Janine Allis took on some major challenges to get her Boost Juice business up and running.
IT’S hard to reconcile the obvious success of the Boost Juice chain with the fact that founder Janine Allis and her husband, Jeff, had to sell their house and raise $250,000 through friends to set up their first store in Adelaide in 2000.
A decade later, the pair sold their 70 per cent stake in the company to US private equity firm, The Riverside Company, for more than $65 million and have embarked on a new venture to set up a chain of Mexican food outlets around the country.
Ms Allis, who had no previous business experience, got the idea for Boost Juice after travelling to the US and witnessing the popularity of juice bars.
“I left school at 16, I’ve worked as a publicist, a steward on a yacht and a nanny and I have not qualified for one thing in my life, but I think it’s just tenacity, problem solving and common sense that have got me where I am today,” Ms Allis told WA Business News.
Ms Allis worked in the business for the first 12 months, learning from her own on-the-job experiences and seeking advice from other franchisors.
“I had never run a business before and I was putting in 80 to 100 hours a week,” Ms Allis says.
“I stopped seeing all my friends, I stopped having a life and it was really Boost, my kids and my husband as a distant third, but I fell in love with the process.”
Two more Boost Juice stores opened in that first year, but Ms Allis says the turning point for the business came when she was approached by Westfield to open 18 stores across Australia in 2001.
Wanting to grow the brand further, Ms Allis decided to implement a franchising model early into the venture.
“In the first year we met a man called Rod Young and he really guided us on how to franchise; before we knew it we had this enormous enquiry list of 134 people, so we could really pick exactly the right type of people we wanted in the business,” Ms Allis says.
However, Ms Allis says if she had her time again, she would have not made the decision to adopt a franchise model while the business was so young.
“In hindsight, I wouldn’t recommend someone taking franchise over a business that was 16 months old because it hasn’t been around long enough to have the necessary systems and processes in place,” she says.
The venture paid off, though, and Boost recorded record growth, opening 70 stores in 2004.
Also that year, Boost bought out its major competitor, Viva Juice, and Ms Allis turned her attention to expanding the brand overseas.
“We decided to look at our capabilities for growth; for us it was never part of the plan to open as many stores as we could as we didn’t want to ‘cannibalise’ the business, so we looked internationally and thought we were as strong and as good as any of the brands overseas,” she says.
Today, Boost Juice has 185 stores nationally and 52 stores overseas, with the brand doing well in the UK, South Africa, Malaysia and Chile in particular.
Looking back over the past 10 years, Ms Allis attributed the company’s success to hard work, good people and a change in consumer sentiment.
“Even though I didn’t have any business skills I was very operational minded, but it was also a moment in time ... I think everyone was just sick of fatty fast food and it was good timing,” she says.
In 2008, Ms Allis bought a second business, a Mexican eatery known as Salsa’s Fresh Mex Grill, which had four stores in Melbourne.
“We believed that we could find another successful brand and plug it in with the same customer service and product quality values as Boost and we saw a real hole in the market for Mexican food,” Ms Allis says.
There are currently 22 Salsa’s stores across Australia with two in WA – at Carousel Shopping Centre and Morley Galleria.
Along with continuing to expand the Salsa’s brand, Ms Allis hopes to add another food brand to her business portfolio.
But her greatest joy is watching the people in her business grow and move onto ‘bigger and better things’.
“All the lessons I’ve learned are around people, make sure you surround yourself with great people and if someone is not working out for both of your sakes move on, because the damage someone can do to the business takes too long to fix.”
