From social media to solar panels and security equipment: speakers at this year’s Summit shared insights to the 186 attendees on what is making their businesses tick.
- We learnt from Sarah Dunning, chair at Westmorland Group that you can get away with charging more than a fiver for a sausage roll! But it has to be a good quality sausage roll, packed with real meat, no nasties and big enough to count as a meal on its own.
- EV charging is bringing in slightly more affluent customers for Westmorland Group, which is really good for its upmarket business. The company has just over 100 EV chargepoints across its sites; a mix of Tesla and its own brand.
- Consider having core morning products available all day and into the evening. Cybake’s chief executive Ali Lyons said there was an opportunity for sales of baguettes and croissant across the whole day. “We’re all working at different hours of the day. We’re not eating breakfast and lunch at normal times,” she said,
- Hemant Tandon operations director at Park Garage Group said retailers should look at waste on food to go as both a positive and a negative. The negative was that it is actual waste, but the positive was that higher waste means you have better availability. ”You’ve got to have a balance of showing customers that availability is strong and managing your costs internally,” he said.
- Hearing Germany’s equivalent of Fuel Finder has failed to bring the cost of petrol down was telling, but more intriguing was learning about ‘ghost sites’, with the system continuing to publish the last known prices for garages that have ceased trading. This leads to firms relying too heavily on automated software to monitor rivals’ prices to use extinct data to determine their own pole signs – a warning for UK operators, for sure.
- Living in an overcast country can make it easy to overlook solar panels, especially during the winter months, so hearing that Tom Highland was expecting to recoup the £50,000 he had invested in photovoltaics within just two and a half years put the impact this technology can have on costs into sharp focus.
- Niche products can mean big business, said forecourt operator Goran Raven who has generated a healthy income from frozen raw dog food at an equine and pet supply business his daughter runs from a former workshop unit on his site in Abridge, Essex. “We’ve been taken by surprise. It’s really phenomenal”, said Raven, with customers spending several hundred pounds on his range on one visit.
- TikTok is a way to engage with young car enthusiasts to promote jet wash hubs on forecourts, said Johnny Srikrishna. Social media influencers have been filming cleaning sessions at his newly introduced valeting centre near Reading. And Srikrishna has been connecting with their followers online to create a community of motorists using the Shell site.
- Motorists are starting to pay a higher price for premium car washes as forecourts invest in apps and other features to improve customer experience, said Ryan Lenihan, sales and marketing director of Wash Tec. In fact, in the southeast of England, a charge of £15 is now acceptable to drivers he added.
- Security tags on high-value items at one Pricewatch Group forecourt has seen in-store theft fall from £1,000 to £150 a week. But said general manager Tom Buckley, the effectiveness of anti-theft equipment is largely dependent on staff being prepared to step forward when there is an incident, with “dramatic levels of change with theft” depending on who is working on a particular shift.
