Peter, owner of Braid & Co, NQ Cartridge & Toners and B2B Supply, grew up living in lighthouses and sold fish, bait, and crab pots for pocket money. He knew the entrepreneurial streak was there. He was working as a national contracts manager at an electrical wholesaler when the opportunity to buy a business from his friend came up. Tired of working for big companies and with his son about to turn 18, Peter bought the business with his family’s future in mind. “You put a lot of time and effort in and in the end, you can still be treated like a number. I’ve always wanted to have my own business, and it was just time.”
Peter now has three family-owned businesses, including Braid & Co, NQ Cartridge & Toners and B2B Supply. Braid & Co is an electrical business that provides to the electrical wholesale market, NQ Cartridge & Toners offers printers, consumables and office supplies, and B2B Supply offers safety and PPE products, and uniforms. His wife helps with the accounts and his son helps with running the businesses and marketing. “We pride ourselves on our customer service and what we do. When you work for bigger companies, that tends to go by the wayside because you don’t have control over that. I found that frustrating working for the larger companies. I think people appreciate us and the service we provide, and I suppose that’s part of the reason we run our business ourselves.”
Peter signed up to Digital Solutions to get help with his business’ online presence, including learning how to optimise his Shopify setup and to gain direction with marketing and SEO. “It was something we just needed to get a bit of advice on, so we saw the opportunity and grabbed it.” He was paired with Ricky Clark (e-commerce marketing), who was able to quickly pick up issues that needed to be addressed. Ricky provided achievable tasks and worked with Peter’s son Ethan to optimise the businesses’ marketing efforts. “Ricky was easy to get on with, he quickly picked up the issues and areas we needed to work on and came up with solutions that weren’t over the top or hard that we could put into practice pretty quickly.”
He and his son Ethan attended one-to-one advisory sessions and accessed online workshops and webinars. Peter appreciated being able to access the workshops online and on-demand as needed. “The good thing is you can go back and watch them later if you can’t make it to them. For us, as a small business it’s hard in the middle of the day to go and sit down for an hour for a webinar or go out to a training session.”
Through the program, Peter and his son Ethan were able to change the layout of the Shopify site, update colours, change descriptions and set up an email program and CRM database. He reflected, “for people out there who are looking to learn what to do with their email marketing or their websites, give it a go. I mean the cost is awesome, you don’t get much better value than that. The return from Ricky from the courses and online training was well and truly worth it.”
Interested in the Digital Solutions program for your business? Book a free 15-minute consultation with Ricky here.
