Welcome to Travis Perkins

I am delighted you are interested in joining this great company. I’m in the minority here – most people join Travis Perkins early on in their career, and then never leave, since they find it’s such a great place to be. I joined a little over 4 years ago and soon discovered why people like it so much.

That feature of the people who work here – their attraction to the way we work and their longevity in the company - is self reinforcing. It produces a culture of initiative, relative freedom and action, maintained by great people that are the main driver of our success. We like to be in control of our destiny and do things “our way”, and that is directly reflected in our approach to the use of technology.

Our 11 businesses deservedly enjoy a reputation amongst customers as the best place to go to source building materials, and the senior management teams running those business constantly strive to develop new products and services to extend our lead over our competitors. They have the freedom to demand support from our central IT function in plotting strategy and developing solutions – and on many occasions the IT function itself identifies and originates innovative business developments as a result of the rich debate and discussion that takes place between our teams.

Much of the market-leading technology used in the company is developed in house from our development centres in Northampton, Bridgwater, Barnstaple and Chennai. Whilst we are not averse to using proprietary application products, our default position is to assume we’ll do it ourselves.

All this means that the well-worn cliché about technology delivering competitive advantage is actually true in our case, because we rarely share advantages with others through the use of common software.

We’d like to keep it that way, and if you join us in this critical senior position, you’ll be influencing the way our company works for some time to come, and with much greater impact than almost any other company I can think of. If you succeed, a path is open for your career to further develop and grow as this great company grows.

Thank you for your interest,
Geoff Cooper, CEO