ARCHIVE

Poulos Poultry, 2005–2006

An archive of the Poulos Poultry venture, 2005–2006. Website files dated 18 July 2006; the profit and loss projections dated April and May 2005. Preserved unaltered in the download; the page below reproduces its text because the original site was built in frames and cannot be read by a browser or an indexer today.

Poulos Poultry was a fresh-poultry retail franchise concept developed by Kevin Barrett and modelled on Australia’s Lenard’s Poultry. The website was hand-coded in Microsoft FrontPage and every file in it carries a modification date of 18 July 2006. The financial projections behind it are older: their file properties date them to 7 April and 2 May 2005. The venture did not proceed to market.

It is preserved here for one reason: the files are dated, and what they say about their author in 2006 can be checked against what he says now. The full record is at thecreatrepreneur.com/record.

What the site was

Roughly a hundred files across a front-of-house product catalogue and a franchise-sales section. The product pages cover marinated chicken, sausages, roasts, kebabs and shashlicks, rollups, pastry, stir-frys and wraps, Thanksgiving lines and a set of recipes. The franchise pages cover the franchise system, set-up costs, profit and loss projections, types of financing available, franchisee qualifications, operations, training, product development, marketing, marketing statistics, a meat industry outlook and a corporate page.

The site was built as a three-pane frameset — a banner strip, a navigation column and a content pane. That construction is why the original cannot simply be re-hosted: a browser or an indexer opening the front page today reads only the fallback line, “This page uses frames, but your browser doesn’t support them.” The content below is lifted from the files themselves.

The proposition

From why_poulos_poultry.htm:

Studies suggest that 50 percent of Americans do not have a good answer to that question at four o’clock in the afternoon. With busy schedules and much to do, dinner planning often does not get a very high priority.

The pitch that followed was convenience and versatility rather than product quality alone — poultry quick and easy to prepare, in a range wide enough to answer the question more than one way. The franchise offer was framed as a partnership in which the franchisee was explicitly named as a customer of the franchisor:

Our customers are not only the people who shop at each Poulos Fresh Poultry store each day, but also the Franchisees we service.

That sentence is twenty years older than Formation over Extraction and is the earliest dated instance of the principle in a commercial document.

The corporate page, 18 July 2006

The site’s Corporate.htm carried a biography written in the third person. It is reproduced here in full because it is a dated self-description that can be checked against the rest of the record.

Kevin Barrett is a successful Business and training consultant, who has helped hundreds of businesses in United States, Australia and overseas increase their sales and profits using easy to implement strategies. He has the unique ability to help others tap in to their full potential, both in business and also personally. He worked for 3M Company in the U.S., Europe and the Pacific Basin for 20 years, where he was responsible for two divisions International Technical Marketing. He has lived and worked in Europe for three years with Technical Marketing Responsibilities for 3M Company and lived in worked in Australia, where he had is own Business and Training Consultancy Company.

Kevin is a trained practitioner of N.L.P. trained by Anthony Robbins, Robert Dilts and Tad James (Time Line Therapy). He is also a certified Silva Method Lecturer.

Kevin’s strategies in business have been developed over the years by working and helping the best and most successful businesses from around the world. He has also trained over 2,000 of Australia’s Un-Employed using these same strategies with amazing results.

He has the unique ability to be able to pull together various disciplines, expertises and financial resources for successful completion of business projects.

As an accomplished presenter and trainer he has developed and presented business programs for leading businesses, colleges and universities in Australia and overseas.

He is also a consummate marketeer, having worked with a wide range of companies, products and services. His expertise ranges from product design, new product introduction, international marketing to Internet Sales and Marketing.

Poulos Poultry is another in a long line of unique, successful business ideas, which he has developed and introduced to the market.

Reproduced with its original typographical errors intact. The page also carried a biography of the venture’s Vice-President of Operations, a poultry-industry professional whose experience was gained with a leading United States supermarket chain. That section has been withheld here: he is a private individual and has not been asked.

What this file evidences

Four claims made elsewhere on this site rested, until this file surfaced, on memory alone. Each is stated in a document dated 18 July 2006.

The 3M figure is worth a note. The employment record runs July 1966 to September 1987, which is twenty-one years; the 2006 page says twenty. Both are his own statements, eighteen years apart, and the shorter figure is the older one. Nothing here is being reconciled in the author’s favour — the longer span is the one the employment dates support.

The numbers

The franchise section published a schedule of set-up and continuing costs, and first-year projections for two location types. Both projections were built in Excel and exported to PDF — the minor-city model on 7 April 2005, the major-city model on 2 May 2005, according to each file’s own properties. The website that published them was built the following year.

Set-up and continuing costs

First-year projections

Both were published behind an earnings disclaimer, reproduced here because it is part of what the venture was:

Earning and Income statements made by our company and its customers are estimates of what we think you can possibly earn. There is no guarantee that you will make these levels of income and you accept the risk that the earnings and income statements differ by individual.

The structure, and what was actually built

KJ Barrett & Associates was the Franchisor. The set-up schedule names a Master Franchisee as the recipient of the licence fee and the continuing four per cent, with the Franchisor holding the lease and taking the advertising two per cent — a two-tier model in which territory operators sat between the brand and the individual shop.

Running in parallel with the franchise offer was a second intention: two company-owned stores, under KJ Barrett & Associates directly, as working prototypes. Prove the operating model in premises you control, then sell the system that the prototypes demonstrated. That sequence is the reverse of the usual franchise pattern, which is to sell the system first and let the franchisees discover what it costs to run.

Neither the prototypes nor the franchise reached the market.

What follows is a prospectus, not a trading record. The tables on this page are first-year projections prepared to raise interest in a franchise that was never sold. No Poulos Poultry shop ever opened, and no figure here was ever earned by anyone. They are preserved as evidence of how the model was designed, not as evidence of what it returned.

Three lines in the model

A projection is an argument about what a business is for, and this one carries three line items that no franchise model is obliged to include. Each of them reduces the headline return.

Owner’s Wage — $4,500 a month, $54,000 a year, identical in both models. The projected profit sits on top of the owner’s salary rather than in place of it. A model that omits the owner’s wage reports a larger number and tells the franchisee less about what they will actually live on.

Health Insurance — $3,000 a year in the smaller model, $12,000 in the larger. A staffing cost carried inside the operating model in 2005, in a retail food franchise, as a fixed monthly line rather than an optional extra.

Charitable Contributions — $100 a month, $1,200 a year, in both. Not a marketing line and not deferred to profitability. It is budgeted from the first month, at a location projecting $3,321 of net income in January.

None of the three was required, and this was a document written to attract franchisees. Every one of them made the pitch weaker — together they cost the smaller model roughly $58,000 of profit it could otherwise have advertised. A projection is an argument about what a business is for, and whoever built this one chose to pay the owner, insure the staff and give something away before showing a number. That is Formation over Extraction written as a spreadsheet, twenty years before the phrase existed.

Files held

The complete site as it stood on 18 July 2006, zipped without alteration. Every file inside retains its original modification timestamp. This is the artifact; the page above is a reading of it.

• The complete 2006 website, zipped unaltered (5.5 MB)
• Projected Profit and Loss — typical location (PDF, exported from Excel 7 April 2005)
• Projected Profit and Loss — major city location (PDF, exported from Excel 2 May 2005)

Back to the record.