Discovering Everyday Greatness
Branch Time at Reece: Not your everyday induction program
I’m feeling the blues as my brief stint with the incredible team at Reece Caulfield soon concludes. Branch Time, as I’ve come to know it, is an induction ritual that helps new starters at Reece experience the beating heart of the business by spending time “working” (more on this later) alongside frontline teams. In the lead up I’d spoken to a few colleagues-to-be who generously shared their own Branch Time stories. Combined with Cam’s brilliant capture of his own experience, I realised this would be an onboarding experience to talk about.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself”
Having worked a short spell in retail during my teenage years, I knew my aptitude for working in retail was, at best, mediocre. Add to this the procession of future colleagues advising that Branch Time would be steep learning, my mental preparation was going well.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself” — his words hung in the air, responding to my earnest request for advice on Branch Time. Apples, as he’s affectionately known, had been given the assignment of hosting me at the Caulfield branch — Reece’s first store in its 100 year history; we’d arranged a virtual meet & greet to orient myself and discuss day-one logistics.
After a pause, he continued, “Imagine someone like me who knows nothing about data, asking someone like you how I could be helpful to you…[chortles deeply]. There’s no way you’ll learn it all in a few weeks. You’re going to stuff up, that’s part of learning the business — and I want you to have a great time doing that. You mess up anything, we’ll just fix it. Also, you’ll need a comfortable pair of shoes.”
Reality hit me — I’d never been told with such surety that I was going to suck at a job, but something about the kindness with which he spoke told me things were going to be just fine.
Works For You
It unfolded as everyone said it would. I was greeted on my first day with a three-minute whirlwind introduction to the store, warehouse, team, and TRS (our POS system). My head still swimming, the team 𝚗̶𝚞̶𝚍̶𝚐̶𝚎̶𝚍̶ shoved me off the precipice: “start talking to people and get busy”.
Reece’s ‘Works For You’ customer obsession was immediately apparent. To many of our customers, the branch is a second home — they are known by name, preferred product lines, and in some cases their secrets — raiding our bunks and pantry for supplies and biscuits all the same. Sold items returned in unused condition are inspected by piece and credited back to accounts, no questions asked — be it a bag of half-inch fittings, or a truck load of commercial-grade pipes. Ringing phones nearly always get answered, and a missing part might get driven out by Apples himself if it means helping a customer get the job done. All situations are a matter of how and when, not if; electronic dance music the fitting soundtrack to the day’s activity — piped at volume 11 of course.
Ordered chaos…
As a rough estimate, each day Team Caulfield juggles the frenetics of over 300 customer transactions, each a sequence of over 25 dependent micro actions. A single action not performed to exactness (e.g. a mis-spelt product query, or a mislabelled delivery bag) compromises the whole transaction. Say, on average there are 3 ways each action could go wrong (given permutations on the 5000+ products we hold in stock) — that means there are at least 61,000,000,000,000,000 ways things could go wrong in a given day. Fun fact: Team Caulfield hardly gets anything wrong. While shadowing the team as they powered through the chaos, I was struck by the precision of their execution, and the size of my knowledge gap.
Case in point: my third day in and I was serving a plumber who had just bought a half length of pipe.
Noelsy: “Mich, you good to go out with Jarrod and grab him his half length [pipe]? It’s on that wall with all the pipes,” [points outside], “.. in the second-middle bunker from the bottom. Make sure you put on gloves. Hold the saw 90 degrees to the pipe, and cut the pipe. Hold it firmly, ok?”
Me: “Uh, sure thing.”
Milling over to the second-middle bunker from the bottom, the pipe was exactly where Noelsy said it would be. Jarrod glanced over and noticed the blank look on my face.
Jarrod: “Actually, I’ll show you how to cut it. Hold the saw at 90 degrees, keep it straight, and just move it …” [finishes cutting his own pipe] “.. that’s it.”
I’d just been the beneficiary of a genuine friendship built between the team and their customers. That said, not everyone was as charitable toward the newbie from Head Office…
[Man walks up to the counter and infers I am new]
Man: “Look, I am going to try to explain this so you get it right. I want that thing… a top, y’know, that you insert into a storm water pipe? It’s about this big” [makes hand gestures]
Me [stabs ‘T-O-P’ into TRS Product Query. Nothing comes up]: “Um.. do you mean something like a cap?”
