Opening up Allsorts of Opportunities for The Black Liquorice Company

The story of Black Liquorice Company goes back to owner Tom Rose’s university days, where he bought sweets in bulk from a wholesaler, packaged them himself and sold them at car boot sales to earn money while at university. A part time earner turned into a cottage industry and when the storage requirements outgrew the family home, a chain of sweet shops followed. 7 years ago, Tom realised that the people of Britain deserved better quality liquorice, leading him to start The Black Liquorice Company, based near Evesham, selling a wide range of high-quality liquorice products.

Here’s what Tom had to say…

“Being a small start-up business, we have always struggled with cash flow. We import most of our raw materials and our suppliers want paying on 30 days. It takes 3 weeks for the goods to reach our warehouse and that’s before we have manufactured and distributed our product to our customers. We have a lovely customer base of farm shops, gift shops, cafes and other quality retailers and we like to be able to offer them payment terms, to make our overall offering attractive. However, from paying for our raw materials to getting paid ourselves can take weeks, which puts a real strain on our cash flow.

Growing the business has been difficult; with our cash flow locked up in unpaid invoices, we couldn’t buy the levels of stock required to meet an ever-growing demand. During Covid, our online sales went through the roof, and we found ourselves turning down business opportunities as we just couldn’t meet the demand.

We looked to banks and larger lenders, but because our historic accounts didn’t reflect what was actually going on in our business at the time, no one was willing to help us financially.

After chatting with the team at FlexABL, it was apparent that their services would be the solution that we were looking for. They made the whole process so simple for us. Now we just upload our invoices and we receive cash within hours.

This has had a massive impact upon our business, helping us with our cash flow and enabling us to grow our business. Being able to pay our supplier invoices early has even given us the leverage to obtain discounts, improving our profitability.

Without the help and support of FlexABL I don’t think we would have been able to grow the business the way that we are and now we have ‘Allsorts’ of opportunities at our feet!”