Clearview National January 2019 - Issue 206 | Page 50

PROUD SPONSOR OF DOORS & WINDOWS
DOORS&WINDOWS
“I’ve no doubt we’ll become
Britain’s best fabricator”
» » STEDEK SALES DIRECTOR
Richard Hammond discusses
joining the fast-growing Midlands
fabricator, what makes it different,
and why he’s so confident it can
become the best – if not the
biggest – in the UK…
I entered the industry back
in 2006. I started out working
as a sales rep at one of the UK’s
biggest hardware suppliers. It
was an excellent way of getting
to know the sector very quickly
– travelling the country, meeting
all kinds of different window
businesses, learning how they
worked.
But what struck me even in
the first few weeks on the job was
how different businesses doing the
exact same thing could be.
To an industry outsider, that
didn’t make much sense. A
fabricator is a fabricator – they
assemble windows. Surely, I
thought, that means they should
all be essentially the same?
It didn’t take long for me to
realise that couldn’t be further
from the truth. I was shocked by
50 » JAN 2019 » CL EARVI E W- UK . C O M
how much the businesses I visited
could vary – some were clean and
efficient, some were messy and
shambolic, some were passionate
about their work and valued their
customers, others just saw them as
entries in the order book.
It meant I got very good at
separating the wheat from the
chaff – and that when I eventually
encountered Stedek for the first
time, I could immediately tell it
was something special.
Of all the customers I worked
with as a hardware salesman,
Stedek was the best. There was
no contest. A lot of my clients
were excellent firms, in business
for the right reasons, offering
their installers a great service.
But Stedek was committed to
quality to an extent I’d never seen
before.
They’d been going for years
– they started as a small family
manufacturer making windows
for their own installations in 1994
– but they’d never lost sight of
that family business, customers-
first ethos. It’s obviously
something I learned a lot more
about when I eventually joined.
After working in hardware for
eight years, I moved to become
sales director at a window
fabricator in 2014. Moving
sectors within the industry was a
tough move - and I didn’t find the
right business to move to initially.
Later in 2014, the opportunity to
join Stedek came up, and the rest,
as they say, is history…
We’ve got an incredibly clear
philosophy at Stedek; it started
with Steve, our founder, and is
now continued by his son Alex,
our Managing Director: ‘if a
product isn’t good enough to be
installed into your own home,
it’s not good enough to leave the
factory’.
Alex very much leads from
the front – he’s spent most of
his life working for Stedek,
rising from the shop floor to
the management, and he has
an intimate knowledge of every
aspect of the business.
His attention to detail is
legendary, and no-one on
the team can falsely blame
machinery or profile when it’s
human error at fault – as an
experienced fabricator himself,
Alex can tell the difference.
We’ve got no interest in being
a super-fabricator. But I’ve got
no doubt that, in a few years’
time, we’ll be Britain’s best
fabricator. When it comes to
quality, no-one comes close.
At Stedek, we want to
be renowned country-wide
as providers of ‘Residence
Excellence’. What that means
is simple. R9, R7 and R2 are
phenomenal products – the finest
timber-alternatives on the market.
But the way so many fabricators
put them together, they’re not
achieving their full potential.
Even from an average
fabricator, a Residence Collection
product will still look impressive
– the core system is that good.
But done properly, the way Stedek
do it, they’re best-in-class.
Residence is a perfect fit for
Stedek. Designers and extruders
DW3 are as obsessed with
quality, performance and service
as we are - and R9, R7 and R2
are the kind of world-leading
windows that demand the sort of
care and attention synonymous
with the Stedek name. In our
view, there’s no point supplying
or installing a Residence
Window if you’re not going to
do it right.
www.stedek.co.uk