Growing your unattended retail operation takes time and effort. However, with the right focus, you can scale your business and find unparalleled success. Hear Tim Ray of Healthy Generation Vending in Houston share how they were able to scale their business into a diverse, successful, and exponentially growing player in the unattended retail industry. Here are Tim Ray’s 6 Ways to Grow Your Vending Business
When did you decide it was time to do more than just vending?
“Definitely once micro markets started hitting the scene, I was kind of against them at the beginning just because of theft and other technology. I wanted to hop in just because everyone else was doing it, and you just had to keep it, you know you had to get them out there just to be able to keep up with the demand. What the customers were asking for, we kept on hearing Micro Market, I want a micro market. So it was really the beginning, whenever Micro Markets started coming out.”
When it comes to growing your business, how important is it to diversify your business lines?
“I would say huge, I mean with us being positioned out in Houston the oil business is something we early recognized that you have to diversify. You can’t be too much in the oil industry, you can’t be too much in education or the hospitals or transportation. So you know it’s actually something within Parlevel that I use a lot is looking at our industries that we are in and making sure that we don’t get too heavy on the oil industry, or any particular industry in general.”
How does choosing the right technology help your company grow?
“I would say choosing the right technology it’s huge, you know you can take one route and you can multiply to do it over and over and I would say the more the partner, the person that is going to help you achieve that is an important factor. So I would say that as much as technology, it’s really the partner that you choose that is more important.”
How does your choosing the right personnel help your company grow?
“I mean people are everything, I think putting rockstars around you, finding people that can do everything better than you can do is part of scaling and growing. I mean that’s the whole point, putting a team, a place and a process together. So I think it’s very important.”
You’re going through an acquisition right now – how instrumental is that to growth?
“Acquisitions for me are huge, they make growing quicker. Instead of slowly organically growing, you know adding accounts monthly, you just wake up with 25-30 accounts. You know 30 new customers, everything you got to serve. So it’s something in our business plan to continue to pursue different acquisitions but it’s a huge part that we are going through right now.”
How beneficial has a VMS been for your company?
“For me the VMS is huge because I do everything from looking at reports to doing my sales tax, to paying commissions, to merchandising accounts, to looking at what account is performing better than other accounts. To the warehouse aspect to managing products there. I would say it’s something that we run the whole entire company by. The VMS is huge, we couldn’t do anything without it. It touches almost every aspect of our company.”
Request Information on Parlevel
[gravityform id=”1″ title=”false” description=”false”]
