How do you run your towers for max profit?

[nivending]

How do you run your tower business to make max profit?

I used to do every site monthly or more if required and in tight geographical areas.
But I was fed up going to sites that only sold 20. I worked two days a week.


So now I try and work one day a week and hit around 20 machines but over a bigger area. I could do 150 + miles a day.
Site visit frequency now from 2 weeks to 10 weeks to hit at least 40 plus sales.

My aim is to lift £800 plus per day leaving a net profit of around £300.

How do you do it?

[Style]

Maximum of 3 monthly for me. If i can get £30 out of a charity machine afer 3 month it stays in, if not I remove it. When I visit I diary the next visit, which could be anything from a week to 3 months. At the begining of each week I carve the work up, I try and work full days, sometimes I get it done in 3, sometimes I use 5 days. 350ish machines and I do about 2000 mile a month including a bit of private running around.

[Siting Services]

That's a very good question NIvending and a question that I get asked a lot.

It is so easy to eat into your net profits by mis-managing your vending business and it is something that many do and not realise.

We used to 'harvest' our servicing slips each week then make sensible routes for our drivers to visit for the whole of the following week. When I say 'harvest' I mean we used to select just those companies where we know there will be let's say a minimum of £40 in the vendor to make the visit worthwhile. With the slower sites we would leave them for up to 3 months then visit them to make sure the vendor is still there and working. With what you do now is exactly how the business should be managed and as Style has also said above, he is doing it right.

There is no point whatsoever in visiting all your vendors on a 'milk round' on a regular timescale as some sites will need weekly visits, by weekly etc. The only downside is mileage and your vehicle getting worn out! Our drivers used to average each 1,000 per week.

Regards,

Barbara

[Quinch]

Lots of factors you need to think about in how you do your round, you should get to know a rough idea of what sales each site does over the first couple of months of the tower being in. A big factor in keeping costs down is the mileage your car/van does, when you fill up check exactly the gallons/litres you put in and press the reset button on your odometer, then work it out when it's empty and you can use this to work out what it's costing you to do your round and how often it's worth going to sites further away.

You also need to decide how many sales justify a visit, as you say 20 sales isn't a lot but if 20 sales empties 2 lines because a regular likes only Toblerone and Mini eggs and won't buy other stuff then it might be worth a visit, you sometimes find the staff in a site buy more than the customers and if their favourites aren't there they won't buy an alternative. I would really advise using a spreadsheet for sales in each site, visit dates across the top/products down the side, that way you can look back over the months and easily see what is selling the best, what lines need replacing with something else or doubling up and if the site is viable etc.

I do most sites at least once a month, I have a few that I do bi-monthly but I would be cautious about leaving it any longer than that, sometimes machines jam or get vandalised and the staff don't know/don't care or can't be bothered to ring you and in this economic climate businesses are going under all the time or changing hands, if the site is not a huge distance away all on it's own I think it's worth checking in on it even if the sales don't really justify it just to make sure there are no problems. This is especially important in the first few months, get to know the staff a bit so they recognise your face and if you're lucky in time they might actually ring you when the machine needs filling up.

[cliffxtc]

especially if you give them a pot of sweets which aren't selling well