What this business looks like on the ground

A new account in Ghana took a first shipment. The cartons in the photograph are ours, photographed on his pavement on the day they were unloaded — not a set, not a catalogue shot. Nobody swept up first.

What came back afterwards was not a compliment about the product. It was a plan: he wants to move the rest of the brands in his shop across to ours, gradually. That is his intention, not a signed schedule, and we are publishing it as an intention.

In this trade nothing gets converted by a catalogue. A distributor buys one line, sells it for a season, counts what came back over the counter, and then decides. He is not buying our description of the goods. He is buying the number of complaints he is going to receive.

The display board beside ours belongs to somebody else, and it stays there. We are not asking a distributor to clear a wall for us. We are asking for one line on it, and to be judged on that line.

As a company we take part in around five trade shows a year. A single show, on its own, converts about as well as any other channel — which is to say, moderately. What makes the money back is a show followed by visits, repeated, until the person behind the counter recognises you.

A visit is not a meeting. It is standing at the counter while somebody else is being served, and watching what he reaches for when a customer asks for something he does not stock.

Most of the actual business gets done sitting on a plastic chair in a stockroom, with a laptop on top of a steel cabinet and cartons of fittings on the floor. There is no conference table. If you are waiting for one, you will not get the order.

We do not only take orders on these trips. One of the photographs below is a slide of ours, projected in a hotel lounge: the customer’s own products down the left, and against each one what we suggested he change — what is sitting on the floor that should be on a stand, what is stacked too high to reach, what is priced above what that street will carry. Sometimes the useful thing we bring is not a container.

The shops in these pictures sell lighting, switchgear, cable, fans, ceiling roses. Earthing and lightning protection is one line among all of that, usually a small one, and usually the line where nobody has settled on a Chinese supplier yet. That is the line we are after.

Tanzania is the newest of these trips and the shortest section on this page, because there is less to report yet. What the photographs show is a market the same shape as the ones in Nigeria and Ghana: narrow frontages, stock to the ceiling, and a counter that the whole business runs across.

Look up from the street and the brands are already there — cable, switchgear, protection — painted across the buildings above the stalls. None of that advertising is aimed at the person who will install the thing. It is aimed at the man behind the counter, because he is the one who decides what gets handed over when somebody walks in and asks for a breaker.

That is the whole argument for getting on a plane. A brand board on a building is bought. A line on a shelf is earned, one season at a time, by a supplier who answers the phone when a box comes back.

We have no customer story to publish here yet. When there is one it will go on this page under the same rules as the rest: country only, no dates, no cities, and no number we cannot show you the source of.

This is our stand at BUILDEXPO Africa, in the China section. The company name across the fascia is our own, which is why we have not blurred it.

The panel we pay for the floor space to put up is the one on the left: earth and lightning protection. Beside it, solar. On the tables, the part that a PDF cannot do — a buyer picks the clamp up, turns it over, looks at the thread, puts it back down. That happens perhaps once a year, in this one place, and it happens before anybody has to talk about a container.

Most people who stop at a stand do not order that week. We keep going anyway, because a show on its own is an ordinary channel, and a show plus a year of visits is not.

A customer sent us this photograph of his own shopfront. Our name is on the brand board upstairs, in the row with the European ones, and there is an ABUK panel in each of the two windows below. He sent it as a point of pride. We keep it because it is also a measurement.

Across Africa, roughly half of what we ship goes out under our own brand and roughly half leaves the factory under somebody else’s. We would rather the first number grew. Own-brand is slower to build and costs more up front, but it is the only version of this business where we hold the initiative on price and quality, instead of being a line somebody can replace on a Tuesday afternoon.

A board like this is not a claim that we are those companies. It is a claim that one distributor was willing to spend part of his own wall on us. That is a smaller claim, and a more useful one.