News
Old head on young shoulders
At 23, Andy Ankers is the youngest ever branch manager at JT Dove – and the current BMF Apprentice of the Year as well. But he has his sights set on higher things.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that a young man in possession of an enquiring mind must be in need of a career to develop. And minds don’t come much more enquiring than that of Andy Ankers, BMF Apprentice of the Year 2008 and the youngest-ever branch manager at north east independent builders merchants JT Dove.

Ankers – known as Shaggy for his resemblance to a 1970s TV cartoon character – first joined JT Dove in February 2006 as a trade counter assistant at the Stockton on Tees branch. “Basically I was doing all the things you would expect a trade counter assistant to be doing,” he says. “Answering the phone, dealing with customers, serving customers, putting the stock away. But I always wanted to be doing more.”

He says he never stopped asking questions about the job, about the industry, about orders and customers.

“I kept asking questions and doing more and more things for myself. It was a real thirst for knowledge. If I had to go and ask someone the answer to a customer’s question, I would think to myself ‘why shouldn’t I know the answer?’, so I found the answer out for the next time someone asked the question.”

“Gradually, instead of handing a job or a query over to someone else, I figured I might as well learn how to do it myself. At that time in the branch we had a heavyside manager, a lightside manager and timber manager, and often a customer would get passed along from the trade counter to one of those managers to deal with. And I used to think, why shouldn’t I deal with them myself?”

Rapid promotion
It was a tactic that worked: by July 2006 Ankers had moved into a more central role as the internal contact for two of the branch account managers. “They were out on site talking to customers and I was their ‘go-to’ guy for information on prices, delivery schedules, timings et cetera. My role was to manage and look after their needs so they could do their jobs better.”

January 2007 saw another promotion, this time to a branch manager role, making him the youngest manager ever to be appointed at JT Dove. The company had bought another company in Marske, and needed someone to go in, initially as branch supervisor, to get it all up and running and refurbished, with staff trained on the JT Dove computer system and in the JT Dove way of doing things. Again, Ankers was the go-to guy.

“From day one I had to just muck in there with the staff and work alongside them so by them time we were fully open as part of the JT Dove team and I was set up as branch manager, the guys at Marske were used to me and knew how I operate.”

Ankers believes that a manager’s skill is all about people and how one deals with them. “You also need to be quite well organised – and above all, you need to know your business and understand what the customers want and why they want it.

“My father is a builder, and I know that when someone says they want a delivery in the morning they mean it. I understand what it means to their business if we deliver all their sand and cement order but forget half the bricks. You simply have to talk to people and listen to them and understand them.”

Ankers hit the headlines last year for his work on the BMF Apprenticeship scheme. When he started on the trade counter, he embarked on the Key Skills course in Customer Service at level 2. He was nominated for – and won - the North East Trainee of the Year award, and was then nominated as National Apprentice of the Year, receiving a cheque for £250 and £1,000 of further training at the BMF Member Day in Birmingham in October.

Training can give you a great framework and structure upon which to build and Ankers is full of praise for the BMF training department – but he also believes it can’t make you a great manager unless you have it in you already.

“You have to have vision and passion and commitment, but also a feel for what your customers want and what your staff need,” he says. “You either have that feel – or you don’t.”

Party invitation
And it’s that feel for the industry which keeps him committed. “No two days are the same and no two customers are the same. One of mine even invited me to his 40th birthday party – not a supplier who wants me to sell more of his products, but a customer. There aren’t many industries where a young lad can get that sort of treatment from the people he’s selling to.

“And then there are the days where you can have a stroppy customer swearing and shouting and calling you all the names under the sun – but the next guy through the door doesn’t know that. So you smile and ask him how he is, and you get a completely different reaction.

“I’ve put 100% of myself into the work I’ve done at JT Dove because that’s the sort of person I am. I’d have put 100% in if I’d been running a fruit stall. What I want to do with this branch is improve sales and margins and make it one of the best branches that JT Dove have, and then move on to a bigger branch within the company.

“It’s a very difficult time to be in business, but as a 23-year-old lad, what a fantastic experience to have to run a branch under these circumstances with a worldwide global recession. Experience like this is going to stand me in very good stead in the future.”