Siblings Tom and Lois Dant have combined their business and creative flair to pull off a flagship site for Gill Marsh Forecourts, which is trading at double the turnover its wholesaler had predicted, and will be used as a template to refresh the rest of the Lincolnshire operator’s network.
Since completing a £1.5m upgrade of the Ulceby Cross site in December, turnover has jumped from £23k to £27k a week to £54k, with the last bank holiday weekend pushing this up to £64k. At the same time, fuel volume has increased from 5.9mlpa before the refit to 7mlpa.
The site is run by Lois Dant as store manager, while Tom Dant is managing director of the Gill Marsh Forecourts group, which has two other outlets in Lincolnshire.
The one-acre site, 12 miles from the seaside town of Skegness, benefits from tourist trade and being on a busy roundabout where the A16, A1104 and A1028 meet. Tom Dant keeps his fuel prices low – at 149.9p per litre for unleaded and 169.9p when we visited last Thursday (June 18).
He watches what petrol stations are charging up to two hours away in Sheffield and Doncaster where many of the forecourt’s passing traffic will be coming from, and charges 3p to 4p less a litre. “To be honest even if you charge 1p less than the competition, people will clock that and come back to fill up later,” he says.
The 3,100sq ft shop, five times the size of the original, and switching to 24-hours with the refit, has surpassed Dant’s expectations. It is an “Aladdin’s cave with something for everyone”, he says. The biggest success has been the introduction of a Tom’s Kitchen-branded hot food counter, which accounts for a third of the store’s sales, and has touchscreen ordering.
The three full-time staff on food preparation produce among other meals all day breakfasts, daily roasts in a giant Yorkshire pudding, burgers and wraps. And around £650-worth of deliveries, mostly in the morning, are made on the range in a Snappy Shopper-branded van. Evening deliveries are now offered Thursday to Saturday from 4pm to 10pm, to capture takeaway trade, and Dant is about to enlist Just Eat.
“I was thinking we would get to a £40,000 turnover around now and then gradually increase to £45k, but we keep having record weeks,” says Dant, who has been with the business for 20 years, the last 11 as managing director and as a shareholder, alongside Jill Marsh who set up the company in 1971 with her late husband.
Most recently Dant renegotiated a fuel contract for the group’s three petrol stations with Jet, after the collapse of the Prax oil refinery meant that he had to find an alternative to the Total Energies canopies in place before. The deal, which went live in April, has seen him become one of the first dealers in the UK to take Jet Ultra 99 high octane fuel, and drove fuel volume up by nearly one million litres per year.
He is now renegotiating his contract for the three forecourt shops with AF Blakemore, as his five-year contract with the Spar wholesaler is up for renewal. Meanwhile, next month he expects to go live with two electric vehicle chargepoints from supplier ABB – one 180kW and the other 50kW – which required a £160k substation as part of the site upgrade.
Dant has high hopes for the technology, with the site being in what he describes as an “EV charging desert”. And depending how take-up goes he could double chargepoint capacity with another four bays, which would leave him with seven standard parking bays.
Dant’s sister, 12 years his junior at 27, joined him as store manager at Ulceby Cross after leaving university with an art degree shortly after the end of the pandemic. Her influence can be felt throughout the petrol station.
She has added personality to the café seating area, a 550sq ft room on the side of the shop with free wi-fi and numerous plug points. She has painted a large mural of local attractions on the wall, including drawing the petrol station twice to take in the recent rebranding. And she introduced a baby feeding station – an area for parents to heat milk and food in a microwave.
In the five toilets, which include a larger than average facility for baby changing and wheelchair users, there are vinyl prints of local attractions. For a store of its size the number of public conveniences exceeds the norm, an intentional move to again attract trade from holidaymakers, says Dant.
His sister has also developed a global confectionery range which has been extended to 4m of eight shelves of Japanese, Chinese, Australian and American lines, and turns over £4,000 a week. She works with half a dozen suppliers to curate the range which is constantly being updated in line with viral social media trends. A current top seller is the American retro Nik-L-Nip wax bottle sweets.
“Lois likes to source items that you can’t find in other places like B&M and Home Bargains, and to sell them cheaper than you can get from TikTok Shop,” says Dant.
One customer had travelled over 30 miles to buy the globally-sourced range of confectionery, and the soft drinks and groceries from various countries, spending £150 on one visit. The unusual product line-up also attracted attention from a local TikToker who has been enthusing to her one million followers that this is the only place where she can get a cooked breakfast in a Yorkshire pudding, laughs Dant.
Dant says that he keeps the margins high – at between 40-50% – on imported food and drink, partly by doing his own labelling of ingredients in English.
Groceries – including internationally supplied gravy, corn starch, and grape jelly – are a slower sell, says Dant, but soft drinks do well, particularly the Korean pouches which he sells with 50p cups of ice, and also the Starbucks iced tea and Sponge Bob cans.
He says: “You need to be bold with worldwide food and drink and have a proper display to make any impact. But then you can afford to be bold and take a risk by trying out various lines with margins typically 40-50%.”
But Dant is not afraid to take chances across the business, trialling different products often on the advice of counterparts in the industry and then quickly removing them if they do not work. An instance of this is switching out Costa machines and replacing them with Barista coffee which has paid off: selling the cups for 10p cheaper has seen a 30% uplift to 180 sold per day.
He recently introduced Lego, and TY Teddies, on recommendation from a contemporary, which do well, he says, when holidaymakers are looking for ideas to occupy their children when the weather is poor.
Alongside this section, he has plenty summertime options too with a range that has surprised him with its popularity. Water slides, water guns, and beach towels have recently sold out.
He has a big gluten-free range, including half a dozen options in his £5.50 meal deal, and sugar-free confectionery. And he has also introduced a protein section two months ago which is proving popular, with £2 energy bars to £1.89 protein drinks, My Protein Whey Protein tubs at £24.99, and My Vitamins Collagen Powder tub at £27.99. It turns over £350 a week.
He has installed two high-end Cook ready-meal cabinets, which represent 70% of frozen food sales. And next to this he has shelves of premium Praveen Kumar Indian ready-meals in an upright freezer. He has been surprised at the uptake of higher end lines saying that he would never have thought he would have a market for £7 pizzas, for example.
He likes to support local suppliers too, with custard pies, plumbread, fresh cream cakes and quiches from nearby baker Pocklington’s Bakery, wild shot venison, and nearby butcher Lakings supplying sausages, and other meats, which are also used in Tom’s Kitchen.
He also backs DoughGirl, the heavily iced cakes from Skegness-based supplier The Chuckling Cheese Company which have a 10-day shelf-life and are popular heated in a microwave, says Dant.
He has installed a free on loan display counter which has increased sales to £1,800 a week – representing an uplift from 300 to 500 units sold. ”It is a good alternative to Krispy Kreme which I’ve not been able to get here,” he says.
Conversely, a whippy style ice-cream, and desserts served in Tom’s Kitchen have not gone down so well and have been taken out of the business. And his idea to run Fish Friday fish and chips takeaways fell flat, which in hindsight he admits is not surprising because of nearby Skegness’s reputation for excellent fish and chip outlets.
And on the shopfloor he reined back his fresh produce display to give more space to the frequently shopped sandwich display; while posh pickles did not get any traction with customers.
Dant continues to turn the forecourt into a hub, with plans for a laundry and pet wash machine. Already there is a post office collection box and picnic benches at the front, and Dant wants to encourage motor groups to use the site as a meeting place.
“We want to cater for everyone and to be a mini supermarket,” he stresses, with the group’s Partney forecourt the next to be given the Dant treatment with a site upgrade.
