The Digital Transformation 🖥️ Construction Didn’t Ask For, But Needed 🔧🚀

How did Manchester go from a struggling industrial city filled with abandoned mills and a thriving rave scene to a forward-thinking hub for business, technology, and innovation?

For PushON, a leading digital agency based in Manchester’s Ancoats, this transformation isn’t just a story from the sidelines. It’s something they’re a part of every day.

In this episode, we sit down with PushON’s Strategist and Managing Director, Simon Wharton, to explore a range of topics — from Manchester’s remarkable transformation and choosing the right digital platforms, to harnessing SEO and AI as powerful tools for growth. With two decades of experience in this rapidly evolving space, Simon has witnessed firsthand the growth and constant need for innovation, both in the digital world and within the construction industry itself.

We get into:

✔️ The role digital marketing, SEO, and a strong online presence plays in helping construction companies grow — whether you’re a small corner shop or a large enterprise.

✔️ Why choosing the right platforms and tools is key to staying competitive in a changing market.

✔️ AI as a capability extender, not a threat, allowing companies to do more with less and respond faster to opportunities.

✔️ Predictions for the future of the industry, from smarter processes to a more connected, data-rich ecosystem.

Learn more about PushOn here: https://www.pushon.co.uk/

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https://web-motion.co.uk/

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Transcript

UK Construction Podcast - Interview with Simon Wharton

Host: Join us for your weekly deep dive into the beating heart of UK construction. From groundbreaking projects to game-changing innovations, The UK Construction Podcast brings you face to face with the industry's brightest minds and boldest thinkers. Each episode features candid conversations with construction leaders, architects, engineers, and on-site experts who share their hard-won insights and behind-the-scenes perspectives. We cut through the noise to deliver actionable intelligence on market trends, emerging technologies, and the forces shaping British building.

Host: Well, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Simon: My pleasure, Peter. Absolute pleasure.

Host: Whereabouts in the world are you?

Simon: So, I've been in London for about the last seven years and very recently moved to Winchester. I actually moved last week, so I'm currently surrounded by boxes and flat pack furniture. Yeah, so they're backdrop things are always a useful thing. I'm in the middle of a bedroom that's just all over the place.

Host: Yeah, they're godsends. And where are you guys based?

Simon: We're up in Manchester.

Host: Okay, nice. So, it's a nice community up here. I don't think people understand. I was at an event yesterday, digital sector event, and there was a London-based software platform, task management, planning, tracking kind of stuff. And they were really sort of taken aback at how positive the digital community is around here. It's quite close knit, but there's a lot of it. There's big scale up here, and they're saying they'd been in London the previous week, and everyone's being a bit dour. But we've got business going on.

Host: Awesome. You know? Yeah, I've only been up to Manchester once, and it was for a social event. But I hung around for another day or two just to check out the area. It's a good night out Manchester. But I fell in love with the area, but I was also struck by what I picked up on, which is exactly what you described. The just the number of kind of the vibrancy of the kind of working community there, the amount of coworking offices and start-up hubs and everything. It seemed much better than London, to be honest with you.

Simon: There's a really good book, if you like to and it's relevant as well. There's a book called "Manchester Unspun" by a guy called Andy Spinoza. I worked with him, and I didn't realize his full background, but he started off - he came to studies with Manchester, same as for me. Manchester adopts sons and daughters very well. So I was brought up in the Midlands, I studied in Liverpool and moved over. And he was a student from London who lived in Hulme before, which was an absolute rat run at the time. It was so poor, the council didn't charge rent. So all the hippies and the punks and the students went and lived there before they demolished it and rebuilt it.

And he started a music paper. Then he got eventually - long story short - he then got taken on by the Manchester Evening News, and he did the diary page for that. So he was around doing initially music, so it was Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, all that Madchester scene, the early acid house thing. But then that moved into the city. The Labour got very pragmatic and worked at how to work with the Tory government and how to get funding. So that was Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese. They just started building stuff. They knew how to get grants and investment. So they did spinning fields, financial sector. We started doing stuff around digital and so forth. Around the city, things have been built.

