Life Coffee Cafés Ltd
Summary
Life Coffee Cafés Ltd is a great example of a successful business that has had to manage rapid growth. With seven stores opened since 2005 and more on the way they have had to deal with a number of administrative issues along the way, including payroll.
On the 28th of February, 2005 Simon Berry and Mark Upton signed a master franchise agreement with Costa Ltd to create Life Coffee Cafés Ltd as the principle UK Franchisee for out of town retail and leisure park locations and non-motorway roadside sites.
Life Coffee Cafés grew quickly, with their first two stores opening in Dartford, Kent and St. Austell, Cornwall in December 2005. A third store was opened in Orpington, Kent in June 2006 followed by stores in Hayle, Cornwall, Shepton Mallet, Somerset and Emersons Green in Bristol. The last store to be opened was in Hayes, Middlesex, on the Lombardy Retail Park in March 2009. With further stores in the pipeline, Life Coffee Cafés are due to open their 8th store this August in Weston Super Mare.
An early decision to invest in infrastructure to support the expansion of the business has been critical to managing this rapid growth. With an increasing number of employees needing to be paid each month, one area that needed to be addressed was payroll. The volume was proving difficult to manage and Life Coffee Cafés needed to find a solution quickly.
Sarah Pickering (Commercial Director) started looking into two options to solve the problem. The first was to take the payroll in-house and the second was to outsource it to a specialist provider. She looked at both options in detail and decided to rule out the in-house option and outsource their payroll. There were a number of reasons behind that decision, the main one being the need to gain access to expert knowledge of payroll legislation from a specialist provider.
Sarah had heard of us whilst working in the film industry and Life Coffee Cafés approached Sargent-Disc in 2005. Sarah liked the management reports that we could generate and felt confident that Sargent-Disc had the expert knowledge and resources needed to handle a significant volume of payroll. Life Coffee Cafés chose Sargent-Disc and right from the word go we worked closely together to ensure that the migration went smoothly.
'Sargent-Disc provides us with an excellent, reliable and efficient service for all our payroll needs...', Sarah Pickering, Life Coffee Cafés Ltd
The payroll transition went very smoothly and the first payroll was processed in February 2006. Since then Life Coffee Cafés has grown considerably, now employing four times as many staff as it did in 2006. Sargent-Disc's payroll has also moved with the times with their reports and employee details now available online via our client portal SD Online. One thing that has remained unchanged throughout has been Sargent-Disc's commitment to processing payroll accurately and on time each month.
