SLR catches up with United Wholesale (Scotland) Managing Director Chris Gallacher to hear about the group’s growth and development plans.
In Managing Director Chris Gallacher’s own words, “it’s been mental the last few weeks!” It certainly has. The Scottish wholesaler has just acquired East London-based Time Wholesale Services in a bid to step closer to its goal of hitting £500m revenue by 2030, up from £300m in 2024.
“Part of that plan was always about acquisitions outside of Scotland and London was never really our first idea of where we were going to go, it was more about, ‘How do we actually get into the middle part of England and then work our way further down south?’,” he says.
“But the opportunity came up [with Time Services] and we went down and met [founder] Sony [Bihal] and it’s a great business. We were very much aligned in our core values.”
Further down the line, the plan is to convert London retailers to UWS’ Day-Today symbol group. Gallacher believes that the move will result in multiple benefits for the company’s Scottish contingent. “There’ll be a wider range of suppliers that will be taken on board and there will be new learnings that we will take from different areas of the UK,” he states. “We’ll start to grow our fascia estate. Hopefully, new benefits that come with that would be better promotions, bigger range, and we will be able to get more benefits from our suppliers by doing that.”
Is he worried the company might be spreading itself too thin by venturing into London? “Although Scotland will always be our heartland, to get to £500m, we’ve absolutely got to acquire more depots in the rest of the UK. I think that was a bigger part of the plan and our other plans were to focus on our symbol group side of the business by giving retailers what they need to try and compete against the multiples and the discounters at the same time.
“We’ve got a very good, loyal independent retail base where we’ve got plans to actually help support them to make more money. In the current climate, it’s very important that we do that so it was a very ambitious five-year plan from now to 2030. What I would say is we’re starting to really tick some [goals] off quite quickly in year one. Call it luck, call it perseverance, good planning, the right place, the right time – and all these things have really helped us start off this new five-year plan the way we wanted it to.”
Gallacher is still on a high having picked up a whopping four awards at the Scottish Wholesale Association Achievers’ Awards back in February. “For the first time last year we won best delivered wholesaler in Scotland,” he beams. “These things don’t get done by luck. The customers are telling us that we’re doing a better job. The reason why we’re doing a better job is because we’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to make sure that we’ve got a great leadership team in the business.”
Another area that UWS has invested in is chilled.
The firm had been delivering chilled using blue containers on its ambient vehicles but has now invested in four temperature-controlled vehicles, meaning all delivered retailers will receive an ambient, chilled and frozen delivery. “Nisa [now Co-op Wholesale] pulled out of [our] chilled [supply] about four months ago just before I came here,” says Symbol Director Mike Leonard. “With cigarettes, vaping, and alcohol we’re streets ahead [of the competition], but the fresh was letting us down, so we’ve now got a credible chilled range in the depot and we’re slowly rolling it out to more stores.
“After we’ve focused on chilled, we’ll look at cake as an opportunity and local butchers.”
Leading the leaders
Central to the group’s success is the guidance and support of consultant Nick Dillon of G8 Group. “We’ve just invested in our company, taking all our management team through our leadership course, and I’m part of that,” explains Gallacher. “Nick is with the team every week. He’s now an extension to our team and that allows us to have a leadership team in the business that can help us drive things forward and make good decisions.
“Now that we are in that position, we can really start to think about expansion and acquiring new businesses by using automation of accounts, systems using automation for a lot of the delivery systems that we’ve got in place.
“Automation has played a big part, but the key thing for me is that I’ve got an absolutely super-duper leadership team to make the business better and that’s what’s allowed us to be able to go out and further expand without having any impact on our current Scottish business and our retailers that rightly demand the best service possible.”
In fact, one of the foundations in the group’s five-year plan is about people and culture, claims Gallacher. “It’s not just about sales and profit, people and culture become a discussion point every time we sit down,” he says.
“I’ve seen a step change in the sector where smaller independent wholesalers are actually thinking more about the effect that people can have on the business by looking at culture, looking at diversity and inclusion.
“When you see smaller wholesalers investing in consultancy and going through things like the leadership programme for the senior team and ensuring that people and culture are talked about in the plan for growth – it’s a massive step change.”
Digital dimension
Going digital is another major part of the puzzle for UWS. The wholesaler had already made massive strides with digital screens at its Queenslie depot, and rolling screens out to stores is the next phase of the plan.
The firm spent a year and a half running tests before beginning to roll out digital screens to 88 of its top-tier Day-Today stores last month.
“This [store roll out] took lots of learnings from that [warehouse of the future] – actually listening to our retailers and our suppliers. This was just the next natural step to use the retail estate to actually communicate with consumers,” says Gallacher. “I always talk about the triangle where the consumer sits in the middle and in each corner you’ve got the supplier, the retailer and the wholesaler and the three of us need to work together so that we all win.”
He claims that by using digital screens to highlight different products and promotions, retailers can make sure that a product is reaching the consumer with the right content, activations, compliance, promotions and pricing.
“By using that digital concept to actually help push that product to the consumer, we can work as partners together, we’ll always win,” he states.
“The multiples and the discounters have continued to take share from convenience. The next stage of digitising our convenience stores in Day-Today is all about trying to make sure that we protect their sales and profits.
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re giving our retailers the best possible chance of growing their sales and promotions will be a big part of that. And I think that using the digital content that we’re going to provide the retailers, there’s going to be a real opportunity for retailers to get behind it.”
Having established its own vape wholesale arm, United Vapes, UWS is supplying vapes through a dedicated website, as well working with Phoenix 2 Retail to supply Day-Today retailers with gantries.
UWS Managing Director, Chris Gallacher is unfazed by the single use vapes ban, which came into force at the beginning of June. “United is probably one of the biggest sellers of vape in the wholesale sector in Scotland, not so much just the online business that we’ve got, but also in store and delivered through United,” he says.
“Vape manufacturers will absolutely continue to innovate to make sure that, despite the loss of any disposable vapes in the UK, there will be a good legal product that will still allow vape customers to continue their journey on vaping. Once it settles, there’ll still be a lot of illegal product that will still come into the UK. It’s very difficult to stop that and that won’t change. But there’s a bigger need now for retailers and wholesalers alike to be able to educate consumers to make sure that they understand what this change means. I think that sales will continue to be pretty strong in the UK.”