So our office is in Ancoats, which was a place where you used to go and get murdered not so long ago. And we're in Beehive Mill, which is a coworking space as well. And we've got a bunch of space in there because it has everything that we need. We're a reasonably sized company, but it's a beautiful old mill. Used to also be the home of Manchester's Rave Capital Sankey Soap about twenty years ago.

Host: Yeah, I remember that name. I've never been - I never went back in the day, but yeah.

Simon: Oh, that's cool. It's got some history to it. I've seen gigs here and stuff. It's a beautiful building, but around the corner now - so this was a dangerous area - it's now Ancoats. We've got a Michelin starred restaurant around the corner. We've got the Hallé Orchestra rehearsal rooms around the corner. So we have a marina.

Host: It just struck me the amount of kind of just the buzz around the whole area. Just seeing there's so much going on, whether it was building works, whether it's nights out. The just the sheer volume of the new build properties. I've never seen anything like it. Everything's so well positioned.

Simon: There's a few things holding back. We need better cross country transport. The rail links are terrible. But we've got an international airport here. They're building out sort of cycle lane infrastructure, but to much complaints from the average Joe on the street who's sort of like, "Oh, I'm being - you know, no one's ever gonna ride bikes." You don't see anybody riding bikes because it's really dangerous without the proper infrastructure in place.

But there's an organisation called Manchester Digital, which is the trade body, which has done really very well. And I was - I've been on the board and on the council off and on over the years as and when I've been useful. And years ago, we used to think about how we combat the brain drain to London. Because we've got three really good universities up here. Now we don't talk about the brain drain to London. People come from London to Manchester.

Host: Yeah, I can believe that. I've got a digital background myself. And in the past, even just checking out the job scene and stuff like that in kind of SEO and that type of world, there seem to be far more opportunities in Manchester and Bristol as well than there were in London.

Simon: Bristol's a great city as well. But a lot of the network agencies did the resourcing out of here. There's a mate of mine who was - we've done conferences and stuff, and it used to be a few SEOs when SEOs first became a thing. They just meet in a pub with a projector, drink, and then talk about SEO. These then went on to be sort of the leaders of the big agencies. There's a guy now called Ben MacKay, who's a GroupM. He's just moved back from London. They had him down there. And Pete Young used to run - oh god, it wasn't GroupM, I forget. But big network agencies are always all start at Manchester.

Host: Really? Interesting. I've just experienced something similar, but a bit more niche to that. So are you aware of Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand?

Simon: Yes, I'm aware of it.

Host: So it's kind of like the world epicenter for SEO now, I would say. So I go out there every season. They basically got one of the bigger SEO conferences, which kind of was the catalyst for this. But they've got a huge community out there now of SEOs and a disproportionate amount compared to the traditional kind of digital nomads and things. And you've got all the biggest names in the world, really, spend at least part of the year in Chiang Mai.

Simon: I was unaware of it, and I used to - I mean, we started off as an SEO agency when we first got together because me and my cofounder, Roy, had a different business doing connectivity. So it's going back to early 2000, and we accidentally learned dirty SEO.

Host: Of course. Yeah, for the pre-Penguin days.

Simon: Well, pre - well, I remember the Florida update of 2002/2003. That destroyed about two thirds of our traffic overnight. We had to rebuild from that again. But yeah, it's much easier, should we say, back in the day.

Host: Times have changed. Nice bit of a private blog network to get things going.

Simon: Absolutely. And some of it still works. But do you go down to Brighton SEO?

Host: Well, there's a group of us that go down there. I don't normally attend the conference. We normally go out for dinner beforehand. And there's a few other speakers are normally part of this group and stuff as well. But yeah, I haven't actually been to the conferences yet. But I think they're super successful now, isn't it? I think they're even doing it in maybe Austin in The States, I believe?

Simon: He's doing - I know Kelvin reasonably well. We used to run a conference up here called SASCON, which was smaller, but much harder drinking. We used to do it for our benefit. It's - he's in, not Austin. It's San Diego.

