Top 50 Indie Penny on the Move is implementing a new efficiency programme dubbed ‘Every Penny Counts’ to cope with rising operating costs.
Speaking at Forecourt Trader’s 2026 Summit, the company’s chief excutive Vicky Hennessy said that the business will be hit with an additional £1.5m in costs this year, because of rising National Insurance and business rates.
It employs employs over 1,200 staff, and it was revealed at the annual conference that it has just acquired its 100th site.
Hennessy told the audience: “This year we’re looking at £1.5m in terms of additional wages and rates, and we’ve got to find that somewhere.”
Rather than lose seven figures from its bottom line, Penny on the Move is instead implementing a programme that will see it focus on cost-saving initiatives over three key areas, said Hennessy.
“There are three elements to it: sales, margin, and costs. We’re breaking each one of those down. For sales, we’re looking at ranges, taking out dead stock, looking at flow of product.
“For margin we’re looking at incremental sales of high-margin items, and of course we’ve got to look at pricing.
“As for costs, we’re breaking those down for every single site, asking what’s a necessity, and what we don’t need any more.”
Hennessy said Every Penny Counts is based on the mindset that “everyone is accountable” for finding efficiencies within the business, adding that it can be easy for firms to pay for services out of habit.
“Over a period of time some of the costs you incur on a regular basis can come as a shock when you break them down.”
She cited one cost the firm was able to cut almost as soon as the programme was introduced and Penny began to go through sites’ outgoings with a fine-toothed comb.
“We’re looking closely at subscriptions and seeing if we can do things in-house. Every time we purchased a site a member of our team automatically – just because we’d always done it – got a company in to start cleaning door mats every two weeks. So we’ve put a stop to that and now we do it ourselves.”
