David Beddy

relationships?I suppose the essence with, with what we're doing is, um, still an awful lot of our business comes via tender, by a tender, where you don't really have that much control of the client.

Um, but what you do find with tenders that they are very much geared towards recognizing sustainable approaches and stuff like that and, uh, the environmentally friendly approach, everything that...

It's all in there, you know? It's, um...

Then what we like to do is we like to get involved with the client at several diff- several different levels.

And if we look at a multi-site organization, we would argue at any point in time that, uh, let's say a client has got 70 buildings, they're probably in a process of refurbishing five to 10 of those every year.

They're possibly, uh, selling off some of the buildings and buying new ones, so they've got new builds happening, and then they've got churn that is happening all the time within the rest of the building.

And what we're trying to do is continually recognize and help them with that churn, for instance.

So if you're gonna close a building down, let's have a look at what's inside that building first, and can we actually go in and rescue a load of the product and decide what to do with it? Well, is that end of life? In which case, let's break it down in a sustainable fashion.

Is it refurbishable? In which case, let's take it back now, refurbish it, and then next year let's push it back into the estate, uh, refurbished and at a much lower cost.

And, um, the, and, and is some of the furniture, is it, it's perfect, let's take it out and let's just move it elsewhere in the estate now.

Now, it's actually, it sounds very simple when I say it, but it's a much more complicated process and there's quite a lot of logistics involved, and that's where the cost comes into it.

And therefore, you might look at it ultimately, some people will look at it and say, "Do you know what? By the time I've done all that, I might as well buy new." But if you do that, you're, you're potentially risking the opportunity to manage that product for it to, to be not managed and to actually head off in various different directions where, uh, and one of the, the, the direction that is not properly set up is one where there are outlets to push the furniture out to.

So in other words, the client will come and say, "Well, tell you what, you take it all and why don't you sell it?" Yeah.

Well, I'm sorry, but I haven't got anybody else who will buy that furniture yet.

So then you're l- you're left in a loop of, do I have to get a warehouse to store it, da, da, da, da.

So the whole thing, the whole thing works properly as a concept if the client is prepared to recognize the movement of the carbon footprint around their own, uh, portfolio of buildings.

That's what's exciting about working with multi-site organizations.

And, and effectively, I suppose if you go back 30 years ago, those organizations would have teams of people who probably looked at doing that.

In fact, we used to do it for one of our clients, you know, take down 70 workstations in Aberdeen and move them to Bracknell, that sort of thing.

But effectively we are a variable overhead for these companies because they don't have to employ us and pay our salaries, but we will do work on their behalf to make, to allow their, the movement of their furniture to be a well-oiled machine.

So that, I mean, that way you're talking about an organization that's got the capacity to move stuff around, enough change within the business dynamics of the people that are working there that requires change, you know? The-

Yeah.

And, uh, and a, a consciousness of the benefits, I suppose, of retaining some of that stuff rather than just getting rid of it, you know? Um-

Yeah.

Yes.