PICTURED ABOVE: John Crichton.
PV Editor Ian Reynolds-Young travelled to Tyneside to find out what makes Automatic Retailing Britain’s favourite wholesaler of vending products.
There’s only one wholesaler out there that’s dedicated one-hundred percent to the vending industry – and that’s Automatic Retailing. Serving the independent vending customer for 15 years and delivering to hundreds of customers in the UK & Ireland, Automatic Retailing stocks confectionery, drinks, snacks, coffee, vending cups, and ancillaries. In fact, as CEO John Crichton tells me proudly, ‘everything a vending operator wants, we’ve got it.’
The vending industry evidently agrees: Automatic Retailing recently won NIVO’s award in the category, ‘Supplier of the Year, Consumables’, for the third year running. And if you think that’s impressive, they’ve won the equivalent AVS award eleven times on the trot.
Time to discover who’s behind such a success story…
HQ is built on a site of 100,000 square feet, in a modern industrial park just north of the Tyne Tunnel. The building is sufficiently crisp and smart on the outside to make you want to check your hair and straighten your tie before you go inside: but if you’re going inside to meet John and his fellow Director Allan Walker, you do that anyway.
*********************
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let Allan begin. ‘Four years ago, Kitwave acquired Automatic Retailing. ‘It’s a good company to be owned by. They came along and they let me and John get on with it. We were turning over forty-eight million then, now it’s over eighty.’
That’s interesting: it’s further evidence that Kitwave’s modus operandi is not to buy lame ducks and re-build them, oh no: on the contrary, the company specialises in identifying well-run businesses in the wholesale sector and giving them the backing they need – and the autonomy – to achieve their potential.
The group is growing rapidly, so clearly, it’s doing something right. These days, turnover is £270m a year; but following recent investment in the organisation, expectations are running high. ‘The powers-that-be hope that that £270m will be closer to £500m by this time next year’, Allan says.
The figures are eye-watering, but John is quick to remind me that Automatic Retailing is a traditional wholesale business of ‘high turnover and low margins’; which seems as good a cue as any for me to ask both men what they think makes their multi-award winning business so, well; ‘multi-award winning’. ‘
We’re vending specific’, John says. ‘Every time we make a delivery it’s to a vending company, unlike any other wholesaler. Everything we do is geared to exceeding the expectations of a very specific market sector.’
‘We make the vast majority of our own deliveries’ John adds. ‘We’ve got 21 wagons on the road, every one of them with a tail lift. We know that not every vending operator has a fork-lift truck…’
It’s all down to ‘price’ though, isn’t it, at the end of the day? Or am I getting cynical in my old age? Ee, when I were a lad, the first and last questions a potential customer asked a wholesaler were ‘how much are your Mars bars?’ and ‘how much is your coke?’
‘I’ve heard it said that ‘there’s not a lot of value put on service until people try the alternatives’ and I like to think that’s true in our case.’ Allan Walker
‘That’s still true to a certain extent’, Allan laughs, ‘but we want to take it away from that by giving another level of service. I’ve heard it said that ‘there’s not a lot of value put on service until people try the alternatives’ and I like to think that’s true in our case.’
‘In my humble opinion’, John adds, ‘empty spirals disappoint the consumer and cost the operator reputation and profit.’
‘It’s about having everything your customers want when they want it’, Allan says. ‘That’s the business we’re in. We have a 98.8% success rate when it comes to order completion. With us it’s about the Full Service: what you need, delivered when you need it, in full.’
‘Empty spirals disappoint the consumer and cost the operator reputation and profit.’ John Crichton
Allan and John need no Powerpoint slides to illustrate that point: y’see, this upstairs room we’re in has a window that gives you a birds-eye view of a cavernous warehouse that’s crammed with pallet upon pallet of everything you could ever need to run a vending operation. They simply invite me to take a look through the window.
‘Twelve years ago, our product list took up half a page of A4’, John says. ‘These days, it’s twelve pages long. We’ve got everything a vending operator wants: filters, coffee; crisps, snacks – everything.’ Giving every customer exactly what he wants does have its downside, though: for instance, due to popular demand, Automatic Retailing carries 51 different cups…
The future looks like being an exciting place for Automatic Retailing. ‘Significant investment’ from Kitwave has allowed the company to develop on-line ordering. Consequently, on-line income is now ‘substantial’ and it’s growing in importance on a daily basis. ‘We’ve done it to make it easier for our customers to go on line’, Allan says. ‘It’s like a shopping basket and we’ve made it completely ‘John proof’. That way, we can be absolutely sure that anybody can use it!’
John sums up: ‘We’re continually trying to improve what we’re doing’, he says. ‘I think that’s what it’s all about. We’re working towards our goal of ‘next-day delivery’, so we’re constantly asking ourselves, ‘can we pick better?’, ‘can we get systems that pick better?’, ‘can we pick individually for operators?’
The hot word for this year appears to be ‘Integration’, as Automatic Retailing takes its offer up another notch by – amongst other things – partnering with Vendman, to make it possible for customers to use their management software to make and manage purchases.
Forward, upward, onward. ‘If you can’t change, you’re going to die’, John says. ‘We’re holding our own.’
I’d say they were doing rather better than that.
