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We have always told ourselves that our kids wouldn't be raised the way we were raised
you know, we're not going to let them grow up on junk food and sitting in front of the
TV and becoming overweight and unhealthy the way we did so, we kind of decided to make
a life change and in doing so we're also helping the community and educating kids on nutrition
as well. Hey guys, Jeremy Griffin here at my house
here in Midland, Texas. Why won't you ride along and we'll go service some machines today.
Daily schedule, usually I've got the van loaded the night before so I'll go two or three hours
in the morning usually for my regular job, make sure everything's good there then I'll
come home and get in the van and go to Lee High School every day. I've got three machines
there, I've got two in the courtyard and one in the field house and we're fixing to put
a couple more there but, those have to be filled everyday so I've got to do that every
day and then I'll leave there and go over to Goddard which is my Junior High School,
it's going pretty well. I'll go and take care of them usually every other day and then Midland
Freshman the same; I'll go take care of it every other day. Then I come home and kind
of get everything unloaded and organised and then load everything back up for the next
day that night. I don't have anybody telling me "this is how
much money you're going to make no matter what you do, this is your salary and it's
not going to get any higher until you get your 5% raise next year." If I'm running my
own company, I control my own destiny, If I want new accounts, I go get new accounts,
I order new machines, I make more money that way. The potential is unlimited if you run
your own company, that's why I have such a strong desire to do it and with it being a
healthy company where you can give back to the community and help the kids and educate
people on the way you should eat and how important nutrition is then, that's just a bonus for
all the hard work you do every day. Now that I've been doing it, I love it, just
going and filling the machines every day and getting to talk to people and really it makes
me responsible for what I eat too. You can't really pull a Healthy Vending van into MacDonald's
and get something to eat so it kind of helps me and I've lost quite a bit of weight over
the last year and a half and still have a lot to go but, we're getting there.
We actually came across it on the internet, my wife was looking, we were kind of looking
at franchises and things like that and trying to decide what we wanted to do and what would
be recession proof and something that we could grow. My wife was doing some research and
that's when she came across HUMAN and we just felt like they were really passionate about
what they were doing and had a lot more to offer than the other companies and of course
the machines were way cooler so, that kind of persuaded us to go with HUMAN.
I really like them, they're technological but, they're not complicated, everything is
pretty simple. You can get to everything you need in that one menu and if you just take
your time and figure it out it's pretty simple. Now, I mean, I'm all over it now, I know all
the channels by heart, I've taken the machines a part, I've changed channel extractor motors
and things like that so, it's pretty simple once you get it down.
I can set it however many hours I want, twelve hours between sales, it will send me a text
"you haven't had a sale in twelve hours" or whatever. There it is, Dexreads@N1 technology,
see it says, ten hours since last bill, it tells you the principles name, where the machines
located and which machine it is. Has there been a situation where that has
helped you out? Absolutely, yeah, I had a student actually put a nickel in the dollar
slot one day and it sent me a text that said you haven't had a sale in two hours during
the middle of the day which told me something's wrong and so I went up there and found that
and that actually saved me probably $100 in sales as opposed to finding it the next morning.
So yeah, it's definitely beneficial. I like the conveyor belts over the coils.
I've been a customer at vending machines that get hung up in the coil machines and I just
don't see that with the conveyor belts. I've made it misvend before just to see what it
would do and if nothing falls into the elevator, it automatically tells you that the product
is out to make another selection or it will refund your money. So to me that's a huge
plus, it knows if something falls in the elevator or not. Like I said earlier, I've had maybe
five misvends since I've started this and to me that's phenomenal compared to what everybody
else has, what I've seen with just the coke machines beside me.
Do you think it helps getting you contracts the machine, the quality of the machine? Yeah
absolutely, just the fact that its total transparency, they can see my reports and get paid an honest
commission you know, that, the looks of the machine, the technology of the machine, especially
the medium mogul and the apprentice where you can see the elevator work, it just draws
kids to it, they love it so it definitely helps.
Well this is your home page on aero vision actually and I come in here and open up the
reports tab and then go to product sales and this is how I do my pick list, we'll do one
for yesterday and then I always group it by machine so I can load the product for each
machine and then it will pull these reports and tell me exactly what I've sold in each
machine, how many vends. The software is really simple to work with, it's pretty self-explanatory
once you get in it and get your machine set up it's really easy to print your reports
and do what you need to do. Now calculating commissions I go in and I've
created a custom report and you can do this, it's real simple, you just add a custom report
and do it under product sales and when you run it, you'll just pick, like last month
I can do, here, I actually show you the commission report that I went off of last month. So this
shows you how many of each product you've vended through that whole month so, I did
66 cherry vanilla cola, 13 regular cola and so on.
What do you have to do for your tax? In Texas it's 6.75% and I've actually got this set
up now where N1 does it, like I'll pull a report for yesterday, it'll tell me my taxes.
