Gary - Manchester - Newbie!

[Gaz3gaz3]

Hello all,

My name is Gary and I really like the idea of starting my own vending business.

I want to run this alongside my full time job so don’t need huge amounts of machines and would like to concentrate on Manchester City centre.

Can anyone help me guesstimate what revenue I can realistically predict to get?

Any advice or tips would be really welcome. I work in accounts by day so would really like this to be a nice pocket money business on the side.

Thanks for your help!

[Style]

Welcome Gary,
To give you a good guide my best site earns me approx £300 pm , my worst site earns me approx £3 a month.

[JavaGreen]

Hi,
Look at the post at top of the general area of the forum. It has been read by over 60k viewers and in the main, most of it still stands. I need to update it and will do soon however, I have several hundred machines and work on the assumption of 25 sales per month (as an average), it still stands as a good marker. Having said that, do not get sucked in as 25 sales is all profit, operating costs still have to come out of that.
Pablo

[JimBoB1975]

I Worked in Accounts full time until I started three small businesses and one is a Vending Tower Round, it's difficult to do even with a small round of say 20 towers with family and full-time work. I was lucky and my other half took over filling and emptying the towers, I did rest ordering, sorting machine problems, the accounts, counting the money (Which I find varies each month February was my worst month ever, due to vending being impulse buy and diets etc) and banking. With some luck and work you can get some good sites.

[PGBrew]

Hi, You can't gestimate or use other peoples predictions of sales. Don't get caught up in predictions based on fictious sellout figures. The only reliable way is put machines out on trial and use the actual sales out figures for your projections.

[Siting Services]

Hello Gary

I would second Peter Brew's advice and also that of Style, it's a very hard question to answer as there are variances in the country and also there are variances on the individual's ability to run and manage a vending business.

You mention wanting to place your machines into the City Centre of Manchester. In my opinion, city centres are not the ideal place for you to place these types of vendors, especially somewhere like Manchester. City Centres are primarily office/retail based types of businesses and these are not your target market as I would say the majority of offices already have vending machines offering a range of cold and hot drinks, savoury and sweet snacks, therefore a tower machine would not be accepted based on the site being tied up under contract with their current vending supplier. If you did find the odd suitable site, you could potentially be giving yourself a nightmare scenario of parking. The main type of sites that are going to be suitable will be the public houses in the City Centre and being that it is city centre, the majority of the pubs have been taken over by the breweries, the likes of Wetherspoons, Greene King to name a few, who do not allow machines on site.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Barbara

[radical.richard]

Hi Gary

I operate a round in and around Manchester that I bought into, it was established and initially really profitable, a lot of pubs which worked well, but as the managers changed the towers got kicked out, I'm now down to less than half of the sites I bought, along with the trend on minimising single use plastics causing further losses, still making money, but I probably already have most of the good out of town sites you would want, but have to travel quite a few miles to service them. Barbara is also right about parking in the centre, anywhere you have to pay for parking seriously cuts into your margins.

Central Manchester is probably quite sensitive to green issues.

Cheers