The Journey - The Beginning
The Forbidden Fruit began in March 1996. I only came over here for a month to help set the shop up for my friend Taryn, do the fit-out so to speak. I was to invest half the estimated cash needed to begin the ‘shop’ ($10000), help build it, hitch-hike back to Melbourne to continue travelling, and if there were any profits after Taryn’s wages I was planning on getting half. To give you an indication of my direction, I flew over with a backpack including the contents of a pair of jeans, shorts, a couple of t-shirts, a jumper and a tent for sleeping in while making the journey back across the Nullarbor hitchhiking home. I still have this tent and to this day it has never been used. The whole idea for a fruit shop was Taryn’s, my partner. It wasn’t until two weeks into the fit-out, and after a lot of questioning to other fruit shops from Melbourne to Perth I began to realize that this was not the sort of ‘shop’ Taryn was going to be able to run on her own, just due to the hours and very physical nature of the type of business. I began to realize the possibility of losing my investment. I had to make some decisions and thus proceeded to continue into the building & running of the ‘shop’. The reason I highlight ‘shop’ is that I still had no idea what a small business really was. I had always shopped at supermarkets as my parents did, and had never really ever put a face to any of the small or large businesses I had ever encountered. To be honest I can’t even remember what I looked for in fruit and vegetables when I went shopping myself. I didn’t know about the concept of slaving away and putting everything on the line. I had only ever worked for the corporate giant BHP, and this certainly doesn’t help you learn how to look after the little bloke.
I also felt that I had better start to take life a little more seriously, try to set myself up with a house or something so I didn’t have that pressure later on when I had other commitments. My train of thought was all based around the concept that I would then end up travelling again. What hadn’t sunk in yet was the shock to the system faced by going from 365 days a year of travelling and having loads of fun, to the commitment of working 365 days in the years to follow. When you consider my last job was filling dive tanks and diving in the coral sea in crystal clear waters with a day and night water temperature of 30 degrees (if you scuba dive you would know that this is close to heaven). What was happening and what was about to come was something I certainly wasn’t prepared for, it was like “diving on new ground”, exciting but also very scary.
Before I left Melbourne to fly out here, I began scouring the best of the best of fruit and vegetable shops. I wanted to be better than them all. I went to the Flemington market, Victoria ’s main market, with a friend who was a third generation fruiterer. He showed me around and introduced me to many growers and salesmen, telling them all how I was starting a fruit and vegetable shop. They all just laughed at me, half joking, not to make me feel bad, but on the other hand totally serious because the local greengrocer was a definite dying breed in Melbourne , and as I was to find out later, in any place where supermarkets had a definite presence. They had seen many of their friends go broke. As it was, my friend closed his shop within a year of mine starting. I asked around and checked out every different type of fruit shop or non-fruit shop and stole all the best ideas I could find. I also did this in Perth and Bunbury and wherever I was I would continually haunt fresh produce spots. This practice has not ceased and it has become quite an embarrassing habit. My staff are now as bad as me and when they go anywhere, be it the Fremantle markets or some exotic country overseas, they send photos and postcards and come back with tales of ideas from other fruit shops or displays. It was this insistent push in my head to make it the best that drove me to develop what it is today.
I had to drive up to the Canning Vale Markets (which was an eight hour return trip all up) in Taryn’s Laser Hatch Back early on when our van blew its motor, so you could imagine what embarrassingly small turnover we were achieving. I only felt embarrassed a few times though. One time I remember was when I drove past the Fruit Barn’s ten tonne truck plus trailer, with only half a load of produce in the old Econovan. The Fruit Barn was my guiding light in those days being the most talked about local shop and has a huge turnover. I remember thinking I hope John Sheehan, the buyer for The Fruit Barn, doesn’t see my small load. These sorts of moments stick clearly in my head because it is what makes me feel so proud of where I am now. People regularly come in and say we are the best fruit and veg shop they have ever seen. I remember when I wished I could sell a whole box of mushrooms fresh, now we sell about 12 boxes a week.
