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Simon Howie's presentation to Centenary AGM
At the Centenary Meeting, Simon Howie told the fascinating story of his journey from farmer's son to one of Scotland's most successful butchers.
“I had brothers on the farm but my dad encouraged me to go and learn my trade. I eventually began on my own and realised pretty quickly that small village shop was not going to be enough to sustain a future so I looked at ways of growing that so this is the story.”
Simon grew up on a small dairy farm, his dad milked 100 cows and he knew about hard work. Simon was serving his time as a butcher in Rattrays in Perth when unfortunately his boss died. So at the age of 19, he decided to open his first small shop in Dunning, a shop that his mother had bought off the Co-op for £2400 when Simon was only 12. He said:-
“I realised that in the shop there was not enough to do just supplying a village of one thousand people. We went and knocked on doors of pubs and hotels, trying to get a job sending our little unrefrigerated van around with meat to supply them.
“We got some of our local restaurants and hotels and grew the business from there. I took on my first member of staff in May 1997 – Jimmy Park is still with us today.
“The big one for us locally was Gleneagles Hotel. We knocked on the door and of course we were told that they had incumbent suppliers and did not need another one.
“One night I was walking up the road from my shop to the farm and there was a chap trying to get a wheel off his car because he had a puncture. It was half past six in the evening and he was panicking.
“He has one this car in a competition, a brand new Ford Orion and it was the early days of locking wheel nuts that he could not get off. I went up to the farm and got down and got this locking wheel nut off. It turned out that he was their new head chef at Gleneagles.
“I called him a week later and we have supplied them with meat for the last 30 years because of that event. There are a number of these things that have happened in my story and that was a turning point for us.”
Gleneagles had 37 chefs and as they moved on from there, they took their business supplier with them to Turnberry, the Old Course, and Glasgow Hilton.
Another turning point for Simon came twenty years go, when butcher Gary Conacher joined from Dundee. Gary's hard work made a 'massive difference'. Between Gary and Simon they have worked hard at developing the business and taking it forward.
In 1996 Simon bought the shop in Perth where he had served my apprenticeship in. The shop is a five time winner of the Best Butcher's Shop in Scotland and once Best Butcher's Shop in Britain.
Simon's had previously branched out to buy a shop in Dunkeld, Auchterarder before acquiring the Perth shop. He subsequently worked back down to two shops and of course built the factory.
“The other big event in my life was getting to know the supermarkets through what they call the Supplier Development Programme run by Scottish Enterprise. They said 'come on all you small businesses, we'll tell you what it is like to deal with the supermarkets.'
“Kind of reluctantly I went along thinking that it would be a complete waste of time. They assigned a person to each business and said that they would mentor us through this programme and then have a dinner and see where we go from there.
“At that dinner I was sitting in the Bonham Hotel in Edinburgh with Stewart Mitchell who was the Chief Executive of Sainsbury's and Sir Peter Davies who was the Chairman. They thanked me for being part of their programme and were very nice to us. They said 'we have a big problem with our counters' and I rather arrogantly said 'yes I think that they are the worst in the whole sector.' And they agreed and that was why they had mentioned it.”
Invited to suggest how to solve their problem, Simon invited them to his Perth shop to see if they could take something out of that. Within 15 minutes of arriving the Sainsbury's chiefs had handed over the running of the butchery counters in their 21 Scottish stores to be rebranded Simon Howie.
This was in September 2001 and the effect was to give the business credibility. Although they no longer run the counters Simon Howie supplies a lot of product into the counters but they are not branded as there's.
“That was a massive thing for the business doing £50,000 per week into those stores.”
Fortunately prior to this happening with his two shops and the catering side blossoming Simon and his wife had the vision to buy a neighbouring farm. In 1996 they built a factory and had three disciplines happening within the factory – raw, cooked and manufacturing. They had a kitchen area and an area where it was anything that goes through a mincer.
By 2002 the factory was further expanded splitting the one unit with everything in it, to raw, cooked, manufacturing, a packaging store and a cold store to take the footprint up to 60,000 square feet.
In 2017 further development brought an engineering shed, another cold store that can hold 400 pallets of frozen goods ready for the peak times and new offices at the front.
With shiny white walls, clean floors and lots of expensive bits of metal. The manufacturing unit was spilt to move pudding production into a dedicated 'room' leaving the sausages and burgers to expand in the manufacturing area.
The pudding room is spacious with cookers and blast chillers, boxing machines for black puddings and haggis, mixes, grinders and flankers. Three lines produce 15 tons of haggis and black pudding a day. Eighteen trolleys are cooking or cooling at anyone time.
A Himalayan Salt wall has been installed to dry age sirloins and ribs so as to give restaurant customers a point of difference.
The factory has 150 kilo watts of solar power on the roof and they have a bore hole where they take 50 cubic metres of water a day out. When used in the factory it goes for treatment on site. An ecological system sends water through to a wetland scrape so that no water is discharged from site. That means no waste water charges. Controlling overheads is an important part of the business.
“Personally I don't have a problem with all the regs. In a way they keep the less scrupulous people out of our hair.”
A Simon Howie food trailer goes round festivals and events like the Highland Show. Branding is important for the business but this is a money making exercise. At the Highland Show they can serve between 6000 and 7000 meals over four days.
On branding Simon explained the objectives:- “It is important that not only if the products are good that they look good. We have tried to mix our branding up and taking our local heritage in Dunning and Scotland got a local artist to sketch things up.
“We have created this image of little Simon and his dog walking through the village in a number of different locations. The illustrations have saved us a lot because previously we would have had to do photo shoots.”
For a country butcher supplying supermarkets was the real way to grow the business. Branding was important when breaking into all the major multiples. Now Simon Howie bacon at 30000 to 40000 packs per week, is the highest selling privately owned brand in Britain. Sales extend to two million boxes of black pudding and one and a half million haggis per year.
Simon closed with a message
“That is what I do ladies and gentleman, it was a bit ad hoc but I hope that you took something out of that. If I can do it, anyone can. There are a lot of younger people in the audience asking should I stick with the meat trade or should I not.
“I have a strong message for anyone and I would like to go round schools and tell them, if they really realised how amazing the opportunity is in the meat trade for young people at any level. You can go as big as you like, you can stay small, you can make a pound or you can make two pounds.
“It has a lot to offer if you are prepared to do a bit of work. I don't think that we need to kill ourselves with work, I am not the hardest working person in this room, I can tell you. I don't want to be. I want to be working smart, I want to be clever about it and I want to get the balance right otherwise you burned yourself out.
“It is a great trade and I am delighted and happy that we have such a great Federation and the work that our people do on our behalf is very very important. Thank you to the Federation for having me here today.”
Attachments:
• SIMON_HOWIE_PRESENTATION_181118.pdf
Attachments:
Attachments:
• SIMON_HOWIE_PRESENTATION_181118.pdf