Lodge Sevices

Source: Retail Digital

Date :20/04/2007 00:00:00

Lodge Services: A personalised approach

Lodge Service offers a range and level of service that belies its origins and size. Managing Director Stuart Lodge tells James Hurley how the company has turned its features to its advantage, offering a personalised service that’s out of reach of the largest competitors

Written by James Hurley & Produced by Kate Bradley

Established as a test purchasing company in America in 1919, Lodge Service moved its international headquarters to the UK in 1930. A family owned business offering retail security and customer service support, the company has offices throughout the UK, Europe and in South Africa. Lodge Service offers its services through four main divisions within the company; Loss Prevention, Shopping Services, Guarding and Reference Checking.

A personalised approach

With its origins as a small, family owned business, Lodge Service is able to win impressive contracts and provide a professional, personal service that the largest company is not able to offer. “As a medium sized company, we believe that we take a greater level of pride in our work,” says the company’s managing director Stuart Lodge. “We aim to retain customers by providing good service and as a family business we can give a bit more individual attention to customers. We offer a more personalised and less departmentalised service where we understand their business and issues and tailor a solution to fit their budget, operation and area of concern.

“It is all really about communication and depending on the size of the business we would allocate key account managers and account directors to look after their interests. We aim to speak to the customers weekly and see them at a minimum of every other month. At the same time, we don’t want to be calling meetings for the sake of meetings and do tailor our approach to individual customers,” Lodge explains.

Our pay rates are competitive but due to the fact that we are a private, family business we have been lucky enough to inspire loyalty in our staff. “We have a large core of staff who are very committed. The last ten people who’ve retired from Lodge Service have done so with an average of twenty years service each.”

“Although we haven’t got a massive budget for training, we do keep a keen eye on what’s out there and available and are able to roll-out regular modular programmes. Due to the divisional and geographic nature of our business it means that we are able to accommodate staff through internal promotions and relocations which has obviously aided our retention. a number of new initiatives that are coming through the industry. Over the past 24 months, due to regulatory requirements, we have conducted a degree of training with the whole workforce and there will be some further training required this year. Going forward it will be largely management programmes designed to get maximum impact to the business as ‘train the trainer’ programmes, but if individuals present courses to us with individual programmes we will certainly consider them.”

Changes in the regulations that security firms are subject to have meant that Lodge Service has been going through a challenging transitional period recently which has required the temporary re-direction of resources from growth and business development and into cost and operational processes.

“This year, to July 31st, and going forward we’re forecasting somewhere between 33-35 percent growth.”

Cost, efficiency and service

By addressing a number of operational practises, Lodge Service has been able to improve both the efficiency and cost of its activities. “We went from using higher purchase vehicles to contract hire, we’ve pooled our buying for uniforms and radios and contracted out our screening services and our control room,” explains Lodge. With the control room we weren’t getting value for money by having it in-house, we couldn’t provide the full 24 hour coverage as we now do through a third party. Essentially, we’ve improved on cost, efficiency and service.”

The company operates within a highly competitive industry, providing services to cost conscious retailers in an environment where labour and servicing costs are increasing, so cost efficiency within every aspect of the business is crucial. With this in mind, Lodge outlines his plans for the business in the immediate future. “We have a continued growth target of 30 percent year on year and we hope to be able to deliver that. This means attention to detail in every area. Purchasing is pretty limited. Uniforms, cars, IT, telecoms and manpower account for the core of our purchasing budget. Finding and retaining the right sort of people within the industry, keeping pay rates within inflation and addressing aspects of licensing are all going to be major challenges for us going forward. We’ve also got a couple of internal software development programmes we need to achieve within the next four to six months. One will capture pre-employment records and the other is for mystery shoppers to enter their shopping experience on-line both will allow customers the ability to view progress on line.”

Traditionally the company’s marketing budget has been relatively small, but this is an area that the company’s chairman says that they will be improving upon. “In the past we have tried to divide the entire marketing budget across all the divisions which has not really been so effective. Next year we will be providing separate support for each division plus there are a couple of trade shows that we want to exhibit at. We’ll be doing a limited amount of advertising but replacing the in-house cold sales with a contracted resource.”

The basic structure of the company, with the business organised through four divisions, is unlikely to change. “Internally, we’ve got four businesses with one accounts department, one HR department and one bank. In terms of focus it’s important that they’re all separated out,” Lodge argues. “With regards to the service offering, it means we can look after a customer, irrespective of their requirements in terms of retail and retail loss prevention.”