Despite having the drive and customer demand to grow the wholesale side of This is Frankies – NSW bakery owner Cody Morrison-Thompson was overwhelmed and turning customers away.
“I would turn people away just at the thought of setting up their account and having to do invoicing on top of it. If they were a smaller client it was just not worth it. I would feel horrible because I'd always wanted to jump in and supply those people, many I already had relationships with. It was just such a terrible feeling to be like, ‘I just can't take you on because it's more bookwork, it's more invoicing that I have to chase up’.”
Cody says he was being held back from expanding primarily a retail bakery and cafe into wholesale because his systems just couldn’t cope.
“It was overwhelming, I felt like I would rather just stick with retail customers because the wholesale was just more of a hassle and not the benefit that wholesale is meant to be.”
Cody was buried in paperwork and with ordering and production tallies kept in his head, he had very little time to recharge and plan his next move.
Thankfully things took a turn when he started using Upstock to buy beans from Sixpence Coffee. He found Upstock so easy to use as their customer that he asked Sixpence to give him 30 minutes of their time to run through how it works for suppliers.
It was the perfect fit and within days he and his customers were set up on Upstock.
“Now I send everything from Upstock. I know customers are going to get their invoices. I know everything's going to be sent and it tracks the payments for me. So I've taken on a lot more wholesale customers because I don't have to do any of the bookwork. Before, even on my days off, I’d just be sitting on my phone replying to texts about who's ordering what and when they need it. Now it's all in Upstock and the team can see what needs to be done.”
With Upstock now taking care of business, the expansion of Frankie's wholesale side is in full swing. They are opening a second retail site soon and will have the capacity to increase wholesale production six-fold.
“This has given us massive growth opportunities. Now when I get a new wholesale customer, Upstock just creates everything for me. Within a day they start trading.”
More from our chat with This is Frankies owner, Cody Morrison-Thompson.
What’s your favourite Upstock feature?
Well, the whole thing! But if I had to choose, every single day I use the production tallies, even if it's a basic day. Before Upstock I would just calculate it in my head. Which was fine when I was doing it, but there were a lot of double-ups and miscommunications about what had already been baked. I swear sometimes it would take 20 minutes to go through and write down and know everything everyone needed. To change from that to now literally pressing two buttons and you have a production report for that day, completely broken down to every item you need – it’s so good.
How has managing ordering with Upstock reduced stress for you and your team?
The team thinks it's great because they can just jump on and see what’s needed for the next day without having to call me and check. To be honest, it's such a relief for me. Before, even on my days off, I’d just be sitting on my phone replying to texts about who's ordering what and when they need it. Now it's all in Upstock and everyone can see what needs to be done and I don't have to worry about that. It's probably a relief for the team as well because they know that they don't have to harass me when I'm not there. They can just jump on and see for themselves.
Now that you’ve got your ordering in order you're able to scale up your wholesale side. How do you see Upstock helping with your expansion to a second site?
We're building a purpose-built production space. We're setting it up as a capacity to be doing six times what we’ll be doing at first – so we'll be able to have massive growth opportunities compared to what we're limited to here and it's going to be a really cool space. We're going to have a display room so customers can see into the production space and see everyone making things. To be able to actually show people how much we make and how much we put into our product is such an important part of building the new space. Upstock means we can grow without getting overwhelmed with bookwork and I can see the stock transfer feature will be really useful when we have more than one site.
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