by Abco | Feb 18, 2014 | Start A Vending Machine Business, Vending Business Show, Vending News
Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros Episode Transcript:
Tom: Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros is a webinar coming up February 25th, and joining me to talk about it is Larry Tanner, who is a vending business consultant with Service Group, International. So, Larry, what’s this webinar gonna be about?
Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros Larry Tanner: Well, Tom, our goal in this webinar is to help you, or help our audience, to become better sales people in regards to vending, going out and getting new accounts, generating new accounts, and becoming more profitable.
Tom: Okay, and who’s gonna get the most from it? Who’s this webinar designed for?
Larry Tanner: This webinar is really designed for an owner/operator, but it could be designed for a sales manager as well. It’s designed for a guy that needs to go out and generate some accounts, wants to get profitable accounts, wants to learn a couple of new techniques, or maybe, quite a few new techniques, on how to generate leads, how to get good prospects, and how to actually close deals. So, that’s who’s gonna get the most out of it.
Tom: Okay, and what’s your background in the vending industry?
Larry Tanner: I’ve been in the vending business for about 35 years. I owned my own vending company for over 15, finished up with in excess of 500 thousand dollars a year in sales, and in three route guys, and we had about 110 or so accounts, 350 machines. Built that from the ground up, from zero. So, that’s my experience in the vending industry.
Tom: Okay, and who else is gonna be on the webinar?
Larry Tanner: We’re gonna have two other guests; Dan Jordan, who is a professional sales guy. He owns a staffing company right now, but he has been selling for almost all of his professional career. He does sales consulting as well, and we’re also gonna have Joe Nichols, president of A and M Equipment. And Joe is a very seasoned vending professional. He has been in the business for 40 plus years. Grew up in the business, basically, has run all aspects, and currently sells vending equipment.
Tom: Thanks, Larry. You can learn more about the webinar in Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros, at amequipmentsales.com. And there should be a link to the registration page somewhere on this, around this video, either below it or somewhere around it. We’ve got room for a hundred people.
by Abco | Jan 28, 2014 | Start A Vending Machine Business, Vending Business Show
Servicing New Vending Accounts Part Two An interview with Larry Towner
In the last video Larry discussed getting product from your vehicle into the facility at the best time of day.
In this video Larry talks about Servicing New Vending Accounts Part Two loading your vending machines efficiently because your time is your money. The more stops you can make, the more money you make.
Efficiency is key.
Setup a system, one example is a pic list and a box to carry product in from your vehicle. Another system might use a pre-filled kit.
When loading bins, load them in the same order as the machine from top to bottom. When you are in front of the machine, the last thing you want is to go from tray to tray in a random order.
Critical info to be successful in the vending business.
In the next video, Larry discusses how to handle the money.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom Shivers: Servicing New Vending Accounts Part Two I’m Tom with the Vending business show here again with Larry Towner, who is a vending business consultant and we’ve talking about how to get started in the vending business and specifically what to do after you land account so and the last time we ended by talking about how do you get the product into the machine and how can you be efficient in that area so thanks for being here, Larry, and let’s continue the discussion.
Larry Towner: Sounds like a plan. When we left off in the last show, we were working on, actually we had the product from your vehicle into your facility at what we consider to be a good time, and you can watch the previous show to figure out what we were talking about there. Now we’re actually gonna talk about loading your machines and when I ran my businesses, I was very heavily involved in efficiencies in making sure that my employees and myself worked at maximum efficiency because, after all, your time is your money and the more that an employee and I always considered myself an employee could get done, the more stops I could get done and the more they could make.
Larry Towner: And now, I don’t know too many people that are in the vending business to not make money. What do you think Tom? Do you know anybody in the vending business that just likes to have a good time and go fill vending machines?
Tom Shivers: They’re probably out there but I don’t many of ’em.
Larry Towner: Right. So efficiency becomes key in filling out your vending machines. Now, when we set ourselves up for the vending business, we set ourselves up with a system and our system included, we used boxes that, when we originally started and I’ll tell you why this is important when we originally started, we used to do a pick list at every stop. We used to walk into the account, go through every machine and go to the levels of inventory that we had pre-determined, but we would re-stock to those levels and we would actually write down what we needed on a piece of paper, walk back out to the truck, pull those products and come back in and fill the machines.