See now it tells you your tax on every product and then it will tell you a total at the bottom
see, I did $40.25 in sales, $16.38 product cost and $2.29 in taxes and this number here
is your net profit, this already subtracts the taxes out for you so that's this number
minus your taxes is your net profit and then you subtract your cost of goods and pay your
commission off of that number.And you just mainly put in your cost of goods looking at
how much you bought the product for? Yeah when you go into administration and you set
up your products right here, it will ask you what your cost is on it see, I've back my
"Back to Nature Chocolate chunk Cookies" so, if I go in there, it gives you your description
and then this is your unit price default, this is what you sell it for and this is your
unit cost so it automatically knows what it costs you every time it vends a product. So
yeah, I don't have to manually calculate my cost of goods, it does it for me. So this
shows you how many of each product you've vended through that whole month so I did 66
Cherry Vanilla Cola, 13 regular Cola and so on. Coca Cola comes in and hands them a check
and this is from the words of the financial Manager at MISD, he hands them a check and
says "we did so many vends, this is what we made, this is your cut" you basically have
to take his word at it, there's no transparency y there, they have no way of controlling what
they get or what they've sold or even knowing what they've sold so, he's very happy with
what we're doing. I kind of started with a standard mix when
we started this and then I changed it up from there and found that a lot of things that
sell here don't sell over there so it's crazy how that works. The popular drinks are the
Zevia grape and the orange, they really love the Guayaki yerba mate revel berryTea and
the Switch is really good over here and the Switch is actually doesn't do too well in
the High School so I was surprised about that. And what does well in the High Schools? The
High Schools are all the Blue Sky Colas and then the Steaz Tea does real well over there
and apple juice, I can't get enough apple juice in that machine at the High Schools
so that really surprised me too. I was servicing a machine and I walked up and this kid is
standing there, I was waiting on him to buy his stuff and he keeps feeding dollars into
the machine and he ends up with six apple juices, that's what he buys and walks away
with six apple juices so, I don't think it's a price issue, he spent $6 on apple juice
so, I don't know, that kind of floored me. That was a football player? That was a football
player, way bigger than I am, he was probably 4/5 inches taller than me, he was just huge.
Did you ask him why he's getting the apple juice? I asked him if it was all for him and
he said "Yeah" he was like "I'm thirsty." This is our climate control storage room,
very small at the moment but, yeah it's worked so far. How do you have things organized here?
I just went and got a bunch of file boxes and labelled them for the bars and the smaller
snacks like the cheddar crackers and the cookies and the stuff like that. I find it easier
to just keep them in there and then you can just slide it out and pick it when you're
pulling at night. It makes it a lot easier and then I just do chips and pirates ***
and then drinks on the bottom. The only trick that I have is to take more than what's on
the pick list because 90% of the time you've sold four or five more items than you know,
between the time that you've pulled the list and when you get there to fill the machines
so, I always take a little extra with me. We are actually going to demolish this one
next week, I went and bought a building yesterday, its 14 by 30 feet and its 14 foot high so
it's actually got a loft in the top and it will be climate controlled, air conditioned
as well, we're going to put that in the spot of this one because we're running on five
machines right now and we're quickly expanding to twenty by the end of the year so I'm definitely
going to need the room for the products. Ray has been instrumental in this, he's wrote
contracts for me, they've submitted RFP's for me for the hospital, he's helped me a
lot definitely and I got the contacts and he called and kind of helped me close the
deal with MISD so, you need a closer because there's going to be questions even after HB3
that you can't answer and I didn't really run into a whole lot of that but, as far as
just being able to talk more about the program, the campaign advisors at HUMAN know a lot
more than we do so, it helps in that aspect, they can give a lot more information than
what we can. The main thing I think is just continue with
develop new machines for other locations, we need to broaden, instead of just being
able to go into big locations, I know they're working on a small machine, keep doing things
like that, the product development, technical support is huge, they've got to be able to
help us when a machine goes down, that's a must because if one of my machines at the
High School went down, I would be looking at $150 a day loss or more so, it gets very
expensive so we definitely need the technical support.
I had to submit a ticket the other day, one of my machines, the extractor motor went out
and that was real simple too, he told me what to do, I went online, submitted the ticket,
got an email that afternoon, less than 4/5 hours later that the part that I needed had
shipped, took it about 3 days to get here, its installed and working again now so, I
don't have any complaints at all about that. I'm not going to lie, some days its chaotic,
there's days where my full time job needs me and I'm gone 8 to 10 hours of that day
and then I've got to fit everything else into 3 or 4 hours for this business but, those
days are few and far between and it's well worth it to reach our ultimate goal which
is to do this full time. Freedom, I don't want to be tied down to a
job, I don't want somebody else controlling my destiny, I want to control that myself,
I want to be able to determine how much money I make and how much time off I have and what
I'm going to do every day, that's invaluable to my family is freedom.
I would say jump in it, its ben great for us, it's getting better all the time, we're
going to expand and make this as big as we can. I think that if you have the drive and
the desire to make it work, it can definitely be great. I think the main thing is you have
to believe in what you're selling, you have to believe in the value of nutrition, you
have to believe that these products are definitely better for you than the traditional junk food
and you've got to lead by example, you can't go fill Healthy Vending machines and then
go to MacDonald's on the way home. You have to transform your life and lead a healthier
lifestyle and then you have to be driven, you have to have the passion to do it and
the want to. It's just fun to me to get into the van, to drive the van, to see people look
at it and see them writing your phone number down or taking pictures of the side of it
and saying "we've never seen anything like that before" that's cool to me and then when
you get to your locations you get the same thing, the kids are coming up and asking you
questions about the products or bombarding you to buy products while you're filling the
machine. It's a really cool business to be in, it's fun.