Are you running a circular business? Reuse, recycle, upcycle, squeeze every last drop of value from your business inputs and multiply your returns.
Find out how Shoreline has been working with one of our clients Whybuy to fully account for the value they generate from operating as a circular business.
Case study: How an accountant helped Whybuy switch to a circular model
Jeremy Piper spent 15 years running a business repairing and reselling second-hand appliances before he went circular.
For him, this meant shifting to a PaaS model. His company, Whybuy, loans refurbished fridges, washing machines, dryers, televisions and microwaves to subscribers.
“We know how to repair our fleet and, when an appliance is retired, it’s stripped of its valuable parts,” Piper says.
“Because of this, we lose very little capital. We don’t just see our appliances in whole, but as a collection of parts. Shelves, fans, doors, computers – all can be reused to bring several machines back to life.”
In establishing Whybuy, Piper worked closely with his accountant, Adam Espie of Shoreline Advisory.
“Early strategy meetings identified the limitation of the then-second hand appliance business as the cost and lack of availability of stock,” Espie says.
“A change to circular practices was identified as a key strategy to drive growth.”
Espie says that the team believed adopting circular practices would improve profit and efficiency, and that this belief has now been proven correct.
At tax time, Espie makes the most of depreciation laws to write off new assets.
Further, he and Piper are working on an integrated asset ledger to capture the additional ‘harvest value’ of each asset’s parts.
“This will fully measure the benefit Whybuy achieves by operating as a circular business,” Espie says.
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