Host: San Diego. Yeah, I think you're right there. And so what's your background anyway, Simon, then? How did you come to be one of the directors of PushOn?

Simon: I started to up, really. Myself and my cofounder, Roy, had a business doing connectivity. And it was dial-up back in the days. And we needed to pivot, and we worked remotely at the time. So this kind of thing is nothing new to us. And we thought, well, we'll have a go at some SEO then. Neither of us have any agency background, so we had to go and do all the learning and make all the mistakes you could possibly ever make as we learned about looking after customers, specifications, and all sorts of things. Brought on paid media and so on.

And we got to the point where - I mean, talking to somebody who understands SEO, you'll get what I mean here - we were so fed up with developers who were terrible at building websites and thought SEO was a thing that should be done after the fact rather than actually planning for it. It is an important thing because your clients need traffic that is relevant. So we start being doing a bit of development ourselves, and we got an opportunity somewhere around 2008/2010.

And we got asked to pitch for Americana International, which was Bench clothing. It was a nice contract. We won that, and we've been doing a few bits and pieces around old school tech. Like, OSCommerce was the thing back in the day, but they stayed almost as a hosted product. And Magento was coming through at the time, so we became Magento solution partners very early and just got heavily into the product. And before it was Adobe, obviously.

Host: Yeah, well before.

Simon: We've seen all the iterations and all the buyouts and so forth. And, oddly enough, Sam, who's our MD now, he started off as an SEO exec, but we made him do web builds instead. And then he led the web dev team. We grew the team. We started winning major clients and grew the business from there, really.

Host: Awesome. And what type of clients do you work with at PushOn? I know, obviously, we're The UK Construction Podcast, but do you work with clients from across the board in different sectors, or you specialise in particular areas?

Simon: There are certain things that we like, and then there's other things that come along that turn out to be a nice fit. We try to focus. If we're going outwards, we like construction, construction supply, engineering components, complex product sets, because we predominantly operate in the medium to very much enterprise space. We've got stuff in pharma as well. And that's quite nice. Things that operate internationally, mixtures of B2C, D2C, B2B, those kind of complex things where you've got a lot of data to throw around and interesting things to do, which is the kind of stuff that Adobe Commerce as it is now in one flavor is absolutely designed to do.

Host: And I mean, so I've never actually used Adobe Commerce myself. I mean, how's that stack up versus the kind of more off-the-shelf platforms, really, such as like Shopify or WooCommerce?

Simon: Well, you'll see a lot - there's a lot going on at the moment. There's a bit of sort of platform aggression going on by practitioners, if you see what I mean. Like, "That's a terrible platform." It's all a little bit childish. The truth of the matter is that you start with the specification. What does the business need to do, and what does it need to be doing in, say, five years? What's the plan? And then you go to platform from there.

So Adobe Commerce slash Magento is a complex platform. You need to train for it as with anything. If you were having somebody doing something complex on a site with a complex tool, they would be trained. You have to use your ecommerce platforms. You have to train the people who use them well because they'll take shortcuts and you'll get mistakes on that.

So, WooCommerce is fine. We would see that more as a sort of corner shop as an analogy kind of thing. Shopify is great. That goes up to the medium sized kind of business and the M of the SME sort of thing. And it will do a lot of money. It could do hundreds of millions. You got stuff like Gymshark on there. I think it's still on there. But there are other things it doesn't do, and you've also got to look at cost as well. There's some hidden costs in Shopify. Adobe Commerce isn't cheap, but it's a tool. It's a really powerful tool.

Host: And I would imagine it kind of bakes in very nicely with all the analytics side of things with Adobe Analytics.

Simon: It can do. We use Analytics 4 a lot of the time. So it depends what people are used to. I mean, you can go full suite with Adobe. We work with a few other businesses, some of them are Adobe solution partners with a full suite. We specialise predominantly in Adobe Commerce and the marketing piece, but it does go together very well. You could see a strong play from Adobe on this.

Host: And what's the actual kind of yearly lease to use Magento, I assume, from Adobe?