Larry Towner: Towards the end of my business, we started carrying a pre-filled kit into the accounts so we had a bits and pieces. We had enough product to fill up a whole machine if it was empty. We carried those in bins and all of those bins came in at once. Your choice of doing this is your choice. You can do it one way or the other. It doesn’t matter. The premise is exactly the same. When we would load our bins, they were loaded in the same order as our machine so that all the chips that were on the top row were in one box. Same thing on all the rows of your snack machines, that how we loaded our boxes.
Larry Towner: If you go and you do a pick list, you go back out to the truck and pick the things, you pick them in order and you do that for a reason. When you get to the front of the machine, the last thing that you wanna do is start going from tray to tray, meaning you don’t wanna pull the top tray out, put one product up there, then have to go three trays down and then go back to the second tray. Do you see where I’m going with that, Tom?
Tom Shivers: Yep.
Larry Towner: You wanna go to the top tray and you wanna fill every slot on that top tray that you need to, right? That takes organization folks. You gotta think about it a little bit before hand. So, you get yourself in an organized system. Either you do a pick list or you do it in boxes. When we went to the end, we started doing it by boxes ’cause we just re-stocked the boxes at the end of every stop actually, they took ’em back. So we walk in and we had the things for the top shelf that we needed. We pulled the top shelf down, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Shelf goes in. Box goes down. Next box comes up, bing, bing, bing. Same thing on a pick list.
Larry Towner: If you do a pick list, you go in, you write down I need five of these, five of that, five of this, you put ’em into the box that you’re gonna draw out of five of these, five of this, five of that, and then they come out exactly the reversed order. Critical information if you wanna be successful in the vending business. You can go back and forth and do it the way I described. You’re gonna spend five times as much time servicing an account as you will if you put it into an organization and that’s just one of the success tips. One of the other great success tips is along with that, how you handle the money. You know, we never took the money out until the very last.
Tom Shivers: I was headed out the door. Let’s reserve that for the next video here in the series and so we’ll be talking about how to handle the money next, is that right?
Larry Towner: Well that and also how to handle a drink machine. We haven’t gotten there yet either so we’ve still got more. We’re on snack machines. We’ll do drink machines and money handling in the next show.
Tom Shivers: All right. You’ve been watching Servicing New Vending Accounts Part Two at the vending business show. A publication of A&M Equipment Sales.
Check out our new vending machines Finding New Accounts and Placing Vending Machines
by Abco | Dec 17, 2013 | Start A Vending Machine Business, Vending Business Show
Finding Profitable Vending Locations An interview with Larry Towner of Service Group International
Finding Profitable Vending Locations? How do I get more vending accounts?
Finding Profitable Vending Locations is based on a number of things. Are your current accounts close together or spread out? Think about geography. What’s in the neighborhood? Look for at least 20 people in a location, for example look at the number of cars in the parking lot.
How do you get to the decision maker at that location?
Rather than talk to the secretary, go around to the back or to someone who works there to learn about the status of their vending and how happy they are with it.
Tip: Make a sales call a day.to finding profitable vending locations
When you talk to an employee at a potential location, this is market research.
A: Do you have vending?
B: Are you happy with it?
These two questions will tell you everything you need to know when prospecting.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom: I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show and here again with Larry Towner who is a vending business consultant and has been in the vending business for a number of years and sold the share of his company in 2012. So glad to have you here Larry. Today, we’re talking about finding profitable vending locations. Why don’t we do a little role play, say I’m new to the vending business and I’ve got one vending account and I want more, how do I get more of vending accounts?
Larry Towner: Well, that’s a great question. This is a question I get asked an awful lot is how do I get more vending accounts. So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. First, your account, is it close to where you drive all the time? Is that something, when you go there, how many times you go there a week? Tell me that first.
Tom: Well, I go there probably four times a week and it’s full of people during the evening hours, mainly.
Larry Towner: Mostly during the evening hours. Okay, great. So you’re there, usually you service it during the day because you don’t want to be there when people are there, I’m assuming that’s correct. Is that correct?
Tom: That’s right.
