By Maureen Mcgrain from BizJournals
Paresh Patel started his vending business with one pop machine to help pay for his college education.
Fifteen years later, Portland, Ore.-based Courtesy Vending LLC is a growing $3 million business with 20 employees and more than 1,100 machines in the Portland area. Patel says the company, which grew 10 percent last year, has the potential to someday be a $100 million business.
That's ambitious, but the entrepreneurial Patel - Oregon's Small Business Administration Small Business Person of the Year in 2005 - may have the chops to do it.
.......
Yet as the company grew, Patel's control lessened. Drivers picked up the money and regulated machines' inventory.
"That's when I decided I had to do things to keep growing," Patel said.
In 2001, he invested $60,000 in handheld computers for his drivers to track sales and product. The data proved revealing: Drivers were putting what they liked in machines, with little variation.
Patel started varying products, which led to an uptick in sales. Courtesy Vending earns revenue strictly through machine sales; customers supply only space and power.
The computer data also allowed Patel to track sales by units per machine - the point of the actual sale - rather than unit per warehouse, as Courtesy had been doing. He auto-mated warehouse operations as well.
With those controls in place, Patel turned his attention to another problem, security. He invested more than $150,000 in electronic locks for all his vending machines to replace the easily picked external locks. Electronic keys are personalized - one employee's key allows access to specific machines at specific times.
....
read the full story at http://wichita.bizjournals.com/SBA2007/entrepreneur_uses_high_tech_tools.html
No comments:
Post a Comment