Apollo Gardening

The Challenge

For Sheffield-based Apollo Gardening, the leading supplier of gardening and DIY products (from landscape fabrics to incinerators; wire netting to greenhouse heaters), the main route to market vanished overnight.

Even though Finance Director Ben Leary and the rest of the management team hoped that the lockdown was creating a pent-up demand for supplies to improve homes and gardens, it was a worrying moment. Says he:

What the business needed was a financial wingman – a partner who could see their trajectory before the crisis hit, understand what they needed, and that had the ability to provide solutions to get them back on their flightpath. Above all, Apollo had to keep suppliers on-side, knowing that good relationships with them once lockdown lifted would be key to satisfying growing consumer demand; and enough working capital to nurse those retailers that were still open through the toughest weeks of the crisis.

The Solution

ABN AMRO Commercial Finance had been working with Apollo for 11 years, so we knew the business and the team. With a turnover touching £13m and a forward order book of around £1m when the crisis hit, we knew this was a strong company – and that we could adapt our existing solutions to meet the extraordinary conditions in March and April.

The confidential invoice discounting (CID) package we’d been running for Apollo was the perfect foundation. In the past Apollo has tended to use a seasonal top-up to manage the big fluctuations in cashflow – booming in spring and summer when there’s strong demand for gardening products, then declining in winter. We looked at the Covid-19 crisis as seasonal hit.

In addition to a £2.9m line in the CID package, which would flex up instantly as businesses reopened, we arranged a CBILS top-up loan of £725,000 for 12 months to ensure Apollo could keep their suppliers happy and maintain the skeleton staff in the warehouses, to serve the retailers who did remain open.

The Result

April and May were tense months. But the solution – and Apollo’s business – were robust enough to see them through. Apollo was delighted to be able to pay everything owed to suppliers. And by June, demand had come back so fast that the full capacity of the package wasn’t required. But back in April no one knew whether this would have been the case – and we don’t know any Finance Director who wants to take risks with critical supplier and customer relationships.