Leverages insights and digital payments to boost productivity and customer satisfaction.
Case Study
Capro, Inc. partners with Silo.
“The kind of style that we have of selling, wholesaling, and importing, was started by my father. He doesn’t just see a number, he knows their families, and what they do on their trips. All of our clients are our actual friends.”
Franky Verdecia
Sales & Operations at Capro, Inc.
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Let's get to know
Capro, Inc.
Capro has been importing and distributing tropical produce since 2015, working directly with small Latin American farms that have been growing premium fruits and vegetables for OVER 40 years. A family-owned business, multi-generational partners Rodrigo, Yuri and Vladimir specialize in bananas, plantains, yuca, and other Central American specialties that are sold in 20+states.
Location
Miami, FL
Team Size
11
Their Goals
Level up their business, and turn the Congo brand into a household name.
In an industry dominated by big players like Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte, Capro has remained competitive by building popularity around a niche market of green cooking bananas that can stay fresh for up to two months. That’s a competitive edge!
Special ingredient to share
Capro’s premium bananas come from Grupo San Alberto, a pioneer for improving the social and environmental aspects of banana production. They were one of the first farms to receive Rainforest Alliance certification. Workers at Grupo San Alberto live in rent-free housing, provide schooling for their children, and through the sale of their bananas, gives workers and families the incentives needed to continue their formal education. See Video
Capro partners with Silo to deliver a better experience for their customers–and employees.
The Challenge
The Capro team has a reputation for being a small but mighty service-based production team that builds growing and lasting relationships with their customers and vendors. However, as their business scaled, their ability to deliver on that reputation was under attack. Leveraging a combination of QuickBooks and Google Sheets provided limited visibility into their inventory, made payments and collections burdensome, and created strain when onboarding new team members to help pick up the pace. Capro needed to find a solution that would connect the dots, reduce operational friction, and deliver the inventory and cash flow insights necessary to grow with confidence–quickly.
The Solution
By connecting Silo’s inventory and payment solutions to their QuickBooks account, the Capro team gained immediate control over their inventory and cash flow. They are purchasing more confidently, tracking expenses and applying them to more profitable sales. Silo’s payment and collections tools have empowered them to bring on new customers with limited risk and pre-pay their vendors with ease, further enabling them to execute on inventory demands. Reducing operational friction has freeing up time to build stronger relationships, onboard new team members quickly and strategize new business opportunities for further growth.
Silo makes things very simple. As soon as we connected to Silo, we grew.
The Results
Time Savings
Through the automation of tasks, access to consumable and actionable insights, and digital payments Capro is saving time across their operations freeing up time for strategy.
Reduced Losses, Bigger Profits
By being able to clearly see the big picture, Capro has been able to reduce produce losses, leading to increased sales and higher profits.
Increased Growth
Automating tasks gives the Capro team more time to think of new sales strategies, strengthen their business relationships, and focus on providing high-touch customer service.
Happier Employees
By eliminating tedious tasks, Silo is empowering Capro employees focus on the most important parts of their job, and do what they do best.
Faster Payments
Instead of waiting weeks for checks to clear, the Capro team is leveraging digital payments to get access to their cash flow instantly.
Read the Full Story
A motley crew of produce pioneers, searching for increased visibility and productive cash flow controls.
The Capro team has a reputation for being a small but mighty service-based production team that builds growing and lasting relationships with their customers and vendors. However, as their business scaled, their ability to deliver on that reputation was under attack. Leveraging a combination of QuickBooks and Google Sheets provided limited visibility into their inventory, made payments and collections burdensome, and created strain when onboarding new team members to help pick up the pace. Capro needed to find a solution that would connect the dots, reduce operational friction, and deliver the inventory and cash flow insights necessary to grow with confidence–quickly.
The Capro Team is a diverse group of individuals. They’ve successfully mixed seasoned produce experts with newcomers that bring to the table fresh perspectives from various industries. This gives them an advantage. As many companies hang on to ‘the way things are done’ mentality, they are prone to leaving typical produce production biases at the door. They refuse to let old school mentality pigeonhole them into becoming stagnate or keeping them from reaching their goals.
“There is only three of us here that have more than 5 years of experience in this business, but we are all committed to growing our sales, optimizing our operations and building an unmatched experience for our customers. We don’t let typical or traditional styles of selling, holding inventory, or invoicing get in the way of growth.”
With plans for rapid growth and the desire to create stronger customer relationships, the Capro team knew that what got them here, wouldn’t get them there. A few triggering events set them on a path to adopt a better way to manage their inventory, control their cash flow, and onboard new members of their team to keep their pace of expansion.
It used to take us half an hour to investigate an issue. Now it takes 5 to 10 seconds.
