Paul Scott, who has written some of these columns before, is standing in for Alan Gayle, who has suffered a bereavement. Paul has worked in sales & marketing in construction for more than 20 years and now runs his own business called Front Elevation. He kicks off with a look at football.

As I have been dragged from the subs bench, donned my fluorescent yellow boots and am about to replace Alan Gayle again, I thought I would focus on football in this issue.

If, like me, you watched more football than you intended to during this summer’s World Cup in Brazil you will have witnessed some great national sides with star players recognised by a single name: Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, Suarez (in spite of biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini).

I have avoided using the word ‘team’ for these sides because they were groups of players that had all their hopes pinned on one individual. As you will be aware, the eventual victors were Germany, a great collective with all the players working together towards a common objective.

So what does this have to do with natural stone or construction in general, I hear you ask. I won't make any puns about them having a rock solid defence, but if we look at our construction industry it remains pretty adversarial. With its traditional chain of command and protocol, should we be more like Germany and work together as a team?

How often do we meet up with the key accounts we supply or the companies we purchase from? How easy would it be to pop into one of your main customers and ask: How are we doing? What more could we do to help make your job easier? Or, indeed, what, as a customer, could you do to make our job as a supplier easier?

OK, now let’s take out the word ‘easier’ and replace it with being more efficient (we cannot get more German than that). If we can be more efficient we might even be able to save money as well as increase business.

The most successful partnerships in commerce and industry work with their distributors and their supply chain as a collective. Let’s think Nissan or Honda here.

To keep the football analogy going, let’s consider the supply chain as the defence, the assemblers as midfield and the sales / distributors as the attack. No team would operate without them all communicating.

We might all consider ourselves as Messi or Ronaldo but what we really need is to be part of a team.

Perhaps just meeting up for a coffee with a few of your customers every month could pay real dividends. Or be even braver and ask to meet one of your suppliers for a chat. Explain your ideas and aspirations (and, dare I say, your ‘goals’!!).

It doesn’t matter how big or small you or they are. Business can always be increased.

There is a concept you might have heard of even if you are not familiar with the marketing term for it (which is Pareto’s Principle – I thought I should include some marketing speak, if only to impress Alan). It says 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. So wouldn’t it be great if you could increase the 20% of your business that the other 80% of your customers bring in.

I’m not advocating a group hug here but let’s try to be more like the German football team and work together. Let’s consider our suppliers and our customers as part of our one big team.

My company is working with Stamford Stone Company, which has made a memorial in Ancaster Hard White limestone for RAF Barkston Heath. One guy – I will give him a name check: Ben Wildblood – has almost single handedly researched, raised the funds for and organised the design, supply and installation of the memorial.

This memorial commemorates the mostly US but also some UK airborne forces who flew in Operations Neptune, Overlord and Market Garden as part of the well documented WWII campaign in Holland. The memorial has its own Facebook page: bit.ly/flyers-memorial

With the centenary of WWI upon us, I feel it is vital to reach out to children and use the commemorations to educate younger generations. And I see some memorials have website addresses and QR codes on them linking to digital sources of information. But I can’t help wondering if society might consider this is ‘A Bridge Too Far’.

Paul Scott has worked in Sales & Marketing Management within all sectors of the construction supply chain for 20+ years. This includes merchants, distributors, manufacturers and specialist contractors. A Fellow of The Institute of Sales & Marketing Management, he set up Front Elevation in 2011 to offer a fully integrated business development service to all sectors of the construction supply chain. Front Elevation was specifically established to help companies of all sizes to raise their profile by offering ‘Marketing for companies who don’t do marketing’. The client portfolio includes specialist stone contractors and quarries.