Expert Eye: David Miller, Millers Fish & Chips, Haxby, York

To survive, you’ve got to put in a bit more work, says David, as he plans a shake-up of the lunch menu and reveals how a strict timetable for switching equipment on, along with closely monitoring food waste, is helping keep costs under control

Business is hard at the moment, as we all know, but we’ve done a few things lately to help ourselves. One of them, of course, is increasing prices. I only put my prices up once last year, so I missed a trick and it’s meant a much bigger jump this time. But I’m now getting well over 78% GP on most of my products. Fish is a different story – the days of getting 70% are gone. It’s more like 60% on haddock now, so we’ve had to work harder in other areas of the business.

Everything is weighed, there’s no guesswork. We use chip scoops because three or five extra chips is about two ounces. Do that 10 times and you’ve given away a whole portion of chips. Even when it comes to making the curry sauce, we follow the instructions down to the letter. I noticed that at the end of the night, if the ladles had already been washed up and someone ordered a curry sauce, the staff would grab a pea pot to pour it out. It seems harmless, but if we do it every night, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, we’ve probably given away a whole box of pots.

We also have a timetable for when lights and equipment go on. A lot of people walk in and switch everything on straight away, but if you’re not frying until 11.30, why have the range ticking over from 10 o’clock? Work out how long it takes to heat up and switch it on when you actually need it. It’s all these little things that don’t seem like much, but when you get to the end of the financial year and you’ve reduced your energy bill by £1,500, that’s a lot of money.

We also use Too Good To Go to get rid of unsold food at the end of the day. Any fish offcuts – we’re not a fishcake county – get fried and included in the bags. We make about £1 from each bag, so every quarter I get a cheque for around £190 and that goes towards a box of fish.

To survive, you’ve got to put a bit more work in. I’m not talking about physically being in frying more – I mean putting more work into how you run the business.

Another big change has been monitoring waste. I couldn’t even tell you what it used to cost us, but now it’s around £44 a week because we really focus on it. Abby, who runs the back of house, tracks not just what’s wasted but why it was wasted. Maybe we cooked it too early and it sat too long. Whatever the reason, it gets shared with the whole team on WhatsApp so everyone learns from it.

We’ve also expanded into chicken because, while we’re lucky to have an older customer base, fish and chips isn’t the go-to choice for many under 35s these days. Chicken has brought us a much younger customer base and, because we do it really well, people think, “The chicken’s great, so we know what the fish and chips will be like too”. It gives us a second bite of the cherry.

This week we’ve launched our munch boxes which include just three proteins – fish, sausage or chicken, or any combination of the three – served with chips, a sauce and a drink. It’s available at lunch time on Wednesdays and Thursdays and that’s all we’ll offer, nothing else. We know some customers will ask for things that aren’t on the menu, but it’s our job to explain that this is the lunchtime offer now. The beauty of it is that we’ll achieve at least 75% GP. If it brings in another £500 a week – and I think it’ll be more – that profit goes straight on top of what the shop already makes. Even better, we can run the menu with just two people, so it also reduces the wage bill. We’re going to give it a go and see what happens. It’s a bit brave, but we’ve got nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work, we just carry on as we were.

The way I look at it is this: we can all make great fish and chips, but are we really looking at our businesses properly? It’s still a great industry to be in. People just can’t be lazy when it comes to running the business. You’ve got to keep asking yourself, how can I get myself out of this?