Simon: Yeah, and it also tends to be volume based. The more you're doing, the more it'll cost you, so it has a proportion of spend.

Host: And so I assume it's just much more customisable, I guess, when you stack it up compared to Shopify, which can be fairly restrictive with what you can do with it.

Simon: Yeah, it really is. I mean, there's a lot you can do with Shopify, but again, it's the thing of scale. And with Adobe Commerce, it has a range of established extensions. I mean, you don't want to hack core code that can cause problems, but you can either do it yourself as an agency or if you've got your own internal team. That's absolutely fine. But there's other people who have been building clever bits to go into it, which have had a lot of work. They are trusted. They are well maintained. So the ability to extend its capability is - we think it's world leading. So, just why we're a partner.

Host: Absolutely. Have you had any particular success stories with construction clients using Magento, Adobe?

Simon: We built the Brandon Hire Station website. That was quite an interesting approach on that one. So they're predominantly B2C. We built the B2B platform around that. And a lot of what goes on when you're thinking about what you should do with ecommerce is thinking about your audience and how you engage with them. So you put a lot of time into thinking about how do people want to be ordering. Do they want to - is it "I'm coming on to just buy some nails, and I'm just a sole trader" kind of thing, or "am I working for a large business? Do we have some form of invoicing process? Is there any kind of tiered pricing going on?" There's a lot of work needs to go into that.

We did a really nice piece of work for a rather major equipment company. I have to be vague about it because they like - because it was so nice, it's won them some really major deals. But they have their own custom interface. And they move a lot of kit around. But because of this custom interface, the customer can go on, understand all the paperwork around this piece of kit, the sustainability elements of it. If that piece of kit is in transit - I mean, there's the kind of stuff that you have to sort of shut road junctions down for sometimes - they can see precisely where it is. So if you've got a site or whatever and you're needing to understand when things need to happen, that thing being available as well. So we take real time data into that, and it handles all the paperwork and everything, really custom piece of work. And it more than paid for itself for some of the deals they won because they can provide the customer with that specific experience.

Host: I can imagine. Especially with those type of projects, as you say, they're shutting roads. The details around what's going on, I imagine, is kind of important.

Simon: And then because they can pull a load of information from it about how it's being delivered, that goes into a very strong sustainability conversation as well.

Host: Absolutely. And do you work with smaller clients and stuff like that? Would you work with your kind of local plumbers and builders and things like that?

Simon: Probably not local plumbers. I mean, I think when you're client side and you're thinking about who your supply should be, most agencies are geared to a thing. We are geared to service a medium to enterprise type client, and the level that they demand is expensive to a smaller client. And that's how we operate. There are other agencies which have an approach which would be much more suitable to that smaller client. If it's a local plumber, they're not gonna be wanting to spend £10,000 a month, are they? They're gonna be charging a lot for the other pipes.

But we have got other clients in the mid range. We've got a particular favorite client of mine is the brilliantly titled Rycroft Heating. It's not a delivery. It's a kind of family owned business, but a very strong MD in there with a very interesting approach to what they're doing. They do air conditioning and sort of plumbing supplies, pipe lagging, but they're very good at major specifications. Not your local outfit. So they've got a really interesting solution underway, but we are geared to that.

Host: Absolutely. And so you guys - so you do the ecommerce side of things, but you also do the marketing, if I'm correct.

Simon: Absolutely. As I say, we started off as an SEO company. We brought in paid media as well. We do a lot on social. As you alluded to before, there's other sectors that we do serve, and we've got some very B2C clients as well. So, oh god, what are the things? We've done clothes, and we do major makeup brands as well, which seems a little bit odd, but it's the skills that are similar.

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Host: And do you find with the actual construction clients, there are any specific channels, whether it's the paid media or SEO, digital PR, whatever, that's more geared towards construction clients?

