MI Pro

Ask almost anyone in the UK’s MI trade what they think of Barnes & Mullins and the reply is very likely to contain the phrase ‘really nice people’. That isn’t idle flattery and it isn’t an accident either. B&M might be one of the country’s oldest distributors, (it was founded in 1895) but while it is among the most forward-thinking in its use of modern marketing techniques, it has simultaneously managed to hold onto a very gentlemanly way of doing business.

After a short hiatus, during which he spent some time with Tanglewood, Brian Cleary has been back at B&M for a year, re-united with joint managing director, Bruce Perrin, the two having finally managed to buy-out the family interests, which had been holding the company back. Since they took sole control it has been business as usual for B&M, despite the tough climate. We brought Messrs Perrin and Cleary together for a ‘state of the union’ interview and to ask why they think being good people to do business with makes very good business sense.

MI Pro: Though MI Pro has covered Brian’s re-joining B&M, could we start by asking how the past year has been and how it feels to be ‘back home?’

Brian Cleary: Fantastic – it’s better than it was before. Now, all Bruce and I have to do is focus on buying and selling musical instruments, whereas for a great many years prior to that we had a lot of shareholder issues that we were having to deal with and that sapped an enormous amount of our time. So it’s the best it’s ever been, in that respect.

Bruce Perrin: One thing it has done is given us an opportunity to sit down and plan out our future, which we've not been able to do before. To be fair, we had a very good framework in place before, but now we’ve been able to move forward with the emphasis on marketing our brands and trying to make Barnes & Mullins as big a help for our customers as we can be.

The phrase that comes to mind is ‘user friendly’. When you talk with retailers, that’s usually the impression you get, that they find B&M easy to do business with. But that can’t be an accident – you must work hard at that, presumably.

BC: The reason this works is because we’ve worked together for a great many years and we have, at almost every time, seen eye to eye on everything and we have shared vision of how we want Barnes & Mullins to be. The analogy we’ve often used is we want our trade customers to perceive us in perhaps the same way people perceive John Lewis or Marks & Spencer. It’s not just that we buy and sell musical instruments, it’s that we also try to offer the best level of service that we can – and I have to admit it sounds trite when I hear myself say that.

Well that certainly raises a point. If you were to ask any distributor, they would all say they aim to offer fantastic service and that they are nice people to do business with. In fact, it’s a sentiment that appears in our pages several times a month. But it can’t always be true, can it? Some distributors are better than others – so how? And what is it that seems to set B&M apart?

BC: It’s dead easy – there really is no rocket science. It’s not what we say in magazine articles, it’s what we do as a company on a day to day basis that counts. It’s what we do when a customer phones up with a problem. That’s what matters – not what we say.

BP: My experience in the music trade – and I had ten years in retail before I joined Barnes & Mullins, during which they were my main supplier – was that they made life as easy as possible for me. If you go back to dealers who were setting up in the 60s, you couldn’t find anybody who was more helpful to them than Mark Barnes. He helped more businesses start from the 60s to the 80s than anyone and I’ve always wanted to follow his lead – I call it the Barnes Factor and I never, ever lose sight of it. His way was always to be as helpful as possible, to understand the customer’s problems and make business as easy as possible. If a customer’s got a problem with an instrument for an end-user, it’s got to be solved – it can’t be forgotten. It’s all about service and I know all our competitors say the same thing, but I really think the experience both Brian and I bring to this company is different. I had many years with Mark Barnes, while Brian had many years with John Skewes, so we have probably both been trained by two of the more successful entrepreneurs of our industry.
  
BC: Actually, the background that Bruce had and the background that I had were quite different in some ways and we often bring different things to a conversation as a consequence. My background with John Hornby Skewes was very much sales led, so I’ve always got that vision in mind...

BP: And my experience was always from having that retail background and having originally been employed by Barnes & Mullins to run their retail store in the Charing Cross Road, so I’ve always brought that understanding of the retail side to
the table.

You’ve both been a part of this industry for many years and seen a lot of changes, such as the Internet and the rise, fall and rise again of the guitar as a key instrument for retailers. What else stands out as a major change do you feel?

BP: The supply chain and the values have changed a lot. When I started at Barnes & Mullins in 1977, our cheapest Fender-esque guitar was £80, retail. Our equivalent now is probably £70 retail and we don’t actually sell any more now than we did then. The demand isn't any greater. Then there are the changes in the supply chain itself. You have overproduction and you have distributors that are retailers and retailers that are distributors and the buying groups – this has changed a lot. Then there are all the changes the retail sector has had to face due to the introduction of Argoses, the Amazons – and the internet in general, of course.

"But perhaps the biggest change for retailers is that they have had to evolve into being more than just a dealer waiting for Joe Public to walk through the door. They’ve had to stimulate business in their areas by running music schools, for example, and there has been a huge change in the way music is taught in schools, with so many peripatetic teachers today. To be in the music industry now, you have to be very proactive to be successful. If a dealer is proactive in his area, talking to teachers, running workshops, getting out there and waving his flag, he can compete, but you can’t exist if you’re just going to do it on price because there’s no margin to be had.”

The question of margins is getting very critical, isn't it?
 
