Why Mindset Counts with Staircase Innovation

Lately, the Alpine Group directors have received feedback from everyone from employees, clients and those just discovering the company, causing them to reflect on what makes Alpine stand out as a specialist staircase company. It turns out, it’s all about the attitude.

The Alpine Group has come a long way on a journey of self-discovery whilst finding a place in the construction industry as a premier staircase creator. In the last month or so, we have received a lot of insight and feedback from people in our company, our clients and from those we are just engaging with for the first time. Something emerged from the feedback about how we do business that is worth sharing, as it matters and can be applied in any sector and any business.

The new staircase project

The first feedback we want to share was from a new client with an exciting project idea. The Alpine Group were approached by a sports car showroom with the idea to create a custom staircase design, like nothing ever created before. They had approached other staircase companies and some of them knocked their idea back. In contrast, Alpine listened and started to sketch out ideas. For the luxury sports car showroom, they wanted a staircase themed around the cars themselves, so all the treads resembled aluminium extrusions, like the spoiler fin of the cars. They were keen to work with us to create this spectacular bespoke staircase.

We always like to find out the reason we are selected for jobs like this, so they fed back it was not just the willingness to give these radical stairs a go, but the Alpine team also shared the excitement and enthusiasm for the project, that they had. Trying new things like this is what we love the most, where you have to innovate and problem solve, and make these incredible ideas into real staircases. After being told ‘no’ by many specialists they remarked it was our refreshing ‘let’s give it a go’ attitude that stood out. We regularly push the boundaries on design and materials, so we can’t wait to get stuck into this design.

After being told ‘no’ by many specialists they remarked it was our refreshing ‘let’s give it a go’ attitude that stood out. We regularly push the boundaries on design and materials, so we can’t wait to get stuck into this design.

The staircase estimate

The second piece of feedback was from someone who appreciated our front-end process. We don’t have estimators; we have design consultants. So, when you deal with the front-end of The Alpine Group it’s not just someone churning out numbers and filling in spreadsheets, we pride ourselves on producing a quote so accurate and simplified and spelt out that you don’t need to ring us to ask a series of questions afterwards. In fact, we feel if someone comes back to us asking lots of questions about what we have presented, then we have failed to communicate it correctly. We recently supplied a quote and the client looked through it and the client came back to us and said ‘wow, that quote is accurate, we’ll simply present your quote to our client.’

What’s key to our process is making our clients look good to their clients. We are the supply chain, our customers are only as good as us, so it’s paramount for us to be totally in tune and up-front with our customers.

What our team thinks

An employee recently left the business for reasons of family commitments, and we invited him to offer his feedback on what it had been like working at the company. One thing stood out for us when he commented on the dedication of those in the company. He said the team was ‘determined and always find a way and never give up, always pushing for the best solutions’.

An important lesson from all this feedback is that in a sector like construction, reputation really matters so you take care to shape it with integrity and go that extra mile. We have learnt that your brand is not what you say about yourself, it is what other people say about you. We hope and it appears to be the case, our strong work ethic, adaptability and ‘can do’ attitude, are the defining qualities of the Alpine brand.

Need someone to drive your idea for a staircase forward, contact the team at Alpine and we can help.