#11 Twelve Month Update

When I first had the idea to write a blog about our growth journey, it was easy. I worked alone, had a tiny business, some time on my hands and an exciting future to plan and look forward to. Now that we've made a positive start along the journey there's suddenly no time for blogging. One of the rules to effective blogging is to be consistent - so the good news at least is I've been consistent in my inconsistency!

So where are we up to? Lets have a little update. On the 4^th August it’ll be a year since we moved the business into Marple Golf Club and took on all their catering, whilst continuing to run our frozen meals business and our own catering operation. It’s been a learning curve for sure but we’ve settled in to a pretty good routine now and things are working well.

Turnover has increased significantly in the last 12 months (as you’d expect), although profit has been minimal as a result of a) having a whole extra human to pay, and b) having to build up stock to much higher levels than before. And that’s all perfectly OK.

What’s been interesting to see is how the business has evolved in the last 12 months. What started as a home based frozen meals business in 2019, selling almost exclusively online direct to consumers, has become an in-house catering business at a golf club, doing a few bits of outside catering, with a small frozen meals business on the side (which is now 50% wholesale and 50% direct to consumer). The golf club takes a lot of our time and attention and honestly the frozen meals business has suffered a little as a result. The positive here is that we know there is plenty of business out there to go for, and we’re going for it.

One of the things we’ve done is enter our best selling Butter Chicken Curry in to the Great Taste Awards this year. We know it’s a good curry – we get told it is regularly – but whether a panel of judges in the world’s largest food and drink award scheme agree is a different matter. Any award would be amazing and is supposed to boost your sales significantly, but we're hoping for a 2 star silver award at least. We'll see, but the results are out on the 29^th July so we’ll definitely be sharing them with you all, probably on social media.

On that note Dan (t’other Dan, not the OG Dan) has been charged with keeping our social media presence in good order, and apart from asking me to do the Macarena last week (which was at worst cringeworthy, but at best amusing) he’s doing a grand job. 5000 people have watched that silliness, and 2500 people even watched me clean the inside of the walk-in fridge a few weeks ago. Who knew…. What we do know is that we pick up occasional orders as a result of our social media activity so it isn't entirely futile. Next up on the social media radar is TikTok. Apparently TikTok live shopping is becoming quite a thing – if you remember QVC back in the day it sounds similar – so we’re going to have a nosey at that and see what it’s all about. But I think the idea of live streaming from the kitchen so potential customers can see us cooking the food they could be buying might be quite compelling. There are certainly some people making some attention grabbing sums from it so we’d be daft not to take a look.

Next Door Neil continues to do deliveries to our wholesaler customers for us – now ably assisted by his fabulous wife Next Door Lou. And Smithy keeps chipping away with some sales activity for us. He’s currently got a bee in his bonnet about pork pies so we’ll see what happens there.

Seeing as you're here it would be remis of me not to promote what we do, so if you’re in the market for some chef made frozen ready meals and pies head to cheshirefood.co.uk/shop

Or if you’re looking for a venue for a special event then Marple Golf Club has a great space for up to 120 guests with wonderful views down the 18^th fairway across Manchester and beyond. Drop me a message at info@cheshirefood.co.uk

Or maybe you’re hosting a party at another venue and need caterers. We can help! Again message us at info@cheshirefood.co.uk

Thanks for reading! See you next time.

Dan