Larry Towner: Okay. All right. So you’re looking for something during the day. You’ve got a rough idea of how many people are there and I don’t need specifics, but you’ve got this idea and you think in your head and you know this account because you’ve probably had it for some period of time. So the big question is, is do you want another account like that or do you want something that’s close by? These are the questions you need to ask yourself and a lot of it just depends on do you want to spend your time closer? Do you want to drive distance to get say bigger accounts? Just for example, let’s go over it. Let’s just go over the scenario that you want to stay close.
Larry Towner: The first thing that I always did is first off, let’s understand that this is called selling, right? Now, nobody likes to sell, but everybody needs to know how to sell. Selling in the vending industry is not as difficult as people want to think. Selling in the vending industry is actually pretty easy, particularly if you have just one satisfied customer, which obviously if you have the one account, you’re maintaining it, you’ve got a satisfied customer. So it kind goes this way. The first thing that I always do, this would be very, very basic prospecting. I get into the vehicle or I walk, it doesn’t really matter, but I drive around and see what’s around the neighborhood, what’s within a mile, right?
Larry Towner: If you go in a circle around the place and if you’re in any kind of an urban area, which perhaps you’re not, you might have to expand your search out a little bit. But I drive around and I look for potential candidates. For me, if I’m looking for a vending account, I want 20 employees in there all the time, or at least 20 people there during an eight hour work shift, for my personal model that worked for us for years, that’s a very big base minimum number. How do you determine if there’s 20? Well, you can tell an awful lot by the size of the building, the size of the parking lot, number of cars in the parking lot is actually a really good way to kind of figure out how many people are actually in that facility.
Larry Towner: So you go and you find there’s a place that’s got 50 cars in the parking lot. All right, that’s somebody that I think I’m going to go in and talk to. Now what do you have to do? Well, what do you think you have to do, Tom?
Tom: You got to get to the decision maker somehow and convince them that you’ve got a very good thing for his business.
Larry Towner: That’s exactly what you have to do. How do you go about doing that? How would you go about doing it?
Tom: Well, I would want to show, I mean, I’d want to not go in there with any assumptions except that I can contact, talk to the person who’s at the top if possible, the manager of the location.
Larry Towner: Well, that’s correct and that’s what we all would want to do. The tendency, at least in my sales experience in all the years I’ve been selling, is you tend to go in the front door and talk to the secretary. What’s the secretary’s job?
Tom: To keep you out.
Larry Towner: To keep you out, that’s correct. You’ve done this before. I can tell. So for me, what I do is I figure out, I usually go around to the back. I usually go to a loading dock or something like that and I try to just find somebody that works there and I don’t bother him because you don’t want to bother them. But I go in and I find somebody that works there and I asked him a couple of questions. The first question I always ask is, I don’t assume anything, the first question is do you have vending? You might laugh at that, but you’d be surprised, there are places out there that they have a big facility and don’t have vending.
Larry Towner: The next question is of course is if you do have vending, it’s like, “Hey, tell me, I run a vending business, are you guys happy with who you have?” Now that guy back there, he’s got no skin in the game. He’s going to tell you the way it is. “Ah, this or that or whatever.” He’s going to tell you everything you need to know nine out of 10 times, at least that’s been my experience. He’s going to tell you whether they’re, “Yeah, they do a really good job. It’s this XYZ Company and the guys here and the machines work.” He’s going to tell you everything you need, that you need to know about how it’s going as a general rule because people will talk about it. Particularly if he uses it a lot.
Tom: Right. So you bring up an interesting point there, Larry and that is it sounds like you’re not making phone calls to get this information.
Larry Towner: Well, you can go and make … You can do telemarketing if you want to call it that. You can make your phone calls and solicit the information. It’s just that if you’re going to go on what I call a geographic base, which means you want to be within a certain radius around your existing accounts, if you want to do it that way, you’re almost better just to do it by driving because sometimes you’re in industrial parks or sometimes … One of the things I tell everybody, this is a success tip for vending professionals, is make a sales call a day, make one sales call a day and that just means stop in somewhere on your route, stop into one of the businesses you don’t have as an account. You drive by hundreds of accounts every single day. I mean, just to and from, you drive by probably 10 accounts going to the grocery store every day. You just don’t realize they’re potential accounts, right?
