Pholicious

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PhoLicious Leverages On-Demand Labor to Scale Their Rapidly Growing Business

Founded and operated by Anh and Joseph Trousdale, PhoLicious is a food manufacturer and distributor of authentic Pho that entered the E-com space in May 2021. Soaring sales on Amazon and gaining massive popularity online after winning QVC’s, The Big Find contest, secured Anh and Joseph’s chance to pitch Walmart and Sam’s Club in June 2022.

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Upon securing launches with two of the world’s largest chains, the opportunity was clear but the path to delivering on their dream was not. Anh and Joseph knew they couldn’t produce their first large order alone, but understood the risks and costs associated with a full-time hiring strategy or temp staffing solution for a potential one-time order. That’s where Veryable came in.

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After consulting with Veryable’s team to formulate an assembly layout and production plan, PhoLicious began leveraging flexible capacity in December 2022 to fulfill large orders with short lead times while staying lean to maximize profits – and never looked back.

*some quotes have been altered slightly to enhance clarity

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Leveraging Veryable's Expertise for Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity

Running a small business in manufacturing or distribution leaves no margin for error and reveals a multitude of questions. How do you grow without overextending? How will you deliver on customer promises without eating into your profit margins? Add in volatile demand and the only answer is flexibility.

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Every successful small business has a catalytic moment that forces a make-it-or-break-it decision. For PhoLicious, it was a 100-pallet order due in just a couple of weeks. Joseph and Anh contemplated, “We needed help – but do we have enough money to hire more people? What about sales? I don’t really want to do this, but we have to hire 5 people to complete this order and if that doesn’t happen, then we’ll have to lay them off. But we have to run our business.”

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Crunched for time and looking for answers, Joseph and Anh weren’t sure where to turn. “I’d dealt with temp agencies before and it was just a lot of headaches. Luckily, a good friend recommended Veryable saying they are nothing like that. So I reached out and I’m glad I did,” said Joseph.

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“Several people from Veryable came out to our facility and gave us recommendations based on what we wanted to do. They helped us utilize labor better. They helped us organize our layout so everything flowed smoothly,” said the PhoLicious founders. Veryable takes a consultative approach to produce long-term partnerships because our success isn’t hinged on the volume of usage, but on the intrinsic value businesses create by implementing a flexible operational strategy.

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Building a Labor Pool to Combat Volatile Demand

When businesses don’t have the capacity to match demand 1:1, they may lean too heavily on their full-time workforce. Joseph provides a perfect example of the negative implications of an inflexible labor strategy when faced with a demand uptick; “Everybody’s working super fast, making mistakes, it goes out to the customers, they get complaints and then we could lose the contract and have to lay off everybody. It goes both ways – either having too much labor or not enough.”

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Businesses with unpredictable demand must think outside of the box to stay profitable through the peaks and valleys. “Veryable helps us with on-demand scaling. We don’t know what the future holds, right now it’s just one order at a time. So if a large order comes in, we can use Veryable so we don’t have to worry about keeping people on the payroll until we get the next order,” said Anh Trousdale.

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Whatever challenge arises, PhoLicious has the confidence to tackle it thanks to Veryable’s concept of flexible capacity. Joseph remarks, “Anyone who’s in my Labor Pool, I know I can count on. I don’t have that question anymore of “what’s going to happen tomorrow” because I already have my Labor Pool.” By leveraging on-demand labor to build of flexible extension of their workforce, PhoLicious removed labor as a constraint to take on any order – regardless of size or timeline. “With a small business, every day it’s something different; there’s always something changing, and we can’t predict it. With Veryable, we can be flexible,” said Anh.

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A Closer Look: Scaling with Demand