• What Wolseley Does
  • Distribution and Supply Chain
  • Business areas
  • Where we operate
  • Our customers
  • Group Strategy
    • The Wolseley Way
    • Earn, Turn, Grow
• What Sets Us Apart
• The History of Wolseley
• The Board
• Key facts about Wolseley and its companies
• FAQ's
• Annual Report and Accounts

The Wolseley Way

The strategic direction of Wolseley is key to its future success

 Leadership Development
 Business Improvement
 Sourcing
 Supply Chain
 Growth 

"Earn, Turn, Grow" reflects the strategy and the framework behind the Wolseley Way

These five areas are our competitive advantages. These form the ’Wolseley way’ and will be driven by the senior management team over the next three to four years. 

The Wolseley Way was introduced by Chief Executive Chip Hornsby shortly after he took over his current post in August 2006. You can read about this in more detail in our Media Centre.

1. Leadership development - we need good people who understand our customers and their expectations and how to not only fulfil, but exceed, their expectations.

2. Business improvement - we want to constantly improve the organisation to achieve a higher level of expectation than what we've had in the past. A key element of this is The Business Change Programme which will deliver the infrastructure and new ways of working to support every change initiative for our business.  

3. Sourcing - this year we will purchase somewhere in the range of £14 billion of product. There's a huge opportunity for us to leverage that, and work closely with our suppliers, to take that product to market in the most efficient way.  The better we can source our product, the more we can drive out cost and the more margin we can add.  

4. Supply Chain - we want to be the most efficient path to market. Wolseley is far bigger than most competitors; allowing us to make significant investments in our supply chain network. Size gives us a clear edge over the competition.   

5. Growth - Wolseley is very good at identifying acquisition candidates and bringing them into the organisation.   But, in addition to acquired growth, we have a huge opportunity to increase our like-for-like sales from our existing locations.  We call this “sweating the bricks” where we push more activity through our existing infrastructure and that’s before we open any new branches.

Our  Earn, Turn, Grow initiative reflects the strategy and the framework behind the Wolseley Way.