Case Study
Monkey Bizness/ Pelican build successful partnership
We are pleased to report that one of our members, monkey bizness is looking to expand having been members of Pelican for just under a year. Jason Ward and Alex Cheney, owners of Monkey Bizness, started their business two years ago and now they run three family entertainment centres and are looking to open another three by the end of this year. We recently spoke with Jason about the value of their Pelican membership.
"We found out about Pelican at the Play Providers Association (PPA) meeting, when one of the members mentioned that they had started to use Pelican's services."
"We then had a couple of meetings with Stuart, Pelican’s Purchasing Adviser, to explore all the options. We have been members now for just over 8 months and things have gone really well since we started, I would say that it's made things easier in a lot of cases." "Regarding the purchasing, we now use 12 suppliers through Pelican. We try to use as many nominated suppliers as we can for ease of use and for the discounts they offer. To be honest, we now purposely choose Pelican nominated suppliers for all our product categories."
Jason talks in detail about some of the suppliers they now use and the products they buy, "previously we had an independent deal with washroom services then we moved our account to Pelican terms and got absolutely jaw dropping savings of 40%-50%." "With regards to fresh produce - in the past we were using local suppliers and the quality deteriorated, I had to keep going back to them to sort out problems. However through Pelican we now have a great working relationship with Pauleys; we buy all fresh fruit and vegetables from them as we get competitive prices, good delivery times and most importantly very high quality of produce."
"Before joining Pelican we were using 3663 for a limited number of products along with various local suppliers for the rest. Now on the strength of the Pelican deal we have consolidated the bulk of our food purchasing into 3663 resulting in savings of between 5-10%." "We also use Britvic for our soft drinks, a company we didn’t use before. We have a very good relationship with them and they have become one of our preferred suppliers. Our customers enjoy the quality of their drinks as we only buy the 100% juices with no additives in them." "We get a great service when we use Screwfix. And the 5% discount we get through Pelican really makes a difference as we spend about £100,000 on building materials when opening a new centre."
Benefit of Central Billing
"I found that there are two main benefits of being a Pelican member, Jason continues." "The first one is that we receive a consistently good quality of service, very good discounts and competitive prices throughout the year and, for a small business which is reasonably young, that’s the most important thing." "The other is central billing, which is such a convenient payment method as we pay all our suppliers with one monthly payment. Nobody is chasing us for payments and we do not have to worry about losing invoices, this makes it so straightforward. The cash back which we receive once a year is also a very nice surprise!"
"I would highly recommend Pelican to any business for their excellent prices, quality of service and the easy payment system."
All at Pelican would like to thank Jason and his partner Alex for participating in our first "meet our members" article. If you would like your business to be featured in a future "meet our members" spotlight, please contact Simona Hardy at Pelican on 01483 523992 or email simona@pelicanbuying.co.uk