I was determined though and worked every single day for the first couple of years. The shop became a part of me; my life was now devoted to getting this new venture to work. I studied every item in the shop, choosing what was the best way to sell each and every one of them. I was, however, living off the great comments of my customers. By this I mean there was no monetary profit and all my energy to carry on and strive for success was built around the continuing positive responses from my customers. I believed in myself, and so did my customers.
Early on in the business I was determined not to ever have a day’s sales go below $100. This was a testing target because we were very close on many occasions and on the closest we actually only achieved this target because we bought something ourselves to make it so. In order to increase sales I began selling certified organic produce, which do not have any chemicals or sprays. Having two lines of many products in the shop meant double the handling, double the amount of produce on the shelf and double the stress of running a fruit shop. It did increase sales a little though. I also started selling wholesale to caterers and some restaurants. I wasn’t the cheapest around, yet it seemed like every time a group wanted the best tasting fruit around they would be knocking down our door. I started doing delivery runs into Bunbury selling wholesale and organic. These were very frustrating and difficult jobs as it now made our fruit shop literally three fruit shops in one. Retail, wholesale and organic, are each a different market in their own right, and unlike most other supermarkets and shops I made the effort to get exactly what the customer was chasing and this meant a very complex way of life in regard to stock control and management.
During the first year I studied part time at TAFE doing a fitness leaders certificate. This was a course involving diet and nutrition, which I was interested in, and certainly thought it would help my business. It enabled me to not only be able to give informed advice to customers but also to start to gain that bit of extra knowledge about what I was selling and help me to gain new motivation as to why I should.
After one year of trading, Taryn wanted out. She had deferred University to start the shop and was not committed to continuing. We did originally only have a plan to set the business up, make a bit of money and sell it for a tidy profit. This was before I understood the difficulties in starting a business. I had put too much hard work into the shop and I felt I hadn’t finished the job. I wasn’t satisfied that I had done my best yet and had become attached to the shop. This was the real turning point in the business.
Then came the introduction of my brother Wayne, who bought Taryn’s half of the business. By trade, I’m an engineer; my brother, a carpenter; and together we formed a very interesting partnership in the ownership of a fruit shop. I had a sound business base, making sure I don’t stumble too many times along the way. I’m very cautious, planning and looking things over thoroughly, researching and analysing, and pretty handy at determining what a customer wants. That is how I had begun the shop and wanted to make sure that this successful way of doing business continued. Wayne is a real dynamic outfit, only sees straight ahead, and charges at things like a ‘bull at a gate’. This is excellent for a business because it can take you to heights before unachievable. It can also be disastrous, as important issues and business items can quite often be overlooked. So if you can imagine the combination, Wayne charging ahead wanting to take on the world, with me, and my ‘business leash’ holding him back just a little, so we can be reasonable sure we are actually on the right path. This combination led to the major expansion of the fruit shop, with Wayne helping build an extension out the back with a larger, desperately needed cool room and organising the restoration of our truck. We did this all with our own capital, planning and building it ourselves. This was time consuming, however it was the only way we knew how to do it. During the course of our growth there was a continual need to be building and fixing things and this suited Wayne and slotted himself nicely into this role. This may have led to Wayne losing interest, as he was fairly detached from the actual products we sold. After a reasonable stretch together, Wayne decided he wanted to fulfil his goal of travelling and now it’s just ME…and my wonderful, fantastic, brilliant bunch of troopers of course.
Since then my parents June and Mervyn, my sister Jenny, my niece Mariah, and my little nieces and nephew, Emma, Cassy and Timmy have all become involved in the business, thus it is a real family affair.
We have restored an old 63-model Ford F500 truck, which is extremely prominent and nearly everyone who has seen it remembers it when you mention it. We travel over 50,000 kilometres in it every year so it certainly gets around and I call it my $30,000 mobile billboard. Whenever I go somewhere people always come up later and say things like ‘we saw your truck at Cottesloe’ (no hiding from anyone.)