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How we helped Briggs & Forrester unite five companies under one unified brand and website

Briggs & Forrester Group is one of the UK’s largest building services engineering contractors. Made up of five separate companies, the group is a leading player in the industry. 

But behind the scenes, they faced a challenge: often two of their companies would be competing against each other for the same project. And clients were confused about which company was delivering what. 

Our brief was to help these five companies create a way to market themselves so that they appeared to clients as one unified brand.

The details

Services delivered

The challenges

Organising and presenting information 

The five separate companies each had their own websites . Each with sales materials, client information, internal policies and manuals. The sheer volume of content across different sites made it impossible to navigate and this was creating serious problems:

For clients, information was scattered and duplicated. They couldn’t find what they needed because they didn’t know which company’s site to look on. And client-facing content was buried under internal documents in search results. 

For staff, the companies couldn’t share information or work together effectively.

Complex content management

The new site had some serious challenges to handle. The client needed it to:

Building unity, not just a website

A unified online presence can only do so much. For this project to succeed, we also needed to help five separate companies feel connected and work together as one team.

How we solved Briggs & Forrester’s challenges

The tech

Drupal Multisite for one site on the surface, five sites behind the scenes

We chose Drupal Multisite because it could handle the complexity while keeping things simple for users. From the outside, it looks like one single website. Behind the scenes, each of the five businesses could keep control over their own content. It allowed us to customise the build to fit Briggs and Forrester’s unusual set up and give the client: 

Powerful search that finds anything, anywhere

The biggest challenge was search. Users needed to find information across five websites and inside documents like PDFs and Word files – without knowing which company owned that content. This is where Drupal multisite came into its own. 

Using Apache Solr and Tika, we customised the search so that users could search all five sites and different document types at once. We then weighted the results to make sure client-facing content ranks higher than internal documents. Users can also refine their searches by answering questions, and the system adjusts what it shows them to surface exactly what they need.

The process

Bring five companies together as one

The technical challenge was only half the battle. We also had to get the companies to see themselves as one unified team delivering end-to-end services, rather than five separate businesses.

We created an approach called ‘groupification’. The new site made it easier for the businesses to share information, and showed them how they could work together as one brand. Seeing it in action helped reduce internal competition – proof they could be stronger together.

Understand the complex web of information and user needs

The site had information covering design, delivery, aftercare and maintenance. And it had several very different audiences – potential clients looking for a contractor, clients during projects, and staff from different group companies needing to share information and work together. 

We had to understand what each group needed, how the companies met those needs, and how users expected to find what they needed. This allowed us to create a structure and architecture that served everyone. A staff extranet meant policies, forms and manuals could live separately from client information. And a powerful search that surfaced the right content from any of the five sites.

Tailored and thoughtful sales journeys

During discovery, we realised that each business had a slightly different approach to sales. To get everyone on the same page, we needed to understand what their clients needed and how they buy services. Only then could we design a process, content and user experience to deliver it.

Briggs and Forrester’s target audience is small and highly specific – clients looking for contractors to deliver multi-million pound building services projects. We took a ‘show don’t tell’ approach, using case studies to quickly build trust in Briggs and Forrester’s ability to deliver these complex, high-value projects.

Empower teams while protecting the brand

We needed to make sure that each company had enough control of the content to avoid bottlenecks. And we needed to make sure there were controls in place to keep the site looking and functioning as a unified brand. 

We set up detailed approval processes and user permissions. It meant each company could work independently and quickly, while the site stayed cohesive and on-brand. Then we built a future-proofed design system with tools that keep the site looking professional, no matter who’s updating it. This included:

The impact

The ‘groupification’ strategy transformed how Briggs & Forrester presented themselves to the market. And how the five companies worked together internally. They now had:

Major changes came out of this project for the client in terms of their processes and approach to new projects. Briggs & Forrester now works, and competes, as a unified business, rather than as five smaller, separate, and sometimes overlapping, companies. And they’re now in an ideal position to win the prestigious multi-million pound contracts they were targeting.

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