Visitors to Cornwall have had their thirst slated for nearly
Page 44
Page 45
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
a century by drinks distributor Jolly's. Nicky Clarke reports on the company that puts the fizz into the West Country.
Rumour has it that the summer of 1896 in Carharrack, near Redruth in Cornwall, was a scorcher. So hot that cool, refreshing soft drinks were in much demand and in short supply. Determined to quench his and his family's thirst, villager John Jolly set about making lemonade in his kitchen which he then sold from his horse and cart to his friends around the village. So started a business that is still fizzing today.
If you're one of the thousands of holiday makers who head for the West Country every year to sample Cornish pasties or stargazey pie you're probably also a Jolly's Drinks Group customer sipping one of the 2,500 drinks products it has bought from other manufacturers and sold on. The company stopped making drinks itself 18 years ago because the seasonality of the business meant machinery was idle for 70%, of the time during winter. So it now distributes drinks to 3,500 retail outlets from corner and fish and chip shops to pubs, clubs, hotels and restaurants from Land's End to Weston-super-Mare and across to Cheddar, Yeovil and Lyme Regis in Dorset.
Jolly's Drinks' core business remains soft drinks—the biggest seller inevitably being Coca-Cola—but it also distributes beers and wines. The company is still owned by the Jolly family with managing director Nigel owning 80°) of the shares and brother Robert owning
cc w the rest. The business was handed down from m if thirsty John to his grandson Denzil, Nigel and '-' Robert's father. cc
1±' When Nigel left school at 15 he was handed 0an invoice book and a list of customers and " • told to go to work. "I started driving an
E FG900, an old Leyland lorry and at 17 pro • gressed to a nine-tonne lorry and was told by ,..;' father: 'If you do a good job you can have a ;,. new lorry.' Sadly he died when I was 23." The family-run business has Robert managing the Wellington depot in Somerset, where sister Alison Langston-Bishop works in telesales. Another sister, Teresa Trewhella, runs the family-owned pub in Lanner near Redruth. Nigel's children Tracy, David and Kevin also work in the business, "I hope they all have a future in the business. It's what I want and what they want," he says.
"My father died 22 years ago and my brother and I took the business over from my mother when it was doing three quarters of a million pounds and we built it up. Year on year it's been growing," says Nigel. Turnover today is almost 110m.
The drinks are stocked at a main depot in Redruth which achieves 50% of company turnover, and also at depots in Plymouth, Wellington and Bideford. Third parties and suppliers deliver the drinks into the depots with Jolly's in-house fleet delivering to customers.
Mixed fleet
Deliveries from each depot are made on a 30mile radius using a mixed fleet of 7.5tonners, 3.5 and 4.5 tonne vans, four 13.5tonners and a 17-tonner.
Six Mercedes Sprinters were added to the fleet in the early summer replacing four Leyland Daf Sherpa vans. "We chose them because of reliability. We'd run Mercedes 410s before and they'd done 200,000km and are still going strong with no problems, so this year we added to the fleet." says Jolly. He's planning to buy more Leyland Daf lorries and Mercedes vans next spring.
The choice of a mixed fleet is deliberate: 'All the vehicles are used on multi-drop deliveries with the bigger vehicles being double manned. Our business revolves very much around service. It's supply and demand and as the weather gets warmer we need to be able to respond so we've got many smaller vehicles to allow a quick response. Most of our suppliers deliver in three to five days and our customers need the product instantly," says Jolly.
FLEET: Seven Leyland Daf 7.5tanners including two Roadrunners, a Renault 7.5
The whole business is seasonal and being able to respond to warmer weather or even second-guess it is vital to the profitability of the company. "To be truthful holiday-makers are critical to our business—they're what we depend on," says Jolly.
Busy periods are December, New Year and Raster with a continual building up of orders through Whitsun and into July and August when the company does one third of its turnover in just seven weeks. Staff are barred from taking any holiday during the summer peak.
During the quieter times Jolly's can take delivery of an artic load of Coca-Cola every 10 or so days to every day during holiday periods. "That's the seasonality swing of it," he says.
Listening to the daily weather forecast is part of Jolly's routine, "particularly in the busy part of the season because it affects the stock we need to have available. A lot of our suppliers have bigger lead times so we need to get the orders in. We need to be ahead.'' Although it seems he has to take the weather forecast with a pinch of salt: 'Up country they give us a worse forecast than we actually get!"
The poor weather this summer has meant that turnover is 10% down compared to last year. "But we were ahead before the summer so we won't show a big increase but turnover certainly won't go backwards. We've got product areas other than just soft drinks," says Jolly.
One of these is a wine shop next to the Bideford depot, which Jolly bought from Balls Brothers three years ago, "We now run that as part of our business. We bought it to give us a bigger customer base in north Devon," explains Jolly.
Further expansion through acquisition is on the cards for the future but at the moment Jolly says the company is in a period of consolidation. "The view was that the acquisition of Bideford allowed us to expand into the wine business and so we've had to adapt to change with a different product," he says, He's become a member of wine-buying group Merchant Vintners in order to gain the expertise required to expand with wine.
The thing Jolly has most enjoyed about running his own business for the past 29 years is employing local people and watching their careers develop through the group.
"We've got people who've never worked for anyone else. Everyone starts on a seasonal basis and then comes aboard on a full time basis," he says It's just as well Jolly has always regarded
his own job in the business as a hobby after working a 12 to 14-hour day there isn't time for much else. He intends to retire in six years when he's 50. What will he do then?
"Cut the grass! No, reduce the 12-14 hour day but I'll still be there for my sons when they take over. It is my intention to let go, though, because I'm a good delegatorr