I'm planning opening a pasty shop - what are the profit expectations?

lostinrates

Conrad wrote: »

Not soggy chips

soggy chips are the best ones.:o

Davesnave

Conrad wrote: »

There's a case in point; chippies and thier wildly varying offerings.

The best chippy by some margin is in Lynmouth Devon

I'll check that out!:j

My favourites at present are the one that thinks its an antique shop in the centre of Brecon. (Nice to sit & eat them on the Promenade by the river) and our 'local' the Penguin Fish Bar in Tiverton (but it depends a bit who's on duty.)

Whitstones in Shepton Mallet are another good example of how to get it right. They began on the site of an old car dealers at a busy cross roads, offering sit down & take away. From the start they created a clear, clean image based on a black uniform and young, attractive, mainly female staff doing the serving, showing both efficiency and courtesy. (Yes, they really can find young staff who have the right qualities.) They are now branching out into other locations and closing down the opposition. Goes without saying that the F&C are pretty good too.

lostinrates

Davesnave wrote: »

Whitstones in Shepton Mallet are another good example of how to get it right. .

Yes, not bad...we know them, but I like another local one a little better.

dopester

DD with a childrens' shoe shop in a quiet village, and now Conrad with a pasty shop. :rolleyes:

In my view you don't make much profit on low-end items like pasties. Think of how many of these low-order products you need to sell to do alright, after all the other running costs.

I'll stick to targeting the higher end thanks, where I just need to sell a few items a year, at a much higher margin, (as there remains very wealthy people about even in depressions) - to make a fair living for the year.

Self-employment in pure semantic terms means that you have elected to give yourself employment, to employ yourself. If you are your employer you must, for good business practice, give your employee (have you guessed who that is?) a job description. What job have you given yourself?

One of the perennial chestnuts is the restaurant business. Now there is nothing wrong with running a restaurant; in fact they can be smashing goldmines, but they also have one of the most frighteningly high mortality rates among new business.

Imagine you have decided to open a Ye Olde Tea Shoppe in the heart of some rural beauty spot. You may consider that you are now boss of a restaurant, an entrepreneur in the comestible division of the tourist boom.

What you have actually done is given yourself a job as a waiter or waitress with no Sundays off ever. Did you want to work as a waiter? If you did, you would probably be better off working in someone else's restaurant where you could insist on decent pay, days off, and have no worries about borrowed money and the general economic welfare of the enterprise.

Almost every small business that you could be proud to say you own, or started, has some very much less glamorous job of work attached to it, and before you start your great adventure, write a job description with a list of the duties and responsibilities, just to be sure you still want to do it.

People continue to eat, even in a depression. But the composition of spending on food changes. In the early stages of a slump, people whose incomes are squeezed will buy lower-quality items. More chicken, less steak and salmon. They will get their vegetables from the ketchup, or settle for something out of the can, not fresh or frozen. Spending on food will drop quickly, but it will be a shallow decline compared to other consumer areas.

In the 1930s, the prices of finished foods fell much less that the prices of meats and other farm products. Bread, for example, fell 20 percent from and average of 8.8 cents a loaf in 1929 to a low of 7 cents in 1932. The price of flour, by contrast, fell 37 percent - about equal to the average fall in wholesale food prices in general. Products from the farm, meanwhile, like butter, milk, eggs, meats, fruits and vegetables, tumbled almost 60 percent. Officially the government calculated that the price of eating at home fell by 37 percent. Nonetheless, the percentage of personal spending going for food held steady at around 27 percent.

In a depression, the service sector is like a shoal of fish trapped on a beach with the tide receding. As real income falls, many service companies starve for customers.

Many customers no longer find it cost-efficient to purchase services they can perform more cheaply for themselves . So they don't purchase.

The reason that services rise as income rises is that the opportunity costs of doing certain things for yourself, like fixing a meal or ironing your shirts rise. This pushes more household chores into the market.

If you're in work making one hundred thousand pounds a year, spending one hundred pounds to eat at a fancy restaurant is a bargain. It economises your time. You find it cheaper to pay someone else to get you dinner rather than take a few hours to make it yourself and then clean up.

But when Conrad McPasty loses his big-earning Estate Agent job, he can heat up some chilli or eat a hot dog. He does not have to keep the limo driver hovering outside, or worry about hailing a cab. It is amazing how many services you can do without when your income falls.

kennyboy66_2

Greggs make about £22k per retail outlet. Obviously they have plenty of management / HO costs that you can avoid, but they can make the pies (up in the North East I think) cheaper than anyone else.