Larry Towner: There are a lot of venting accounts out there. You just have to know which ones really work. So anyway, so yeah, so I mean I talk to … I do it by the old fashioned cold calling, if you want to call it that or in this case, this is kind of market research. When you get in and you talk to an employee, you’ll find out what … Are they happy? What do they like? You want to listen to what they have to say because essentially they’re the ones that pay your paychecks. Now at the same time, I’ve had guys come in, I’ve walked in and talked to an employee and the guy says, “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here. This guy is terrible and the foods’ old and it’s molding and and it’s this. Come on with me.” I got dragged into a president’s office one day by the dock manager and he said, “You need to talk to this guy.” Well, we closed that account that day. So this is, while it sounds cumbersome, it works. It really does work. You find an employee.
Larry Towner: You can do the same thing for prospecting. You can do it at your local church or you can do it … People you know. You ask everybody you know, “Do you have vending A? Do you have vending B? Are you happy with them?” There’s a million ways to prospect. We could do hours on this topic, hours and hours and hours. But like I say, if you’re going to do a geographic center in your planning, you want to do it around the center, then you do it that way. If you want to do the other kind where you want to do a size comparison, then you get on the internet. You get on the phone, you do your research. You say, “I want to find places with 200 employees.” The number of places with 200 employees is a much more limited thing you have. You can do the same techniques, but it’s just a little … It takes a little bit more time and you’re going to have to actually identify those prospects before you go in. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not.
Tom: All right, well thanks Larry. Tell us about what you do.
Larry Towner: Well, we do consulting for vending industries. We do big companies, small companies. We specialize in startups. If you need help, give us a call or actually send us an email. It’s [email protected]. Again, [email protected].
Tom: Oh, you mean … Go ahead, do it again.
Larry Towner: [email protected]. That’s what I meant to say.
Tom: You’ve been watching Finding Profitable Vending Locations at the Vending Business Show, a publication of A & M Equipment Sales.
Vending machines for Finding Profitable Vending locations check out the Automatic Products 113 Snack Machine
by Abco | Dec 3, 2013 | Start A Vending Machine Business, Vending Business Show
How the Vending Business Works with An interview with Larry Towner, vending business consultant
How the Vending Business Works is well first thing that’s most important in any business venture is do a little planning. The second thing is before you go out and buy equipment, how about have a place to put it – go get an account first.
What are some of the better accounts for vending today?
I would look for businesses that are growing. Businesses that supply the construction industry in the current economic environment, but it depends on what you want to do – your goals.
When you land an account, what’s next?
Now it’s time to go buy the equipment and to keep expenses low I would go for refurbished equipment from a quality supplier.
After you buy your equipment, then what?
Have someone who knows what they are doing move your equipment because there are lots of tricks in moving vending machines through doors, etc. Then you’ll need to setup the equipment.
In a future video we’ll be covering what products to include in your vending machines that really sell.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTS:
Tom: I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show here with Larry Towner who is a vending business consultant. He’s been actually run his own operation in the vending business for quite a while, a couple of decades and recently sold his vending business in 2012. So we’re happy to have him on the show today. Thanks for being here, Larry.
Larry Towner: Oh, I appreciate it, Tom.
Tom: Today we’re talking about how the vending business works. A lot of times, people that are new to the vending business think they have to buy a vending machine first. But, what’s the most important thing to start with,On How the Vending Business Works Larry?
Larry Towner: Well, Tom, I always like to say that the first thing that’s most important in any business venture that you undertake is to do a little bit of planning, number one. The second thing is before you go and buy equipment, how about have a place to put it? When I say that, what I mean is go out and do some sales and actually get an account first.
Tom: Yeah. So, yeah, let’s say, what are some of the good places to find or to locate … What are some of the better places?
Larry Towner: Well, there’s all kinds of places. I mean, you see vending machines out there in the world, you see them everywhere from on street corners into businesses, retail shops. Some vending machines are becoming retail shops. This is kind of where we have to get into a little bit of the planning thing like we were just talking about. You can go into a planning situation, you kind of decide what do you think is going to be best for the for the business and to help you make money. Perhaps the reason you’re actually watching this video is just to find out that kind of information. So we’re here, you and I, we have these discussions on a fairly regular basis to discuss some of these things.