BC: Yes and I can’t think of a period where it has ever been tougher to be a retailer. We know just how hard they are having to fight to do business right now and that’s the premise of a lot of the decisions we make. It’s the reason why we don’t make our products available to the big, non-specialist chains. It’s not that we’re against that sort of business, it’s that 100 per cent of our customer base is individual music shops and we don't want to do anything that undermines them. We’re very careful where we place our products. We don’t want our products to fall victim to being slaughtered on the internet. We’re always mindful that the retailer has to make as good a margin as possible.

Every few years there seems to be a flap about ‘the role of the distributor’ and the doom-sayers predicting their demise. Yet distributors still seem to be here and are as much a part of the industry as ever. But has your role changed? Is it that you now support smaller manufacturers, or is the drive now to build your own brands – as you have done with Faith guitars?

BC: I don’t think it has changed greatly. There are a lot of significant brands out there that don't want to be their own distributors. There are greater demands on us as a supplier than there were before though. Manufacturers look around and choose the best distributor for the territory in question, but they want that company to do a full marketing job and that’s a big overhead. It’s one we're prepared to take on, however.

Looking at Barnes & Mullins from outside, it does seem as if you spend a lot on marketing – considerably more than the average at a guess?

BP: Yes, and if you take a brand such as Rico, for instance, there’s any number of workshops we’re doing, summer schools we’re sponsoring – helping the dealer promote the product. This is something that we perhaps didn’t have to do ten years ago. The whole concept of marketing has moved forward greatly and you also have a situation where Joe Public wants more information and there are more opportunities for him to go to workshops, so these have to be done. As Brian says, some manufacturers can’t do their own distribution, so therefore they will work with a professional company that will promote the product and that’s what we have to do.

You work harder distributing other people’s products, while building your own brands as well? In your case, that has primarily been Faith, so how is that going at the moment?

BC: Faith really has been a huge amount of fun. It’s very rare that you have the opportunity to do something with a brand that is completely as you want it to be. We make absolutely no compromises on it in any shape or form. Whether people agree with what we do is another matter, but obviously enough do for it to be selling very well. But another nice thing about Faith is that it is a part of Barnes & Mullins, so we can take our time to get the details right, do things that other companies that are wholly dependent on one brand can’t do so easily. It's part of our strategy. We strive to have a mixture of house brands and international brands and I think that’s what our customers, the retailers, want – a mix of both.

How do you feel the MI trade is doing at the moment?
 
BC: I think the retail trade is having one of the toughest times in a very long while and if our customers are not selling, then they’re not buying from us. We’ve been very fortunate at Barnes & Mullins so far, but we are very aware how tough things are for our customers. This is why Bruce and I recently sat down and planned out what we have, with tongue in cheek, called our ‘manifesto’ for this summer. Essentially, it’s a three-point plan. We've launched a three-month summer deal, with some exceptional prices on some strong-selling products, with extended terms. Then, we’ve just announced that we recognise retailers need to be buying small quantities and regularly, so we’ve really cut our carriage charges to the bone to accommodate that. The third thing, which we’re launching at the MI Retail Conference & Expo, is what we’re calling The String Gallery. This is a scheme that will introduce general music shops into the world of selling orchestral string instruments. It’s going to give them all the tools in product, sales skills, internet backup – everything we can think of, so they can engage in that market.
  
How big a boost do you feel this could really be?

BC: For Barnes & Mullins, what we do in orchestral strings is a significant part of our business and we genuinely believe that a lot of our customers could be doing a lot more in that area, but that they are scared of it for one reason or another. So we’re going to be trying to put together a project that will make life very easy for them – and that's what we’ll be launching at the Conference.

BP: I remember from my retail days how you’d see people looking in the shop window because they were scared to come into the shop, because they were scared of making a fool of themselves and I think we are still like that. Lots of mums and dads know what a guitar is, but if a youngster wants a violin, the easiest thing to do is go to a catalogue shop and buy something that will, in fact, put the child off. The idea is for the String Gallery to be an information site that tells everyone everything they need to know. This was an idea that came out of regular meetings we had with dealers, who, when asked what they were doing with bowed instruments, tended to say ‘well, we don't really do that area because we don't now much about it’. There’s a considerable amount of business out there that the general retailer is missing as a consequence.
 
Back on the rock side, your relationship with Line 6 has been unusual hasn't it – sharing distribution with the manufacturer? Obviously, it enables smaller retailers to have easier access to a top brand, but how has it been working for you?

BC: Line 6 was looking to sell as much as it could, obviously. The company had two people on the road and recognised that if it sent one of its people to a shop in a remote town that bought two amplifiers, it couldn't really justify that cost. But we have six area sales managers covering the whole of the UK and Ireland and if our customer in the middle of nowhere can add a couple of Line 6 amplifiers to his Barnes & Mullins order, it works well for everyone involved. It’s a very interesting model and all the parties concerned are very happy with the results.

Any final thoughts you'd like to get across to our readers?

BC: We understand how difficult business is for retailers at the moment and we are wholly committed to giving them the best help we can.

BP: Yes, we're on their side. The sun’s shining, the World Cup is underway,
not a lot of people are coming through their doors, but we are wholly
committed to giving them the absolute best support we can.

BARNES & MULLINS: 01691 652449