Customer stories

Stephen Robins

The Robins Mill Farm Shop

Over the past five years, Sowerby Bridge Mill in Halifax, West Yorkshire has been entirely transformed; from a derelict and unloved building, into the lively, family-run home of Robins Mill Farm Shop.

This was the hard work of business owner Stephen Robins who – with his experience in butchery, greengrocery and plant sales – set out to refurbish the property into a new farm shop complex, that would include a delicatessen, a café and a gift shop too.

Business has boomed since the redevelopment and across these three departments, Stephen and his daughter Sarah-Jayne now have nine members of staff running the trade. All with a consistent focus on offering high quality, local produce and a positive value for money, whether it be the sale of homemade pies and breads, or their free range eggs and jams.

As business has flourished – and Stephen’s ambition has grown too – the Robins Mill Farm Shop has looked to expand even further by adding new lines to their stock and building both a plant store and a bakery into the business throughout 2017.

“Our expansion earlier this year was a matter of extending the existing business,” says Stephen. “We wanted to introduce a few new lines of stock, and put new fridges in. These were for the bakery addition we’ve got where we needed new ovens too.”

To reach these goals and secure the best deals on sourcing the necessary equipment, Stephen wanted to find some extra funding so that he would have the right cash, exactly when he needed it. And so, after receiving a letter about their business finance, he spoke to Worldpay to find out how they could help.

“The customer service at Worldpay Business Finance is excellent and I’m very pleased, the staff are really helpful. If it’s a matter of giving them a score out of ten, they are certainly a 10 out of 10.”

Since April earlier this year, the Robins Mill Farm Shop has now been advanced business funding through Worldpay three times, allowing the Robins family to purchase the equipment needed to support their business growth. Borrowing this way has also enabled them to make repayments directly in line with their cashflow at a rate affordable to the business, as repayments are taken as a fixed percentage of daily customer card takings.

“We’re a seasonal business in respect that for winter and the Christmas period everything is a lot bigger, so our advance gets paid off very quickly during the runup. More people are using cards now too, and we’ve found that after opening the plant centre at the back of the store, people tend to spend more on the card machine there than they do with cash. So the method of repayment, it works perfectly for us!”