The road to inventory insight
Two years into joining the Capro Team, Franky Verdecia, a video production creative turned produce-pioneer, saw the need for operational change. “When you sit across accounting and operations, you see the inefficiencies. I knew that Google Sheets, QuickBooks, and relying on a 3rd party for limited inventory visibility wasn’t going to scale.”
“As we placed orders, we needed to see in real-time how much we had left,” says Franky. “When you’re monitoring 10,000 boxes of one product, you can't really do it by hand without errors. We moved to Google Sheets to give us visibility, but it was still a manual process and there's lots of room for human error. It’s very limited.”
One error, and you're not prioritizing your sales inventory the right way.
Every week the Capro team would execute on two sales periods, during which they would create a new Google Sheet to track their inventory. “It involved a lot of copying and pasting. One error, and you’re not prioritizing your sales inventory the right way. After two weeks we realized the Google Sheets formula wasn’t copied correctly. The bananas that we thought were one day old ended up being 21 days old. It was a little over 4,000 boxes of bananas.”
For many companies, an error like this can be devastating. “Moments of high blood pressure were definitely felt, but luckily, there were no losses. None of our customers complained, but it could have been a $30,000 loss right there. We realized we needed to find an alternative way to track and manage our inventory. At that point we were just guessing. We saw this as an attack on our customer experience. We couldn’t let that continue.”
After a few additional events that put strain on their inventory and warehouse teams, Franky found himself desperate for a solution. “It was a huge strain on me. I’m a techie, but I don’t have coding experience. I didn’t know how to piece together what we needed. For about five months, we did everything manual. I must have prayed that night and Jarod, from Silo, emailed me. I went to the website, saw the services Silo provided, and thought ‘oh, this is what we may need.’”
2 months in Silo, and we are able to focus on bringing new ideas to the table, actually contributing and adding value on ways to strategize and grow the business in general.
“As soon as we connected Silo to our QuickBooks, our team grew. Silo makes things very simple, stupid. Anyone with the most minimal computer knowledge can take it on–with a little practice. 2 days and people are feeling comfortable. 2 months in Silo, and we are able to focus on bring new ideas to the table, actually contributing and adding value on ways to strategize and grow the business in general.
We even had time to further build out an ecommerce portion of our business to help build our brand. We leveraged a second Silo account, in sync, to clearly track what we have.
Silo helps reduce our losses and increase our inventory visibility. We're able to see when inventory arrives, what the profit margin on each lot is, what our break-even costs are–we're able to see everything right there, clear cut, so we don't have to waste time opening up a tab on our computer or searching through old emails. You have all the information you need right there, it's perfect."
In addition, it helps with our historicals. One thing we weren't able to do before, very easily, is inventory investigations. It used to take us half an hour to investigate an issue. Now it takes 5 to 10 seconds. If a customer got something bad, we're able to track it right then and there. Our calls are proactive and informed. I mean, we're here to work smarter, not harder."
I’m able to review what vendor invoices need to be paid and, with a click of a button, a physical check is sent. Each vendor gets a check PDF with the invoice attached as proof of payment instantly.
Payment and collections that frees up time for business strategy
As a smaller company, Capro relies heavily on reinvesting collections back into their inventory. The typical produce methods of payment were sucking up valuable resources and contributing to stressful cash flow situations, keeping them for executing on growth opportunities they were excited about.
“We were either driving to the actual location of the vendor to deliver a check or cash, or we were walking it to a mailbox and praying for fast delivery. Our current building doesn't have a mailbox, so we spent a lot of time going to the post office and then the bank to reconcile our books. In some cases it was taking 2-3 weeks to collect payment off our terms. Some checks inevitably get lost, delayed, or sent elsewhere. Anytime payments are delayed it causes stress, and requires more of our time to follow up and investigate. Not fun.”
Once Capro started using Silo Pay, vendor and customer payment transactions that took 7-10 days, were done instantly. “Sure, some people still want checks, but with Silo it’s easier. I’m able to review what vendor invoices need to be paid and, with a click of a button, a physical check is sent. The physical checks take a few days to arrive, but each vendor gets a check PDF with the invoice attached as proof of payment instantly. In my opinion, being able to accept and make payments digitally is fun and saves time.”
Sometimes, we use Silo Pay to build trust slowly, asking our new customers to pay before the order goes out. Being able to make that happen, on the spot with digital payments, avoids waiting for a check to clear before taking action.
The fact that Silo lets you have that money right away so that we can reinvest it reduces so much stress. We fill orders confidently and give our vendors peace of mind. We know our vendors will have our orders ready for us. They want to get their payments quickly, and they know that they can trust us.
Going back to the customer service part, we always want to have inventory, because if we don't, there is a chance they could go somewhere else. Faster payment allows us to always have the inventory we need. Moving to Silo has made it easy for us to grow because we now have the time to invest in new strategies across sales, marketing materials, and talking to growers. Silo does ‘the behind the scenes’ and allows us to focus on building stronger relationships.”
