Indirect benefit

Jenny Boreham,
managing director,
Fastsigns Chelmsford

When the Olympics were awarded to London and that the venue would be Stratford my heart leapt. I assumed that, because of our proximity and experience this would ensure that we picked up business. I immediately set one of my staff the task of researching how we could get involved.

We attended heavily publicised seminars and signed on, as advised, to the Compete4 website, which supposedly would have all leads to allow companies to tender services. This was a complete waste of time and we didn’t see any signage opportunities.

We monitored press and trade to see who was picking up the building contracts and sent professional intro letters and brochures. While we are a small company, we have managed large projects so knew that we had the necessary experience.

Despite everything there wasn’t one lead and this seems to have been a common view among sign companies.

There were some major beneficiaries; all sub contract installers I knew were fully booked. Through one of these contacts that I managed to speak to the main company who had the contract and, although far too late to be involved, it was explained that 20 or so bigger companies had been selected and they were required to invest financially into colour calibration before being selected.

Despite nothing coming directly we did see a good increase in business because several of long-standing customers had Olympic visitors and decided to upgrade their image with huge banners and vinyl graphics. Overall, and indirectly, the Olympics were good for us.

Flying the flag

Lee Harvey
Managing director,
Piggotts

We have seen significant benefits from the Olympics, including an extra contract with our current client, the Crown Estate, to manufacture and installed 206 national flags in London’s West End along Regent Street, Conduit Street and Jermyn Street. The flags represented every country competing in the games.

This has meant that once again our flags have taken pride of place along some of the most popular streets in the world, raising our profile and setting us apart from our competitors.

It wasn’t just our flags and banners division that benefited either, our marquees division undertook the construction of structures from everything from exclusive parties and first aid tents to the luxury horse stabling at Wanstead flats.

We invest in strong, long-term relationships. For example, we have worked with the Crown Estates and the Metropolitan Police over a number of years, so when events such as the Olympics come around, we are in a great position to pick up the extra business due to our track record and strong relationships.
We also invest heavily in our stock, to make sure we uphold our reputation of being able to meet demands from new and existing customers, even at short notice.

A long-term view

Peter Phair,
Sales and marketing executive,
GDI Trade Signs

What a great event, 65 medals and 29 of them gold. Wasn’t a bad show, was it? Well done Team GB. There was a lot of talk about how much business the country was going to enjoy as a result of the Games. In regards to the sign industry especially, I heard the main contract was worth in the region of £29m.
Gdi Trade Signs, like many sign companies in the south east, were hopeful of a share. For years Gdi has been building relationships with a lot of the big boys in the sign industry, offering a good quality product combined with a reliable service.

Our strategy was simple, to make ourselves indispensable.

Although Gdi didn’t do millions of pounds worth of work directly for the Games, it did run in to the tens of thousands, and is set to continue with the Paralympics. Direct work wasn’t the only work available. There were many projects that were linked to the Games, some large retail chains had Olympics rollout programs, to take advantage of the anticipated increase in the volume of potential shoppers.

Temporary venues were also created by some of the major sponsors of the Games that needed branding. Again, years of reliable service ensured that when the time came Gdi was asked to contribute to these projects, and the value of these projects was substantial. In conclusion, for Gdi Trade Signs, the hype was certainly justified.

Don’t bite the hand

Scott Conway,
Sales and marketing director,
Venture Banners

In my opinion, going for big tenders and devoting all your company’s resources to them for a short period of time does more harm than good. The sword is very much double edged in that you cannot (but will, you can guarantee it!) let down your existing customer base for short term ‘prestigious’ projects.

The fact is that the ‘aspirational’ jobs are usually the minimal profit jobs with long payment terms and turnaround times that give your production manager a heart attack. Do you really want all of that just to say; we do ‘insert household name’s banners’.

A case in point is as follows; several years ago before we bought our Vuteks we used to subcontract out around £50,000 worth of work every month to a big name printer. In 2010 they won a large tender to produce print for the South African World Cup and subsequently told us, ‘sorry we won’t be able to do your work for a while’.

I thought this was incredibly short-sighted and I was shocked they were willing to give up a very valuable contract in place of a one-off ‘quickie’ as it were. We obviously still had customer orders to fulfil, and so went elsewhere.

I must admit I allowed myself a chuckle when the Olympic tender was released and the usual suspects scrambled to bid on this potential business killer. That is why we steered away completely and focused on catering for our trade customers and the loads of unofficial overspill work, which we did on our terms. We were in control and as a result didn’t let anyone down.

Our former supplier spent nine months after the World Cup trying to get us back, but we had built superb relationships with new suppliers. I hesitate to think what that decision cost them in the long term; millions I would guess.