Hiring for your Snack and Beverage Vending Business

Once your Planet Antares vending business becomes established and is running profitably, you can then think of expanding your vending business. When most people start a vending business, they usually run the business from home. This is because vending is a home based business that you can easily run from your home. There is really no need to have employees at that time since you will be the one who will service the vending machines. Since it is a home based business, your family can also help you out in running the vending business.

As your Planet Antares vending business grow, you will feel the need to hire employees, since you will have more vending machines that will need servicing and more locations to cater to.

Below are some guidelines that you can use for hiring the best possible employees for your vending business.

• Full description of job: You must describe in detail the job that you have for your Planet Antares vending business. It must be appealing to prospective candidates. To do this, you can list the positives of the snack and beverage vending business job up front.
• Visualize: To make sure that you hire the right employee, you should first imagine the perfect vending business employee. You would also need to decide on what values, work ethics, experience and attributes they would need to posses that will make your Planet Antares vending business a success. With this in mind, it will be easier for you to hire the right candidate.
• Advertising: soliciting employee candidates through the newspaper is not really the best thing to do. What you should do first, is to ask current vending machine employees for suggestions. Since they already know the job and what it entails, they are the best people that can know which of their acquaintances would be able to perform the job. Try looking for potential employees for your vending business at local colleges or other vending businesses that are downsizing.
• Pre-screening: If you pre screen the candidates before the interviewing process, it will allow you to spend time interviewing only the most promising candidates. Pre-screening will help you gather information on the candidate.
• Interviews: interviewing the candidates will help you learn more about a candidate. The interview process would also be your opportunity to sell the position to the applicant. Write out the entire questions that you would want to ask. This will help you give interview flowing in a smooth and orderly manner. Make sure that you note all the relevant information. It will be very important when you are short listing the candidates.

All in all, you just need to look for the right person to hire for your vending business. A good employee will work hard and will help to keep the business thriving.

Securing a Snack and Beverage Vending Location

As a Planet Antares vending operator, you already know that the main way of increasing snack and beverage machine profits would by securing new locations. Nevertheless, finding new locations in a mature market is not that easy. The snack and beverage vending industry must fight rising prices and the scarcity of new locations. This is the main reason why many vending operators choose to instead concentrate their efforts on increasing the profits at current locations, plus maintain their customer base.

If you are interested in securing locations for your Planet Antares vending business, you will find that the Internet can prove to be a powerful tool. You can use the Internet to solicit prospective locations for your snack and beverage vending machines and to find potential location leads. In the past, vending operators relied on phone directories, business directories and purchased lists. Today, all that you need to do is use search engines to find the kind of location that you would want for your Planet Antares vending machines. Many of the old techniques that were used some years back to find locations are no longer plausible. Gone are the days when you could just walk into an office building or any other kind of location without an appointment. You can now use the Internet as a business directory to gather information on potential locations. In addition to this, you can even use the Internet to research and qualify their leads.

The Internet can also be used to attract new clients. Vending machines like those that are provided by Planet Antares are always in demand by many locations, because they sell snacks and beverages. These are the kind of products that are quick sellers in vending machines. Americans love snacking and this is what makes a snack and beverage vending business a very lucrative business. A large number of businesses now use the Internet to shop for services such as snack and beverage vending. If you have a website for your vending business, you can also invest in pay per click services which can improve your website rankings. Having an effective vending business website, will means that you just have to wait for new clients to come to you. There will really be no need for you to go out looking for the locations.

The Internet has proven to be very useful when it comes to location hunting, however, direct mail, in person soliciting and networking still play a significant role in securing new snack and beverage vending locations. The most critical tool is a good salesperson. If you have a sizeable vending business you should invest your time in recruiting and training good salespeople who will carry out a good job in converting leads into sales. The use of the Internet is a cost effective tool that offers a new possibility for the replacement of these established methods.

DEX Data can be used to Control Cash in Vending

If you want to better control cash shortages and product shrinkage in your Planet Antares vending business, you would need to install software management solutions and also utilize DEX. A software system working with DEX data can provide tremendous control.

The traditional method that vending operators use to reconcile cash is comparing cash collected to product sold out of a vending machine. This method works, but it would requires you to inventory a Planet Antares vending machine every time cash is collected. This method can be completely circumvented by a hired driver that is running his own product through vending machines. In that case, the driver makes out like a bandit by running his product through an operator’s assets.

Cash and vend meter methods
Another method that you can use for controlling cash in your Planet Antares vending business is the use of a vend meter in a single price machine, or a cash meter in multi priced machines. Cash and vend meters always provide cumulative data that is compared to the previous reading to determine the difference. This method can work, but it is dependent on the driver accurately recording the meter readings. In some cases, drivers can still get away with running their own products through the machines by calculating and reporting false meter readings. This is something that you can catch during an audit of the machine’s meter readings.

Obviously capturing the cash meter reading electronically from a machine via a DEX reading during the service tightens up most of the process. A hired driver will never see the meter reading and it will be captured accurately using a tamper proof method. In this way the driver can never sell his own products in your vending machine. This will not immediately solve all cash control problems because capturing a cash meter via DEX goes a long way to preventing most cash control problems. The driver who takes $1 per day from each machine can only be caught by analyzing trends over time.

Vending operations usually average a 5% variance between cash expected (meters and/or products sold) to cash actually accounted for. Using DEX CASH – audit, you can reduce that variance to less than 2 %. By applying tamper – proof DEX Cash Control in your Planet Antares vending business, you can recover 3 % more cash. DEX CASH provides the exact amount of bills in the acceptor and the coins dropped in the collection box. In other words, DEX provides a more accurate accountability process.