Always fight to be leaner, more efficient

When a business is making a profit, you still have to look for more ways to generate profit and cut costs. If you don’t do that, a more leaner operation will enter the market and overtake you. When you are a new business not even having achieved breakeven, it’s even more important. It’s life or death.

We started looking at everything, every ingredient in every drink, all other expenses, wastage, overheads, etc. We found numerous drinks that were just very low margin because the underlying products are so expensive. Mandy helped us identify some based on her experience too. In fact our most popular drink, the berry bonanza, is our lowest margin product. Mandy has something similar which she removed from her menu because it just was not profitable to keep it on. We also started trimming costs and controlling wastage better – it was amazing how many wasted drinks and staff drinks we were getting through in a day. Also we started finding cheaper suppliers without compromising quality. But the most important shift was that I started going to the market myself – the covent garden market – London’s wholesale supply of fresh fruit and veg. I had been a couple of times before when I found new suppliers that were cheaper than before. However what I didn’t realise was that I was dealing each time with distributors and wholesalers. What I needed to do was speak with the actual importers. Mandy had been doing this and was saving a fortune. By taking overstock items, she negotiated huge discounts that hammered down the cost of drinks and made the difference between loss and profit for her business. The wholesalers I was dealing with were keeping this difference for themselves because when they delivered the items, I was none the wiser whether they had got a good deal on them.

So around mid-April I started going to the market. Instantly I was finding amazing deals – boxes of apples previously cost me £15/box. I could now secure them at about £4 by buying 30 boxes upfront, which is about what we went through in a week. Similarly bananas cost £18/box, I got the singles or ‘repacks’ for £3. These were not damaged or faulty products, they might just have been ‘class II’, ie. odd shapes, large, small, etc. For juicing you don’t care what shape they are. Class I was for supermarkets where display matters.

So I started shaving costs on the products. We combined this with ‘specials’ based on the deals i got from the market (another of Mandy’s ideas). As the weather was starting to pick up, smoothie sales were rising, however we realised that people actually wanted to buy food as well. So Jonno and Emanuele started looking into making food. Top quality sandwiches and salads. Some of their combinations were amazing and we soon had people coming in regularly. However as a whole we still weren’t selling loads of food, and as a whole our gross income was not really impacted by food. It was still smoothies that drove business and that still needed growing...more marketing.