Simon: Since you've got a background in SEO, I would give you the classic SEO response: it depends. It's always good when you could come up to somewhere and do a good in-joke. So, it depends where they are and who the customer is. So if they're at the stage of their journey and they are having a site build, you wanna get your SEO right to start off with. Build the site right for SEO. And you're thinking about product names. We do a lot of engineering component stuff, and they can have really complex product names and slight variances and things. How are you going to handle that? Because somebody being able to go straight into that one particular product could be a new customer for you. That's a great opportunity for discovery around that.

Marketing wise, there's just some real basics. And one of the things that gets forgotten most and just pushed so far, the can's kicked so far down the road, is email. Get yourself a good email sort of system in play with good process flows. So one of the great things is abandoned basket. You know, if somebody's come to buy something and they've gone to the trouble of putting something in the basket and you've captured their email address, put a timer on it, send them an email saying, "Was there any problem with this, or do you wanna throw them a discount?" So, so forth. And then maybe they're botting that with a retargeting ads as well.

Host: Oh, absolutely as well.

Simon: But then again, think about what the nature of the - if you're talking specifically construction sector, what's the nature of the client? Is it somebody who's sort of like it could be - I don't know - it's a DIY person. They want a few bits and bobs. It's a very different conversation and transaction. You don't want to spend too much time on that necessarily. Details, payment, that's delivered to you efficiently, and we've done an upsell around it, maybe using some nice AI to sort of upsell around that.

If it's somebody who's looking at a specification for a major project, you want to capture that information, and you want a personal kind of conversation with those. So it depends. And sometimes if you're thinking about traditional sales teams, you wanna get to the right people in the right businesses, so you could be just doing some LinkedIn marketing.

Host: Absolutely. You've gotta get to that very specific person, which the traditional channels or not traditional channels, the more common kind of marketing channels, I guess, it's got more of a spray and pray type of thing.

Simon: Well, you can be quite precise with it if you can - so, like, LinkedIn's got some very good tools. It's got a cost associated to it. We use a few things that plug into it. But if you can filter by - you probably know which locations you want to be working in. You probably identified some particular businesses and range of job titles. You can drill down to that quite well. And depending on how you like to go about these things, you can put messages in their inbox, which are quite reasonable. I mean, I'd always suggest an exchange. I don't like personally, I don't like aggressive sales. I think that sales should be about a value exchange. Here's something for you. Can you - do you wanna come to a thing? Do you wanna come to an event or lunch? Whatever can be very effective as well.

Host: And I saw on your website, you guys do CRO as well, which is nice to see. It seems CRO is - I don't know, I always think of it as a - whenever we've spoken to our clients before, there hasn't been a huge interest in it, but I think it's such a good tool.

Simon: For anyone who doesn't know, CRO is conversion rate optimisation. So it can be as simple as changing the color of a checkout button on your website. Simple things like that. Testing ongoing testing around things. Again, I'm talking about such a broad range potential clients. So if you're looking at somebody who's just going to transact, it could be just tweak it up on that. And if you're doing, say, if you're doing £10 million and you can improve conversion rates by 0.5%, that's a significant number. And if you can keep testing and tweaking and testing and tweaking and see where people drop out on that purchase journey, that effort can actually be quite a significant number at the end. If you can add half a million to a million just by making sure you're using data, that's a game changer for a business.

Host: Absolutely. It'd be huge. And I mean, except for the actual the testing cost, which obviously there's a cost associated with the testing. But it just gets more out of the current traffic they already have. Just utilising it better.

Simon: Again, think about somebody who might be architect, specifier, whatever, who works across a whole range of buildings. If they come to your website and you've done something that makes them exchange that contact information, would that be a deal in the millions?

Host: Absolutely. And do you guys do much kind of personalisation for web visitors and things?

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. So what if you're not doing it, then you lose it, basically. There's a lot of AI tools around which will kind of understand the nature of the visitor, and if they start looking at products. I mean, one of the easiest things that you can do is look at start looking at lookalike groups, or people who have habits like this increasingly bought that. If they're looking at these kind of things in the basket, then maybe you can add further things in like that. And then you can incentivise that whole piece around, "Can I get some more information from this customer?" What can I do? Can I get more contact details? Do you want to incentivise somebody to give you full contact details? Maybe a - I don't know - a voucher or something at checkout. So then you can get them into your email program. Then you can start understanding more about the things that they are interested in, the things that they're buying. Then you can start putting content towards them that might be interesting, that might make them better at their jobs. Then maybe you might be exhibiting somewhere. You might want to get them down to a show somewhere. You might want to get them to a dinner if they're a senior buyer somewhere. So you can get those really strong relationships in play.

