Our History - Part 2: Growing Pains
If you missed out on Part 1 in last month's newsletter, you can find it at our blog HERE.
Running a business you've never run before, in a country you've only just moved to, selling a concept most people have never encountered..... it turns out there are a few things that can go wrong!
Mum and Dad will be the first to admit they learned most of what they know about retail by making mistakes. The pricing structure took time to get right. Dad describes early forecasts that were optimistic on turnover but wildly off on expenses, particularly wages and rent. The customer behaviour we'd anticipated didn't match reality either, we expected shoppers to come in once a week and spend a set amount. Instead, people came in three times a week and spent a third of what was predicted per visit. Same total, but it broke every forecast they’d built.
What they did get right, almost from the beginning, was relationships. With suppliers, with customers, and with each other.
Our major supplier relationship stretches back over thirty years. We first dealt with the uncle (Eli), now it's the nephew (Naji) and his son (Eli, I wonder where he got the name!), who is in the process of taking over. Mum's view on suppliers evolved quickly: "I learned that changing suppliers regularly was not a good move. Loyalty equals consistency, and it goes both ways, they helped us through tough years."
The customer relationships were something else entirely. Weigh 'n Pay had a community feel from the start, but a particular moment crystallised it for Mum: the introduction of bread mixes. Before we started baking sample loaves of bread in-house, we sold around 25 kilograms of bread mix a week. Two years later, that number had grown to 3.5 tonnes. People were learning to bake. They were taking control of what went into their food. "Those days set us up for success," Mum says.
For a store that was trying to teach Perth about bulk food shopping almost from scratch, those small wins mattered enormously. "Zero waste" wasn't a concept anyone was using. Recycling was barely mainstream. Mum even launched a recycling program at our school, which she describes as genuinely innovative for the time. Initally the school wasn’t convinced… until the P&C started to see some income from it! That program ran until verge collections made it redundant.
Dad recalls that a few people "immediately picked up the idea and ran with it," but that for years we were essentially educators as much as retailers, explaining to customers how the whole thing worked and why it was worth doing. This is still the case today!
There were harder things happening behind the scenes too. Going into business with friends, even good ones, brings its own complications. "Whatever happens with the business inevitably bleeds into the friendship," Mum reflects. She and Dad are still close with Keith and Vanessa today, which is perhaps testament to their bond. But it wasn't always easy.
And then there were the stores that didn't work. Mirabooka opened a year after Warwick and struggled almost immediately. Kardinya followed, then an opportunity in Forrestfield. Each location had its own personality, Kardinya drew a crowd interested in South African foods and nuts, Forrestfield was all about snacks and lollies. The vision at the time was to build something franchiseable, a chain of Weigh 'n Pay stores across the suburbs.
That vision didn't survive contact with the reality of each new location. Back then we didn't have the technology or systems in place to efficiently run three stores. What did survive was Warwick, consistently the strongest store, the one that kept the whole enterprise viable while the others came and went.
By 2001, Warwick itself was under threat. The landlord was planning a major renovation that would have forced us to close for twelve months. Mum and Dad had to decide: wait it out, or move. Woodvale Boulevard Shopping Centre made us an offer that was hard to refuse, financial assistance with the move and a few months rent-free. We went. Woodvale has been home ever since!
"It was tough at first," Mum says. "But we don't regret it at all."
One of the more unlikely threads running through those years is Isla Fisher's mother, Elspeth, who served as our business coach. She worked in marketing, was a friend of Vanessa's, and brought a professional eye to what was otherwise a very much learn-as-you-go operation. Mum met a sixteen-year-old Isla who, even then, had her sights firmly set on becoming an actress!
Dad had a nickname for Mum during those years: Panasonic. Their tagline was "slightly ahead of our time." It was affectionate, but also accurate. Mum would push a new product and it would often fly out the door. Sometimes though she was too early! We'd try a product, nobody would buy it, and it would get dropped from the range. Six months later, customers would start asking for exactly that thing. Being ahead of the curve is only an advantage once the curve catches up!
The business traded successfully through some family turmoil, namely Dad's cerebral aneurysm in mid-2001. Fortunately I was there to witness the fall, and Mum performed CPR until the ambulance came. It was a harrowing few weeks in ICU, months in hospital, and years of rehab where Dad had to relearn how to walk, talk and eat again. The early prognosis was not good, but Dad is still kicking about today, after finishing a long career lecturing Finance at ECU while also working in the shop.
Mum recalls the shock amongst all of this. At the time she didn't know the difference between an invoice and a statement, or how to lodge a BAS, or when GST applied. There's a lot of business acumen she just didn't need up until then. Fortunately, she put in the work with the help of a few great people, Sarah Aldridge, Elaine Weskin, Kerrie Burgess and Gina Grizaard, who helped keep things running over the next decade. These women all spent 10+ years at the shop and really contributed towards who we are today. There have been many others who have left their mark, but I wanted to highlight these four in particular.
That decade of steady hands and hard-won lessons set the stage for the next chapter. In Part 3, we'll look at how Weigh 'n Pay grew into the store you know today, and what changed when the reins were passed to a new generation (me!).
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