We help Richard shell out on egg delivery!
FARMER Richard Robinson is proud to deliver fresh free range eggs to his customer’s doorsteps. “We’re connecting with the community,” he says. “Building a personal relationship, encouraging people to buy local, real quality produce from the farm just down the road. We’re preserving an old tradition.”
But he’s using a 21st century way to do it, with eight Mercedes-Benz Sprinter milk float vans – all funded thanks to a modern method of finance.
“We saw the opportunity to expand the business, to provide good old-fashioned customer service, and found that there was a really efficient, practical way to pay for it.”
The local delivery round was the latest logical step for Robinson’s Eggs, which Richard set up in 2008 near Clitheroe, Lancashire with just 400 hens. Now he has 50,000 free range birds and a state-of-the-art packaging centre and sells to cafés, restaurants, hotels and artisan bakeries. But he has always championed the idea of customers being able to buy produce direct from their local farmer.
“One of our dairy customers approached us and said he was selling his milk round,” says Richard. “We realised we already had the staff and certainly the eggs, and all we needed to do was buy the milk from another local dairy farmer and hold other products such as yoghurt and cheese, and it’s proved a really big success. Given the chance, people love to buy local – instead of buying their essentials from a supermarket chain, they buy them from us.”
But buying so many milk floats to deliver all this is inevitably expensive – so Richard contacted Rural Asset Finance, a specialist lender to UK farmers. “Richard had paid outright for two floats already, so we offered him a ‘sale and HP back’ facility, which reimbursed him 90% of the net invoice price,” explains Rural Asset Finance’s head of sales Ben Wood. “This enabled him to pay for them on a fixed-term, 36-month agreement which freed up his cash flow, which is so vital for any expanding business.”
The ex- supermarket vans, which are fitted with an aluminium ‘milk float back’, have been such a success that Richard is about to take delivery of three more and will be buying a further three. It’s an investment made easier by Rural Asset Finance also restructuring Richard’s existing land mortgage and consolidating other debts by securing them on the farm’s land and buildings – a move that will considerably reduce his monthly repayments.
“It’s really taken off,” he says. “It’s a traditional service, but we are finding we’re delivering to customers of all ages. Unlike other delivery services, we don’t do direct debits, we invoice once a month, so our customers are not tied in. It’s about giving them a friendly service that they can trust.”
And that service will soon be even easier to access as Richard’s team is developing a dedicated door step delivery phone app – for those who want to use it. And as the customer base grows, there’ll be no shortage of eggs to feed them. Richard’s on-farm processing unit is already capable of sorting, grading and packaging half-a-million eggs a day – and he’s building towards that capacity. “It’s a volume business,” he says. “It relies solely on that. We will be expanding the flock further and are talking to Rural Asset Finance about funding a bigger free range hen unit.
“Ben just spoke sense, right from the start,” he adds. “He took time to understand what we wanted to achieve and knew what he was talking about. And the whole process with Rural Asset Finance was so smooth and direct. Banks want to see masses of history, but he was much more forward-thinking, looking at where we wanted the business to go, focusing on our plan and how we were going to approach it. From there it went through to Rural Asset Finance’s credit department, it was all really straightforward – and Ben kept in touch with us all the time to keep us up to date, helping to obtain any other information they needed.”