Host: Absolutely. And, again, as you said before, by providing value.

Simon: It's always gotta be about providing value, I think, in any kind of business, really. It's not just hard sell. No one really - it's only a distressed buyer who buys without some kind of emotional context.

Host: Absolutely. And are you finding you guys are having to deal with the sustainability side of things much more now with the actual your web platforms and things, data usage, energy uses, and accessibility, of course, now.

Simon: Absolutely. Accessibility is just really good practice all around. It helps anybody be able to use your site reasonably. Now if you follow those principles, it tends to help out with SEO, you find. And you think about the nature of where somebody might want to interact with your site. So if you sell parts, components, whatever, and you've got somebody who's on-site, they might have a device like this. And they want to be able to buy like this. So if it's well built, it's accessible, it's really usable, that's massively important as well.

Moving back to the sustainability piece as well, certainly, there's a lot more talk. Demand tends to lag behind it, but we're seeing an uptick in interest around it. You've potentially got to deal with sort of, certainly for dealing into Europe, product passports as well. So individual items. I mean, the focus on that tends to be more around clothing, but it will be anything going into Europe. I think there's been, if I recall, there's been a little bit of a delay on that at the moment. But people want to know where products come from, where they're sourced from. And if you're thinking about the nature of the government at the moment, they're really trying to drive through green initiatives. They are trying to get us building again. We're seeing some interesting initiatives coming through. There was that new tunnel under the Thames and so forth. I'm fairly certain in the supply chain going into major projects, they're going to say, "We need some sustainable credentials, and you need to be doing that digitally." That's otherwise, it's so time consuming.

Host: They're ticking all the other boxes. Seems that they can't leave the digital forgotten about now, although it's behind the scenes. I think in the next few years, I can see it similar to the accessibility side of things just becoming a requirement now.

Simon: I think so. I think that's fairly close. The thing is it's doable. You can get a competitive advantage. If you're responding to a tender and you've got people who know how to use AI properly, and I don't see AI as a threat. I see it as a capability extender. But if you're taking an RFP and you've got some prepared work and you can say to a good bit of AI, "Take this RFP, extract all the data that you can find in our preexisting document, database, and then populate the RFP and pass it to me to check." Donkey work's largely done then. You can train it to get it done. You become a much more powerful player.

Host: Absolutely. Some of the stuff it can do now, not necessarily with the kind of content creation side of things. Although there is a benefit to that, but actually just analysing data, processing data, as you say, giving it stuff that might take someone hours to complete. It's just unbelievable.

Simon: We use various government frameworks ourselves, so we have to do a lot of - I mean, responding to an RFP on government frameworks takes weeks. We use AI to do a lot of the sourcing of the information for that, and it takes days and days out of the work and produces arguably a better result that's compliant. Have you got the right thing out of it is what we go for, and it works. It works really well.

Host: Nice. And are there any kind of common issues you run into with specifically with construction firms or companies with digitisation, whether it's kind of the digital platforms or digital marketing or any of the headaches?

Simon: I have a bit of a bugbear, and I'll illustrate it with a bit of a story. And it comes down to leadership. So we exhibit quite often at Construction Week Live. We've often done the NEC. That was very good for us. We've met some great clients there. You know what it's like when you're at a show, you go and do a wander, and you talk to people on the stands when they're not too busy. I remember one business in particular that did a lot of parts. It was relatively locally based. And I'd had to look at the website. I thought, "Well, there's a good chance of a conversation here, I think." And I went to speak to them and said, "Oh, what are you doing on that?" And they said, "Well, we've been keeping an eye on the internet, and we're just waiting to see if it'll be important." And I said, "Thank you very much," and I walked away.