Larry Towner: So when we get into that planning thing, you should sort of develop an idea of what you want to do and then you decide what businesses or what the vending types of locations are going to do to do your best. That’s kind of a roundabout way around your question there, Tom. But in effect it’s the same thing. I can answer what the best locations are for me, but that’s not necessarily what the best locations are for you as one of our potential viewers.
Tom: Well, that’s a good point, Larry. So let’s just say if you were starting a vending business today, where would you … How would you go about finding locations? What would you go for?
Larry Towner: Well look, what would I go for? I’d be looking for areas where there’s growth in business and to that, while that sounds broad, it’s where you’re looking for. There’s less competition and growing businesses and things like that. In business cycle, they come in and out. They go through various different stages of growth. Right now we’re in a somewhat depressed real estate market or at least the construction industry and real estate is off a little bit, but it’s going to, it’s starting to make its motions back. So some of the things that I would be particularly looking for would be into accounts that might supply the construction industry and things like that, in the current, this is 2013 under the current environment. So those might be some things that I would be looking at. A lot of it’s going to depend on what are your particular ideas. Do you want to be in schools? Well, school vending is going to be there for quite some time as long as there’s school. So really depends on what your particular goals and objectives are.
Tom: Okay. Now let’s say you land a placement, you get a deal with the business or organization that wants your vending machines. What’s next?
Larry Towner: Well, you get this business, now you need to actually go out and it sounds like you need to go buy the equipment. Of course there’s probably a thousand choices on equipment. One thing that people need to understand in vending is is that you have to keep your expenses low. So if you’re new to vending, my suggestion is you go for refurbished equipment and you go to a quality supplier, someone that’s been doing refurbished equipment for quite some time. My particular choice is A&M Equipment Sales, which is probably where you’re looking at this video from.
Tom: Okay. So after you’ve gotten your equipment, then what?
Larry Towner: Well, then it actually comes time to actually install the equipment, that be a simple or difficult job just depending on the location. Usually, there are several people in a [inaudible 00:04:55] area or actually anywhere that can actually move equipment for you. I would suggest if you’re starting that you have someone that knows what they’re doing, move equipment, vending machines are heavy. There’s a lot of real tricks and moving vending machines that if you’ve been doing it for unfortunately 30 years, like I have, you know all of the tips and tricks to actually getting them through doors, how to do it without taking them apart and so forth and so on, but I suggest you just hire somebody to do it. There’s plenty of qualified people in any given market that’ll move things for you. You move it in, you’re going to set it up. At that point, it doesn’t walk into that account completely filled and completely working and completely priced out. Now, again, depending on where you purchased your equipment from, some of those issues might be done for you, but you will eventually have to learn how to do those things anyway, so.
Tom: Right. So yeah, I guess, supplying your whatever products fit that particular business, you’ll have to find out what those are and find a way to learn what works in that particular machine, right?
Larry Towner: Well, one of the great things about that, Tom, is I think we’re going to do another video on that in a future installment, aren’t we?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. We will get to that one.
Larry Towner: So say that so that you all come back and take a look, but we’ve got all kinds of tips and tricks that are going to come on to teach you what products you should be considering when you go and put them into a machine because a lot of it, it’s its own topic, but there’s lots of variety and lots of choices. So we’ll do that in another one.
Tom: Okay, great. Tell us a little more about what you do, Larry, and then we’ll sign off.
Larry Towner: Well, we do vending consulting for particularly for startups and also, but for people that are looking to maximize their operations, get the most money out of their operation that they have now and try to help them, give them some consulting services. We’re available at [email protected], if you care to contact us, that’s all one word. [email protected].
Tom: You’ve been watching the Vending Business Show, a publication of A&M Equipment Sales.
Check out our remanufactured Dixie Narco 501E Drink Machine
by Abco | Mar 30, 2012 | Vending Business Show
Vending Efficiency Delivering Product An interview with Larry Towner, vending consultant
In this podcast, Larry discusses: Vending Efficiency Delivering Product
- Plan your route schedule in advance
- Park out of the way and avoid being off the curb if possible: marketing, security, safety
- Inventory of each machine in one box
- famous saying: “Vending is a business of minutes”
- Do a pick list
- Limit trips from truck to machine
- Items to keep in your pocket
- Drive in a line to limit windshield time
- Plan well for a smooth and efficient route
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom Shivers: I’m Tom Shivers with the Vending Business Show here with Larry Towner who is a vending business consultant. Larry sold the majority share of his vending business a few years ago. Thanks for coming back, Larry.
