Is hoping for government help holding your business back?

I started this article differently. I opened with my gut reaction to the autumn budget, but after a proper night’s sleep and a nudge from my editor, I realised I was drifting away from a belief I live by: focus on what you can control. I’ve built Ceres from scratch, gone through some tough days and some easier days, and I’ve learned that business is a cycle everyone will endure.

I also reminded myself of something important. The people who most need help usually won’t be reading articles like this. The people who do read them are often already the ones trying to get better. But if an article stirs up a bit of passion, it can push good businesses to think harder, act sharper, and move forward. That’s why I’ve written pieces like this for years, right back to my days writing for Fish and Chips and Fast Food magazine in 2007. They stimulate conversation, and conversation is where change starts.

In the last six months the industry story has come back to lowering VAT, because it’s the headline everyone comes back to. And to be clear, VAT is a consumer tax. Businesses simply collect it and pass it on. I agree, 20% VAT is not lovely for consumers. But I don’t think it is the biggest issue right now. The biggest issue is the price of fish. On a recent News Review podcast with David Nicolaou, I asked a simple question: would anyone care about VAT if frozen-at-sea cod was £200 for a 45lb case? I honestly don’t think they would. If cod was back down to £200, your margins would be fantastic and VAT would shrink in importance overnight.

If the hyperbolic Trump actually managed to force a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, then yes, we could see fish prices, gas prices, and fertiliser prices fall. If that happened, the profit potential would be huge because everyone’s prices are baked in for the higher premiums you have all been carrying. But that’s a hypothesis, not a business plan. You can’t run your shops on “maybe the world will calm down.”

Here’s the uncomfortable thought I keep chewing over. Could constantly looking at the economy, government, and begging for a VAT cut like Oliver Twist actually be a negative? Could it be distracting us from looking at our own businesses and making them better?

It reminds me of that meme with two queues for unhealthy people. One queue is for diet and exercise, and it’s empty. The other queue is for the miracle fix and it’s 100 strong. The truth is, this government isn’t going to help us the way we want. Their focus is elsewhere. Some people will love their choices, others will hate them. But either way, waiting around for them to rescue our margins is a waste of emotional energy, and worse than that, it risks pulling our attention away from what we can fix ourselves.

Let me be clear. I am not saying campaigning for lower VAT is a waste of time. I’m saying it needs long-term thinking, a real campaign with all stakeholders rowing in the same direction. It’s not an easy job. Many say we should have the same VAT system as other EU countries, where hospitality often has a lower rate. But the key difference is that those countries usually apply VAT to supermarket food too, including staples like eggs, chicken, seafood, and vegetables. Can you imagine the red top newspapers screaming blue murder if the UK ever did that? The hard truth is that no government adds consumer tax to staple goods lightly. I just cannot see it happening here.

That’s why the constant VAT debate in our industry feels like Groundhog Day. Same arguments, same hope, same disappointment. Meanwhile, time passes and costs keep moving.

This is an illustration for effect, not a prediction.

And if you want a reminder that fish & chips isn’t top of the political list, look at wider hospitality. Restaurants have had it much harder than takeaway retail. They employ far more staff, and those staff often cost more. They run larger locations, pay business rates, and carry bigger overheads. Their menus are wider, which means more stock holding and more waste. They were screaming for VAT reform, and they got almost no acknowledgement. In fact, they were hit harder on business rates. That should tell us something. If they can be ignored, so can we. Which is exactly why we cannot build our plans around being rescued.

If we accept, right now, that the government isn’t going to change things for our benefit, something interesting happens. We stop waiting. We stop looking over our shoulder for permission to improve. And we get our focus back on the only thing that will keep us alive and profitable in any climate: making the business tighter, sharper, and more valuable to the customer than the shop down the road. Efficiency, yield, menu discipline, pricing confidence, better buying, better prep, better service. These are not exciting headlines, but they are the levers that win in the real world, whether the economy is booming or miserable. And if, at some point, the government does throw business a bone, fine. We’ll take it. But by then we’re not relying on it. It’s a double bonus, not the life raft.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us with the one thing we actually control. Our own businesses.

I’ve always been a big proponent of looking at your business with a microscope. Recently, a customer of mine has been reviewing his gross profit and costings weekly. Weekly. Not yearly. That level of discipline forces you to face what’s real, not what you hope is true.

So here’s my blunt question to you: can you afford to wait 12 months before talking to your accountant and finding out what really happened to your business? The details matter. You don’t build longevity on a yearly surprise. You build it on weekly truth.

I’ve written hundreds of articles and spoken on The Ceres Podcast for years about this. We need to drill down into our own businesses and make the tweaks that keep them healthy. The government isn’t coming to help you. And we shouldn’t be waiting for a budget announcement to make efficiencies. If you look closely with a routine, you make smaller decisions every week, not desperate ones once a year.

A mentor of mine repeatedly tells me cash flow is the lifeblood of a business. He’s spot on. When cash flow runs out, the business doesn’t limp. It collapses. Fish and chips has always been built on volume. With all the post-Covid shocks and geopolitical chaos, many of us have drifted away from that core job of driving footfall and portions sold. We’ve been coping instead of sharpening.

We need to get back to basics:

• Trim the menu.

• Reduce stock holding.

• Improve product quality.

• Increase yields.

• Remove items that are mediocre in flavour, low in sales, and just taking up space in the freezer or on the shelf.

And while we’re on money discipline, stop treating VAT like it’s yours. VAT is paid by the customer, and you’re just collecting it for HMRC. McDonald’s never counts VAT as turnover, and neither should you. If you take £10,000 through the till, only about £8,334 is your revenue. The rest is the taxman’s money passing through your hands. Set aside that 20%, or one sixth, every week. Not later.

Here’s a visual technique I use, and it works at every level. Imagine that every box in your freezer is money, the money you paid for it. If it sits in that freezer for 12 weeks, that money could have been in your bank account. A big menu fills your freezer and shelves with slow-moving stock. That’s cash sat there doing nothing for weeks, when it could be working harder in the products that give you the best gross profit, like fish.

There was a saying that cash is king. I’d go further. Cash flow is king.

Now, there might be a silver lining. With this government increasing wages, raising benefits, and lifting the two-child cap, some winners in the economy will start spending. People at the bottom end feeling a bit more flush usually spend in takeaways. People in the middle and top who are being squeezed will get choosier. That means our industry is in a prime position to capitalise, but only if we fight for it. We have no right to exist. We earn that right by being better than the alternative.

So listen. I’m not defending the government. I’m saying we need to take control of what we can control. Stop waiting for someone to fix it. Take ownership, get disciplined, and fix your business. Because no one is coming to help you.