NTS Retail is nearing founder Thayaparan Nalliah’s goal of having 35 sites in his portfolio, with the recent refit of a store in Canvey Island seeing the boss set out his ambitions for the firm.
With around 2mpla flowing through its pumps the Jet-liveried Essex forecourt is relatively quiet where fuel is concerned, but the shop is another matter, with the small-ish forecourt no barrier to strong convenience sales.
To capitalise on that NTS has spent around £300,000 giving the shop a top-to-bottom update, with new lighting, floors, tills and produce on offer.
Every inch of the shop’s 2,000sq ft has been made use of. There’s a comprehensive run of food-to-go counters comprising two hot-food cabinets, a milkshake machine, a Costa Express, a bakery unit, a slushie maker and Red Bull fridges, while towards the rear of the shop sits a freezer full of Cook ready meals – the first time NTS has featured the brand in its estate. Products are priced with electronic shelf labels, a circa £30,000 investment, while an impressive beer cave rounds things off.
Nalliah tells Forecourt Trader the shop is expected to turn over £35,000 a week, and with the refurb having been in place for a fortnight or so, early indications are it will meet that target.
NTS has a team of four area managers and seven office staff to oversee its 28 sites, all of which are run on a commission-operator model. This makes sense given Nalliah started out in the business in 1993 as a com-op in Bournemouth after moving to the UK from Sri Lanka, while later came stints managing sites for firms including past players MRH and Snax 24.
He put his 1990s earnings into a property business, which he continues to oversee, then used revenue from those investments to move back into the forecourt sector, buying his first site in 2013 and acquiring over two dozen more since then. In its busiest year NTS bought four forecourts and the portfolio now stands at to 28 sites, plus a convenience store.
We ask how the firm has been able to grow so quickly, and Nalliah explains: “We don’t mind paying a bit extra for a site if it’s in the right area for us – that makes it easier for us to run.”
The expansion has no doubt also been facilitated by Nalliah’s knowledge of both fuel retailing and property, a blend that can be seen in the Canvey Island store, which, unusually, has shrunk by around 500sq ft as part of the update, a partition wall being installed at the back of the shop.
Rather than give the space on the other side of the partition over to a generous stock room or office, NTS instead turned it into a separate retail unit that will be leased out to a barber or similar local firm
“If you have more space you need more stock, more staff. The shop was too big before – we didn’t need all the space”, Nalliah explains.
Nalliah clearly has an affinity for the forecourt business. “I can immediately tell if something is wrong when I walk into a site”, he says, before adding – “Assuming my area managers haven’t spotted it first”. The firm is hot on empty shelves, for instance, and is commissioning a gap-analysis firm to carry out mystery shopper-style inspections of its sites.
As for choosing which fuel supplier to go with, Nalliah says this is also fairly straightforward:
“It’s partly determined by what other sites in the area. You don’t want two of the same brand too close together, otherwise customers compare the prices between one and the other and think the more expensive site is charging too much.”
We ask what the ultimate goal is for NTS – how many sites is enough? “I want to have 35”, Nalliah says simply. “With what we have in the pipeline we’ll be up to 31 soon.”
Those pipeline sites include an upcoming acquisition Nalliah has to remain tight-lipped about for now, though he’s more forthcoming about a project in Street, a village just outside Glastonbury, that will see a former filling station currently trading as a car dealership brought back to its original use, complemented with EV charging and a pair of jet-wash bays.
Given the pace of expansion clearly it won’t be long until NTS achieves its 35-site goal – so what then? At this point Nalliah introduces his son, Sanjaesh, who is currently studying business at university and is set to join the firm in the coming years.
There’s something refreshingly straightforward about how Nalliah sees the forecourt business – a certain decisiveness coupled with quiet confidence and a no-nonsense attitude. Given he looks set to achieve precisely what he set out to little more than a decade after buying his first site, it’s clearly a winning combination.