Larry Towner: Good to be back, Tom.
Tom Shivers: Our topic Vending Efficiency Delivering Product The last time we talked, you had a lot of interesting things to say about efficiency and specifically you’re talking … told us a lot about loading the truck effectively so that you can have a smooth flow of your … of the products from the truck right into the machine. What are we gonna cover today?
Larry Towner: Well, I think today, Tom, what we’ll talk about is now that we’ve got the truck loaded and we’ve got it ordered in a way that makes sense, basically the way you have your machines laid out, let’s talk about getting out to the machines and getting out to the accounts.
Tom Shivers: Okay.
Larry Towner: Like I say, you’ve got your truck loaded. You’re ready and you’re rearing to go. Generally, just as a course of action, I usually started my day the night before. What I would do is … Well, actually, I started a week before, but I would have my route schedule printed out on a weekly calendar program. I used a office shelf calendar program that you can get at any store, but that allows you to do repeating schedules where you can do things weeks and weeks and weeks in advance. The keys here are is when you’re scheduling your time, you do it the night before so you have an idea. One thing that a lot of people don’t do, they don’t plan around traffic. Tom, you live here in metro Atlanta like I do. Is traffic a factor here?
Tom Shivers: Just a little bit.
Larry Towner: A little bit, yeah. We, in the vending business, don’t get paid to sit in front of the windshield of the truck. We get paid to sit in front of the glass of the machine and actually fill that machine up. One of the things that I always did, and just depending on the days, I would go and look on … look at my schedule and say, “Where do I need to be during the traffic time?” [inaudible 00:02:19] and I always used both traffic times, both morning and afternoon. I would be making sure that I had a series of stops that were all very, very close together during those traffic times.
Larry Towner: Generally vending people start very early in the morning. They start 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM in the morning. By the time the main traffic time rolls around, you are pretty much … you should be in a stop if you’re doing everything right. Of course, here in metro Atlanta as you know, you can get stuck in traffic anytime of the day, anytime of the night. It’s just how it goes being a major city. Anyway, you start the night before you go and you lay out your route and where you wanna go and when you think you wanna be there. You give yourself an approximate amount of time as far as your sales and your dollar [inaudible 00:03:01] per your accounts. That’s the first place where you start.
Larry Towner: When you get into the accounts, there’s a couple of techniques … Or, you’re heading into the accounts. You pull up into the driveway. There’s a few things that I used as a rule of thumb. One is I’m very marketing oriented and also … but also safety and security conscious, too. I would be very careful. I usually parked on the loading docks and I wanted to make sure that we were out of the way. We didn’t wanna be an eyesore to anyone and we didn’t wanna have to work off a curb if we could help it. You end up working off a curb a lot, but you try not to work off the curbs where you’re out in the plain view of everyone, at least that’s my opinion. I always liked to kind of stay back and out of the way.
Larry Towner: Then again, I don’t like to be in dark corners either for security purposes where there somebody might come and accost you because the minute they know you’re in the vending business, they know you’ve got cash and you become an easy target. Try to stay like, if you’re working at night, well-lit areas and things like that. You get out of your truck. Now, there’s several different ways to do it in the vending business. One way … The way that I currently do it is I have boxes inside the truck. Inside each box I carry a whole inventory of a machine, rolls into the account with me. I have a set … preset level of inventory that’s in each box and it’s arranged just the same way as the machines are. I start top shelf down and work my way down through the machine using my boxes.
Larry Towner: You think this is kinda silly, but the amount of time that you spend walking back and forth between your truck and your … the machines can add up to considerable time. In past shows, we talked about how the vending business is a business of minutes. It’s all about how many minutes. If you can cut five to ten minutes out of each stop, you can add one to two stops per day, which is giving you an extra impact on your bottom line of your business.
