If you’ve been running your station successfully for decades, it can be easy to stick to the status quo.
Following a site rebuild in 2017, Hiren was asked by his Dad to spend more time on the family business. He had been around the site for many years ‘behind the scenes’ (as he puts it), but as he became more involved he quickly realised that there was more the business could be doing to optimise profits.
“It was a little bit old school. My preference was to introduce a collaborative approach and use technology to modernise the way we run the site.” He was met with some scepticism though. “It’s a massive shift for people to buy into new things when the way we’ve been doing it has worked for so long.”
Hiren had been thinking about getting EdgePetrol for a while, but couldn’t convince his Dad to shift from his current processes. JET providing EdgePetrol at no cost to their dealers has given them the chance to try it for their site and now they are both massive advocates of the service.
“For someone like me who is tech savvy, it made a lot of sense. I know the decision making ability that it would give you.”
But it’s not Hiren that usually sets the prices, it’s his Dad. And he was worried it wouldn’t stick and they never took the leap. Not until JET announced they would offer EdgePetrol to their dealers free-of-charge.
“The EdgePetrol JET partnership has given me the ability to get him to try it and he’s actually taken to it really well.”
Hiren now sees his Dad trying out pricing strategies they wouldn’t have been able to before. They are experimenting with prices and are able to see the immediate impact of those decisions on their volume, margin and profit. This has allowed them to realise how elastic their site is and that their price changes do indeed impact their volumes. Super grade margins have increased and are driving profitability that can offset reduced prices on more elastic grades.
“The important bit is how it impacts the bottom line. Sure, we can put our price up and get more margin, but does that impact volume to the point profits are lower? We can now see this as it happens and that’s the power of the product.”
“Because the feedback is immediate it gives you the opportunity to try things that you’d be waiting until month end to see the results of. You just can’t compare to pulling it from a spreadsheet where the data is either manually input, out of date, or both.”
Waltham Cross have also taken advantage of access to their Customer Success Manager to help identify potential strategies that could work for the site. “If you’ve run a petrol station for many years it is easy to slip into the standard routine. Having someone there to say ‘have you tried this’ has been really useful.”
The results speak for themselves. Over the year or so that they’ve been using the application, they’ve seen a steady increase in turnover and margin. “The pricing strategies have come as a result of using Edge and we’re using it to make better decisions.”
If you are a JET dealer and would like to sign up for EdgePetrol, you can get started with the implementation process by contacting us today.
