Meet Mr. Joye Gomez, 33 years old ambitious CEO of a SME in Bangalore - the FruitsNJuice fruit vendor.
Last year, during a cloud summit, I met this guy as he has been trying to get more insight on Greytip Online, the cloud based Payroll & HR software.
Probably, many of us may not even think of retailing fresh fruits & juice as an organized business. After masters in agribusiness and a short stint with a MNC, Joye Gomez started his first FruitsNJuice store in Bangalore with 2 employees, almost 3 years back. Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley got a special inclination towards hygiene and may be this could be one of the reasons behind the success of FruitsNJuice stores across the city.
Photo Courtesy : Original work of Ali Karimian, Creative CommonsCC BY-SA 2.0
By
the time Joye Gomez reached 25 stores across the city with a staff
strength of 60, FruitsNJuice managed to achieve a whopping sale
of 500 fruit bowls and 750 juice packs, on an average from each store. 30%
of sale is through phone booking and 70% over the counter.
Let's see what made Joye Gomez to visit the summit.
Huge
number of transactions, maintenance of order details, verifications,
real-time data analysis, JIT for fruits, preparation of salary and
incentives, monitoring leave of absence and expense claims made the life
of Joye Gomez and his Accountant, extremely difficult and reached a
level where they have only two options – add more staff for accounting and administration or use information technology to
streamline and simplify the process.
As FruitsNJuice has been operating with a moderate margin, Joye Gomez is not in so favor to spend again
on staff. Being an avid reader, he had somewhat idea on benefits of SAAS
tools for Small Business.
For order management and point of sale, Joye Gomez identified true POS,
as the best tool to go with. For accounting, as it is centralized, he
has decided to go with the existing desktop tool for some more time.
Managing
staff salary preparation and distribution is the next big thing. At the
time of this transition, everybody get their paychecks by 5th and to
achieve this, 3 people including Joye Gomez had to spend day and night
for a week to crack numbers across spreadsheets.
To look after entire statutory aspects, he has appointed a consultant too. However,
staff accountant will be spending even preparing reports for the consultant.
It was when Joye's Chartered Accountant referred Greytip Online, he has signed up for a trial account and evaluated the services for a month. Joye, by seeing some of the customer references , almost decided by the time itself to use Greytip Online. Incidentally, I have got the opportunity to meet this young
entrepreneur at the summit and spend half an hour and explain the
benefits, key features and how to go ahead.
During
the discussion, I have noticed that Joye Gomez has no website and not
done much in social media. I recommended him to try Google Apps, Google
Local Business Center, Facebook & Twitter to promote among Gen Y. As
Joye has shown interest in creating an online portal to sell,
guided him to buildabazaar, where an e-commerce site can be hosted without any investment.
Today, FruitsNJuice is a 125 people company with 50 stores and an amazing turnover of 500 million... and expansion plan across cities. According to Joye Gomez, the overall expense towards software services across the shops is around 75K per month and for FruitsNJuice, it is worth spending.
Here is the overall satisfaction index of this CEO upon SAAS tools
- No deadlock in order management, perfect POS and real time data analysis
- 100% just in time (JIT) for fruits and related consumables
- 5% orders getting generated from e-commerce portal
- Complete and seamless document management and mailing
- Real time CEO Dashboard for staff details
- Perfectly streamlined one point reference for staff info
- Staff attendance and leave of absence at mouse point
- Preparation of staff salary, statutory returns and payslips in minutes
- Perfect statutory compliance - ESI, EPF, IT and PT
Joye's own words "These tools are giving me the freedom to manage my business without visiting my stores frequently. I am not writing fat cheques for store supervisors or techies to manage technology. In fact, I myself processed the salary, when my staff accountant was on medical leave..." broadcast how SAAS tools helped the CEO of a Small and Medium Enterprise to expand business, improve the effectiveness and add further value to business.
Disclaimer: FruitsNJuice, Joye Gomez, Cloud Summit are not real names/events. Resemblance to any business is purely coincidental