Man [visibly agitated]: “No, I said it’s like a TOP.” [more hand gestures]
[To my relief, Tom wanders over to help]
Tom: “Hang on mate, the lady is learning the business, she is trying to serve you, just give us a bit of time. What do you need?”
Man: “How would I <expletive> know she’s <expletive> new and doesn’t <extra expletive> know the products! I’m looking for..” [more gestures and expletive-laden description]
Tom [taps a query into TRS]: “That’s a dome grate mate, is what we call it in plumbing. No worries we’ll get that for you.”
Man: “I’m a builder mate, how would I <super expletive> know what plumbers call it!”
With each episode I began noticing the chain of small exertions: mental and physical, woven into the interactions needed to fulfil a customer request — all with speed. No two requests were the same, yet we had only seconds to understand the problem, and a few minutes to corral a solution from TRS and 1501 square metres of warehouse space. Any longer and an experience became jarringly “un-Reece-like”.
Such is the level of excellence our customers are accustomed to.
… meets everyday greatness
All this wizardry, I’ve come to realise, is in fact Reece’s values manifesting at commercial scale. We are an ASX-listed, century-old leader of the Australian trade supplies market — but our people deliver scale with an extraordinarily local spirit.
The complex dance between telephones, paper, warehouse, software interfaces and trucks has been practiced to a fine art. Mistakes happen, but are swiftly detected, admitted, and rectified without blame — rarely does the customer actually see a problem. Own it, do the right thing and be humble: in few places have I seen these values more lived out.
It is also a treat to witness the team’s encyclopaedic comprehension:
Me [holds up a widget]: “Hey Dave, what do I query in TRS for this?”
Dave: “That’s a 32mil welded male lugged capillary. It’s quite old school; these days very few people use it because we have the push-ons, but some plumbers still do, so we stock it. We keep it in the ninth bunk out the back of the sixth row of bunkers — look up in the top shelf and it’s the fifth bin from the left.”
Me: “Ok… cool, thanks. What about this thing?” [holds up a long pipe with grooves]
Dave: “That’s a 300mil threaded nipple. Doesn’t look like a nipple I know… it’s used for [insert verbal tutorial on threaded nipples]…”
More than the self-evident depth of accumulated knowledge, what’s most impressive is how the team wields it. For every esoteric problem a customer brings in, Team Caulfield almost always finds an exact solution — male/female reducers, ballcocks and other widgets with brow-raising descriptors — in a matter of moments.
Still, everyone recognises elements that need improvement. TRS, with its layered legacy, continues to be modernised by our TRS team at reecetech. The new Product Query module in TRS will be a game changer for rank novices like yours truly, who have yet to master the incantations needed to conjure the right parts. Also being trialled is a new delivery optimisation system, and along with it some kinks to be ironed out. For an operation the size of Reece’s, even small errors reverberate through our network (a 1% error rate is ~180 bad deliveries and countless stranded plumbers). But the team faces every issue with the same constructive stoicism — “We’re changing things all the time” is commonly said; “we’ll fix that” and “don’t worry we’ll get better” — always keeping it simple and writing the next chapter.
So far, so good
I’ve come away more inspired than I’ve been in a while. In many ways I’ve been living and breathing innovation under constrained conditions; witnessing mastery of a craft and creativity in an industry one might not expect, and seeing impact every day. Underpinning this is deep-seated respect between every teammate, from 15 year veterans to that newbie from Head Office (I hope).
There is plenty to contemplate on what data & technology means for a business like ours. How might we instrument our relationships, enhance the data assets our teams use for customer development, or turbocharge our pricing operations with cloud compute? How do we continue grafting coherent, intelligent and robust data use onto the backbone of our business? And what does living out our values look like in a future of data-rich trade ecosystems? These are the questions I pinch myself at having the privilege to work on.
It’s been an unforgettable first three weeks at Reece. It’ll be one more induction week at Clayton HVAC’s world of refrigerant gas and other cool things, before I get my feet under a desk. A huge thank you to Apples and Team Caulfield for taking me under your wing! I know I have only scratched the surface and anticipate there will be many-a cheeky (albeit data-driven) reason to visit again in future.