But the point is leadership tends to be, I think - I mean, not every business, but there seems to be a propensity for, "Well, we've always done it this way." And lacking, I mean, lacking leadership on the board that is fully digitally literate and has power, has the authority to make things happen.

Host: But it's such a traditional business, isn't it? All the whole industry, really. You have the big players that ever needed it, really. They've already got kind of ongoing contracts. They work with - they're already known. But who are the people making the buying decisions now?

Simon: That's Gen Z. It's Gen Z. It's not the people who are as old and as ugly as me. We're getting on a bit. We're upsetting back. There's other people going out making buying decisions. And, okay, some of those might want to go for a game of golf or something and might have been referred on by somebody else. But, again, it's coming back to they're using mobile. They're not necessarily working nine to five. They're making decisions, researching things. Or when it's convenient to them, they might not be in the office. You have got to satisfy the Gen Z requirement for ease of use. They've got to be able to find out about you or transact with you the same as they might buy a pair of jeans off Boohoo.

Host: Absolutely. They've set the standard, and now the traditional firms need to catch up, basically.

Simon: Absolutely. And some do it very well. Travis Perkins have a very good operation in play. Interesting is B&Q. They've got their marketplaces going on so you can throw product into B&Q and they will look after it for you. It's almost like the eBay concept, isn't it? eBay, Amazon kind of thing.

Host: Absolutely. I was only recently aware of that, actually. I was talking to someone in the industry. They were saying that - well, I was aware they've been struggling with Amazon for quite a while and talking about the success they had with the B&Q marketplace.

Simon: And there's loads of good tech around which you could set up your own marketplace, and you can throw data at other people's marketplaces. So you can be selling in many different shops. But just bringing it back around to your point, again, it's leadership. If you have not got somebody on your board at board level who can actually make things happen, then you're gonna struggle. And I'd come to another thing as well on that training. You gotta train your team. You can't just go, "There it is." The people on the shop floor have to understand why it's important or they'll tend to find ways of bodging it.

I remember years ago, we did some work for an international signage and labeling business, and they had been traditionally cataloged, big wedge of catalog. So they had, you know, fire escape signs, no smoking signs, health and safety stuff all over the place. So because we are human, we can interpret. So if you're looking at a sign, think about the nature of dimensions on it. They had it in millimeters, centimeters, inches, feet. They had rounding kind of things, rounded radiance sort of things. There was no consistency over thousands upon thousands of products. So we had to do a whole piece of work to translate all of this data into something that was solid, consistent, for the ecommerce platform. A lot of work involved in that. Quite a bit. There's a good few weeks in that. Just trying to mash it together using a little bit of a really good data analyst, and then you still gotta get humanised over it just to look for errors.

Host: And is there any - what would your predictions be for the next kind of ten years in the digital landscape, specifically with construction, if you had any insights into that?

Simon: Difficult to actually predict more than six months at the moment. There will clearly be winners and losers. I think this is a great opportunity for certainly the mid market to go and operate intelligently. I think you have to go down the sustainability path to understand where things are done and making sure your accreditations are in play. My gut feeling, I look at a reasonable amount of data around the construction sector. It's been slow. Glenigan have good data, I think. I look at some of their reports quite a lot. But I can see nothing but a really strong uptick in the construction sector. Second half of this year, getting really strong into next year. There'll be a lot more projects starting off, and I fully anticipate that there's going to be a lot of businesses doing good business. But people will make decisions in the next six months to a year about who their major supplies are going to be. Yeah. So it's kind of like being ready Yeah.

Host: Fairly soon. Absolutely. Yeah. Simon, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. Very much appreciated and interesting.

Simon: Lovely. Thank you so much for having me on, and, I will hopefully speak to you soon. Yeah. Absolutely. 

Host: And if, any of our listeners, they wanna, find out a bit more about yourself or your company, Where's the best place for them to look you up?

Simon: Have a look on the website, which is www.pushon.co.uk, or find me on LinkedIn, Simon Wharton. And, I would absolutely love to have a chat.