Howells Year in Review
Our Year in Review; what was good, what was bad, and what was even better for Howells Patent Glazing UK.
Well, what a year 2016 has been! We started in a haze of bad weather, (everyone in the trade knows that snow, ice and severe weather is a roofers worst enemy!) and then turned it all around at the end of the company year in August to be our best year for turnover to date! What a ride!
The year has seen a new direction for us in the retraining of our staff. Now, all but handful of staff are undertaking NVQ’s at level 3,4 and 5. They have also had to undertake their functional skills in English, Maths and, in some cases, ICT at level 1 and 2 too. This will continue on into next year, but by the end of 2017, most of the work force will have completed their current courses.
We have teamed up with Dudley College for the training of our staff, and they not only attend for the lessons, but also oversee the exams here too. We have had NVQ courses running in Leadership and Management, ICT, PCO and BIT.
It has also been a year for Charity here at Howells Patent Glazing. We have supported a bike rides from London to Brighton by one of our suppliers for the British Heart Foundation and made donations to the Teenage Cancer Trust and Melanoma UK. We also donated to Ellowes Hall senior citizens Christmas lunch and to our local food bank.
2016 has seen a couple of our staff beginning to starting to give blood at our nearest major blood bank in the center of Birmingham. We are super proud of them!
Preparations have started to get ready for our very first trade show in May of 2017 at The Fit Show in the NEC – One of the biggest shows for glazing UK – where we have designed and ordered our stand to be specially built for us, have had a video recorded and are just finalizing and undertaken new testing of our product range all in readiness for this new enterprise.
We have undertaken stringent testing of our UK glazing materials, and designed and built a new test rig for impact testing of our roofs. Howells also commercially released our new trade range of ready built rooflights, and added new lines to the product range.
Our social reach has also had a massive explosion, thanks to our new PR company Preach PR and Yogurt Top Marketing, scaling to an impressive 31157 people reached in ONE POST on our Facebook page for a contract we completed for Aldi! We had a new strategy for 2016 and it clearly has worked.
2016 has had many highs, seeing many new and existing customers continuing to love and use our glazing UK services. These include end users of Aldi, Leeds City College, Bourton Meadow School and Ferens Art Gallery in Hull.
Another first for 2016 was that we started entering business enterprise competitions with the Express and Star Business awards, National Apprenticeship Awards 2016 and Made in the Midlands 2016. We were amazed that on our first application we were shortlisted for the Apprenticeship & Training Award for Midlands insider, Made in the Midlands and got through to the Semi Final! We may not have won, but how fantastic it was to come so far, first time!
All in all, we are really happy with 2016, everything has ended on a high, and we have so many exciting new challenges to look forward to for 2017!