Cheeky Salads - Les salades effrontees !

Voici un article paru dans le Sydney Morning Herald - le 04/02/05 - au sujet de la sociéte pour laquelle je travaille comme livreur. Bonne lecture en anglais. Vous pouvez utiliser le traducteur mis à disposition dans mon blog.

 

Must get bigger, but how big? Tristan Harris at his Cheeky Salads outlet at the Macquarie Centre.

The trouble with getting in on a really good small business idea, as Tristan Harris has discovered, is that by the time you're up and running, everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon. Janine Perrett reports.

That's what happened to him when he became an early player in the fast-growing salad bar sector. The choose-your-own shops are now becoming so popular, it's not a question of whether he should grow bigger but just how big he should grow.

"There will be survivors and casualties. I know we've got to get bigger but I just don't know how big," he says. "There's a belief in this industry that you've got to keep opening more shops, but I don't want to open shops for the sake of it.

"I know if we stay at one we're going to be swamped, but is franchising the only answer for large-scale growth?"

Harris is lucky he can even contemplate expanding, but the fact he's prepared this time came out of bitter experience the first time he started his own business.

Although he hails from a small business and fresh food background - his parents founded the successful Harris Farm Markets group - his own first foray was in something completely different: telecommunications infrastructure leasing.

"I thought if I set up a little business it is going to grow - but it was not nearly as successful as I expected," Harris admits.

"I just couldn't afford to keep it going. I did it for a year and then found someone to take it over."

Harris recalls the advice he received from leading entrepreneur and Hungry Jack's founder and owner, Jack Cowin. "I showed him my business plan and he said 'whatever you think is your worst-case scenario, then double the time and double the money'. He was right," Harris says.

Although the abortive venture didn't put him off trying again ("I thought next time I'd be smarter"), he was reluctant to put his wife through the stress a second time. But a couple of things combined to change his mind.

Firstly his father's passion for salad.

"My dad has a salad for lunch every single day. He's fanatical about it and I used to eat a salad with him. But it was much much better than those ones you scooped out of a tray in a sandwich shop because it had things like mangoes and figs, and ingredients you didn't see elsewhere.

"Then about two years ago I heard people talking about these new salad bars in London and New York where you choose your own ingredients, and I thought that sounds like a great idea."

When he saw a local sandwich shop operator attempting the concept but not executing it very well, Harris thought he could do it a lot better. "I saw the possibilities and thought it would make a great business, but I thought to myself my wife wouldn't be in it. Yet I couldn't get the idea out of my mind. When I couldn't stop talking about it she surprised me and said 'why don't you do it then?' "

Learning from his previous mishap, Harris decided this time he would make sure he had adequate capital at the beginning. He convinced his parents to go in with him 50/50, but had to raise the money for his half - which he did by taking a loan on the house.

Their first big break came when a shop became available at the Parramatta Shopping Centre next door to a Harris Farm Market outlet.

It was a juice bar that had gone broke and had two months left on the lease. Harris was briefly able to use it as a pilot store to test his concept, and the customer feedback proved it worked.

By the end of 2003, he had scouted a permanent location at the giant Macquarie Centre in Ryde, a place he was familiar with because he used to work across the road so knew all the lunch shops.

"It was the right size, the right trading hours - seven days a week and night as well - and it was next to the cinema."

After the usual headaches with shopping centre bureaucracy, Cheeky Salads opened last May and has been trading successfully at the projected turnover of $20,000 per week ever since.

Without a doubt, he says, staffing is his biggest ongoing challenge; although that improves as time goes on. He currently has 14 employees, four full-time and the rest part-timers and casuals.

"Finding them, keeping them, managing them - it's the usual thing," he says.

"As a percentage of my costs they are the biggest part, so I've got to get them working better. When we first started, staff costs were 50 per cent of turnover but it's now about 30 per cent and I'm always looking at ways to manage more productivity."

Other traditional issues like pricing and margins don't seem to concern him at this stage, nor does he have to update his menu as the customers choose their own and can refresh their choices themselves.

Marketing has not been a big issue despite his limited budget, as the customers are local. So he has concentrated on promotions like "cheeky" flyers and ticket advertising at the nearby cinema to basically "get them through the door and get repeat customers".

Competition is the key concern, but not in the usual sense. While there are indeed countless new shops opening with the same idea, Harris believes the key is offering a point of differentiation, be it in the image or additional products like pasta.

The real problem is that the competitors will consolidate, as the Sumo group has done by franchising the concept.

"Everyone expects you to franchise, but is franchising the be-all and end-all? Is it the way to go? In terms of large-scale growth is it the only way to go?

"If you're going to open, say, 50 stores, is there any other alternative?"

While he contemplates this he knows he has to keep growing. For months he has been scouting for a new location but is still undecided on whether to try another shopping complex or go for a different style location.

He is also looking at both starting another Cheeky Salads from scratch or else buying another salad bar, particularly as the concept grows so rapidly.

This time he has enough capital to invest in other players, and as everyone scrambles to survive he keeps up communication lines with his competitors for the possibility of mergers.

And then there's the big question - are these salad bars simply a fad?

"I tend to think there is a big difference between this and the juice bars," Harris said.

"This is a proper meal and good-tasting one at that. Juices have been a phenomenon but they're not a product in the long term."

CHALLENGES FOR CHEEKY SALADS

· Is franchising the only way to grow rapidly?

· How big should you grow?

· Choosing next location.

· Staffing and productivity issues.