posts published in October:
-
Safestyle UK Reaches Commercial Agreement With SafeGlaze UK
-
SafeGlaze Enters Administration
-
Safestyle Deny SafeGlaze Takeover Rumours
-
Better Capital Warned In August On Everest
-
Yale Had Smart Lock Problems At The Weekend
A look to November
I think it’s clear that the fallout of the SafeGlaze collapse is going to continue into November, so I would anticipate quite a lot of content on this story on DGB. But there are other things going on in November too, including the winners of the 2018 G Awards being announced at the end of the month. It is also the last major sales month of the year for installers.
This is the last push for the industry before we all start to switch off in December in preparation for Christmas.
To get weekly updates from DGB sent to your inbox, enter your email address in the space below to subscribe:
By subscribing you agree to DGB sending you weekly email updates with all published content on this website, as well as any major updates to the services being run on DGB. Your data is never passed on to third parties or used by external advertising companies. Your data is protected and stored on secure servers run by Fivenines UK Ltd.