I like a proper Cornish pasty, but a franchise (or it looked like a franchise to me) opened near home and closed again within 12 months.
God knows how much the owner/franchisee msut have lost.

carolt

Am I the only one to wonder what this says - between the lines - about Conrad's views on the future for the property market?

Why have you given up on the idea of bing a mortgage broker/BTL millionaire, Conrad? Is there something you're not telling us?

This thread also gave me wonderful ideas of what other fantastically unlikely dreams posters on here could reveal. Just as I'd never put Conrad down as the Pasty King, is chucky really a secret dental nurse? ISTL a jazz clarinetist? Does Kenny dream of taking the stage at the London Palladium, or building model trains? Is nollag a closet birdwatcher?

Please, BTLetters, share your dreams..tell us what you'd like to do if you had a proper job.

Conrad

Snooze wrote: »

Further to my last post I would also advise you to steer clear of franchises, unless you're the person at the top who is dishing them out. Franchises are for noobs who have no clue about business and the only thing they achieve is making those at the top very rich


if the product is such a money-spinner then why are they trying to franchise it all out instead of setting up the shops themselves ?? Yes, that's right, because it's all BS... :rolleyes:

Now here's an idea for you which *may* work. Round my way we have a take-away chicken shop called Marston's. They do hot freshly cooked chicken in just about every combo you can imagine. That is not something you'll find at Gregg's (nor pretty much anywhere else for that matter). This place does that much business that they can bring Leeds Road to a complete standstill in the evenings with punters blocking up the road with their cars trying to get in to the place. It's only a little !!!!-pot place with no other real shops near it for miles except the odd newsagents and yet they have people queueing out of the door to buy their stuff.


Another good idea I saw - and I've mentioned it here before (think I briefly discussed the merits with fc123 or LIR, can't remember) - is a hot evening meal style take-away. There is one such place in Weston-super-Mare called Carvery Fayre (iirc), it's on the corner at the entrance to the coach park. Basically they do evening meal style food in the form of take-away and you choose what you want and they make it up into polystyrene trays for you. For example, a hot decent size beef & yorkshire puddings meal with a choice of 2 vegs, some roasties and gravy will cost you around £4.50. When you consider that your average size grease-in-a-box take-away pizza would cost you the same then I think it's pretty good value for a hot healthy and tasty meal. Like the chicken place, when I was there people were queued out of the door and it wasn't surprising really as the food was superb.

In fact I could just eat a nice meal from there now . Pity that it's half 3 in the morning and I'm about 200 miles away . Will have to make do with raiding the fridge instead .

R

Hey, thanks for those ideas. The hot meal one I thought of some years ago but as ever freinds / family said there would be no demand.

FRANCHISES - I'm very wary as they can be a non starter. Having said that some client's had me arrange thier commerical finance to aquire amongst others, McDonalds and Subway, and both haev done well. The McDonalds chap is making over £250,000 pa net profit out of one shop. He however agrees with you and thinks most franchises are rubbish. KFC he rates as the food sits for hours so there is little waste, but you need £1m in raw cash in your account to even get an interview.

In some regards a franchise is appealing, in that a decent one has gone through a long learning process to distil the 'perfect model'.

My inclanation is to do my own thang though. I could easily do a pasty shop (again plus other foods) and would simply visit lots of good ones to glean best practice.

I want a day time biz which the pasty thing lends itself to. I don't want to be serving evening meals!

Cheers for your extensive post:T

PasturesNew

Conrad wrote: »

...

You're ASD and I claim my £5

Conrad

dopester wrote: »

I'll stick to targeting the higher end thanks, where I just need to sell a few items a year, at a much higher margin, (as there remains very wealthy people about even in depressions) - to make a fair living for the year.

What items?:o I thought about solar panels, yes even in grey Britain.

Certainly the 2 bakers in the town are rammed from morning until about 3pm. Hundreds of customers per day, 6 days per week. I reckon after all costs inc one offs and annual only costs, you could make about £2000 per week before Tax.

2 of them would suit me fine.

I will sit and count footfall going in before I committed though.

Restaurants and cafes are far more risky as people will linger and you might only make a quid or two a (a grey lingering over a cuppa for 2 hours for example) from each plus your staff costs are high.

dopester

Have you got any idea whatsoever of regulations involved when you have preparing / selling food to the general public?

I don't. Wouldn't surprise me if you have to have health/ clean inspections and stuff from local government.

What about insurance. I know a story where a pregnant women fell ill, lost it, and blamed it on food-poisoning. After initially pointing blame at one restaurant, the blame then got switched somehow to another.. and their insurers paid up a mighty sum in the end.

Anyway.. I'll leave you with your dreams of competing for an income at the lower end of the market at ever tighter margins, with fierce competition.