Face-to-face - Glenn McClelland

From the March edition of HCD

Armour's Managing Director, Glenn McClelland, has been with the company for four years, since leaving the oil business for AV, hi-fi and CI. In that time, Armour has struck black gold. Not bad for a company that is itself just four years old.

The move from oil to CE may seem an odd one. Glenn worked for Repsol YPF, the biggest oil company in Spain and a move to the audio business looks like a big jump. Why did he make the change?

“Well, principally it was the opportunity to be a bigger fish in a little pond rather than a little fish in a big pond,” Glenn says. “When I worked for Repsol, they had something like 50,000 employees. You used to get lost in the washing machine so to speak. Armour is very ambitious. It wanted someone who had been there and bought the T-shirt. So Armour said, ‘come and join us and we’ll grow the thing in the best way possible’”.

Big differences

Most of our industry luminaries have spent decades inside the business, but coming to it from outside stands Glenn in good stead to see what’s good and bad about the industry. He points to several big differences:

“It’s obviously a very small industry… and a bit ‘cottagey’. The nice thing about this industry is that you have a big opportunity to be creative. Also, everybody is very passionate about what they do.”

The enthusiasm for music and movies is infectious, as Glenn (and his partner) soon discovered.

“I wasn’t someone who bought hi-fi before… and now, I’ve got a house full of it,” Glenn laughs. “I love it, and I read the magazines even when I don’t need to. I can’t wait for the next product to come out. I’ve got 13 radios at home. I’ll be divorced if I bring another one home!”

Glenn is in the perfect position for our industry to grow. Here’s someone who came into the business at the top level with no particular interests in hi-fi or AV, but is now hooked. How do we manage to get that bug across to people who aren’t in the industry?

“The onus is on us to simplify the message,” Glenn suggests.

“For example, the term ‘custom install’, ‘multi-room entertainment’ or ‘future-proof homes’ – what do they mean to Joe Public? Nothing. If I buy a fitted kitchen, I go to a fitted kitchen supplier – it’s clear what I’m buying and where I go for it. So getting the message clearer and letting people know where they can buy things is what we should be aiming for.”

Although Glenn was impressed by the technical ability of many dealers, he was not impressed by their premises.

“People put a lot of time and effort into selecting the right plasmas and systems for their clients, but they’ve got their auntie’s 25-year-old couch sitting there, too,” Glenn says. “If you look at what Comet have done recently; the layout, the branding is very good now, I think. Hi-fi shops are pitching themselves above Comet, and yet often they don’t look as good and consumers are confused by that.”

This is part of a greater training issue. And no one is more into training than Armour. From the outset, Armour’s headquarters included a £350,000 showroom, demo room and training centre, with a technical support function added on to that. Since then, Armour has doubled the size of its training centre and added functionality at a cost of an additional £100,000. It now has five full-time staff on training and tech support.

Glenn feels this is simply the “best of industry facilities”. Last year, Armour trained upwards of 1,000 people, both on site and in this facility.

“Given that Stansted now seems to be the centre of Europe, because of cheap airlines, and we are one mile from Stansted airport, we’ve trained a lot of international people, too,”

Important training

Although at the leading edge of dealer training, this is still not enough for Glenn.

“We can do more to emphasise the advantages of training, If an installer gets it right first time, how good is that? He has to put aside the two days of training, but he gets job after job because of that and the jobs are more profitable. There are a number of products you cannot buy without training and we are very strict about this sort of thing. What we probably don’t get across well is that this training is completely open to people outside our dealer base. And of course we have non-customers coming in for training, but they often leave as customers. Our conversion rate is hitting 99 per cent.”

Armour is currently refurbishing its training facility in Manchester, expanding one of Alphason’s premises. This is expected to be completed this year. Training is vital in CI. And it’s the wider CI market that has seen huge growth lately.

“We are almost certainly the biggest supplier into the multi-room market for the UK, with Systemline Modular now alongside Systemline, Intellix, MediaMAX servers, Lutron and Sonance. We see a growth market for conventional custom installers, but we’ve also put a lot of effort into supplying the new build market, for more mass-market, middle-market type products.”

Perhaps this is why Armour is the biggest company you’ve never heard of. But that’s likely to change. Armour is internationalising the business – one quarter of its sales are overseas, to 54 countries. Glenn plans to double that. With more than 40 new products expected to be delivered in the next 12 months, this could be more than possible.

Yet despite the growth, despite the scale of the operation, Armour is not Big Brother plc.

“We are actually very nice to deal with, we take the business seriously, but don’t take ourselves too seriously. We are full of passion and enthusiasm!”

Just the sort of thing our industry needs.