Larry Towner: We roll in to our stops with basically a full amount of snack on the thing and then we do a pick list on the drinks. You can roll in and do a pick list on your accounts if you want. I do that on some of the more difficult locations that I have. If I have to go up some stairs and I don’t have an elevator access or something like that, I might go in and make a pick list. A pick list just is you go into the machine and you pick out the particular items you need as per the shelf and you write them down in a card you brought. You pull them out. You put them into a box and you just carry one box in instead of carrying in nine boxes, which is what I currently take in with me every time.
Larry Towner: If I have a good, easy access, I roll the whole thing in. I make one trip into the machine. I don’t have to make multiple trips in and out in and out and in and out. Generally we try … Right now we limit our trips in and out to two. We can’t carry the whole amount of product with drinks and snacks in our hand truck all at once. We usually do too much volume to do that. That’s should be your goal that you have that much volume. Do you get an idea of what I’m talking about, Tom?
Tom Shivers: Yeah. It sounds like you wanna cut off those minutes and find a way to get things in and out quickly.
Larry Towner: Right. Right. That’s really the key. You also, when you make your lists, make sure you can read your lists so that you know. When you come out to get your drinks, don’t guess. Make sure you know exactly what you need. Again, to make one extra trip back out to the truck takes anywhere from two to five minutes just depending on the stop, but two to five minutes adds up at the end of the day. That’s what we do. We also walk in with our money bags.
Larry Towner: We walk in … I keep in my pocket, you’re gonna think this is funny, but I keep in my pocket, I carry two pens, a small screwdriver, a magic marker, and I also carry a three by five pack … I don’t use three by five cards, but they’re the three by five spiral ring notebooks is what I use now. I used to use three by five cards. They got a little pricey. I keep those in my pocket. I always have something to write with. I always have something to do a small minor repair and or open a box, which is what that little screwdriver is for. If I need to mark on something, I always have a marker. Don’t think it means that much, wait til you forget and you have to run out to the truck to get a small screwdriver to tighten something up or to cut something.
Tom Shivers: How ’bout a stopwatch?
Larry Towner: We’ve … We’re not UPS yet. If you’ve ever talked to … When you get out there, talk to a UPS driver. They’ll tell you, they’re measured by the minute with a watch, too. It is something that if you wanna do it, actually, we used to do a little bit. We tried. We’d time ourself and see how long it’d take us to get in and out. We would strive to do better and better on a daily basis.
Larry Towner: The key, again, it starts at night though. You wanna make sure you have all the prior … It starts the day before. You want all that product on the truck and you wanna make sure you have enough. You wanna make sure you get your boxes full and get your route scheduled because it’s the same issue if you’re driving … you don’t wanna drive back and forth and back and forth. You wanna drive in a line. We generally work our route lines … or routes in circles, where you start at one place, you go out, you loop around, and you end up back at home. We try to limit the amount of windshield time between stops because, again, we don’t get paid to drive. We get paid to fill.
Larry Towner: That’s really, really critical. All it takes is good planning. I think in a previous show we had talked about scheduling as far as your … how …what’s your interval between stops are as far as weeks go or months or days. It just depends on the size of the account. Again, you have to integrate all this information together so that you’re nice and smooth and efficient. Theoretically, on a great day, you’re gonna spend 80% of your time filling machines and 20% of your time driving, if you’ve really got everything clicking and doing really well. That’s where you’ll be.
Larry Towner: That’s some of the tips is basically use a pre fold type system. If you get farther on and you have better resources, there’s all kinds of technological things that stream real time data back into your handhelds or into your iPhones and stuff like that. For most guys starting out, you can’t afford that technology. It’s very, very expensive. It works great for very, very large companies, but for small guys it’s just a little pricey.
Tom Shivers: Good stuff, Larry. Thanks for the tips. Tell us a little about your business and what you do.
Larry Towner: Well, we do vending consulting. We specialize primarily in startup type operations and helping guys get out there and get efficient so that they can start to make some money in this business because, believe it or not, just because you buy it for a quarter and sell it for 50 cents, you can’t necessarily make money on that. We help people get efficient so that they can start earning money faster.
Tom Shivers: How can people contact you?
Larry Towner: Best way to get ahold of us is send us an email. It’s [email protected].
Tom Shivers: You’ve been listening to Vending Efficiency Delivering Product at the Vending Business Show, a publication of A&M Equipment Sales. More Blogs of the Vending Business Show Vending Efficiency Operating Procedures
