What is a good profit margin for a Hawick takeaway?
Carlton Scott | Scottish Borders Business | September 2026
Between 6% and 12% net, on Nory’s UK takeaway benchmarks, and a Hawick shop should be aiming at the top of that range because its running costs are lower than in the pricier Borders towns. Tenzo’s 2026 figures put quick-service restaurants at 6% to 9%. The shops that fall short here usually have plenty of customers and too little margin, because they have been competing on price in a town that rewards consistency.
Hawick is the biggest town in the Borders, and takeaway is a weekly ritual here in a way the smaller towns can’t match: rugby nights, family Fridays, and a working town’s appetite for hot food without fuss. The town keeps adding reasons to visit. The Borders Distillery, the first in the region since 1837, brings tour visitors into the centre, the knitwear outlets pull shoppers from well beyond the town, and Wilton Lodge Park, 107 acres of riverside park along the Teviot, fills with dog walkers and families in every season. Once a year the Common Riding brings the whole town and its far-flung sons and daughters past every counter in the same week.
Should my Hawick takeaway compete on price?
No, and it is the most expensive habit in the town. In a value-conscious place the instinct is to compete on price, and that is a war nobody wins. Cut a £2.80 meal to £2.40 and you need a sixth more orders just to stand still. The shops that do well in Hawick do the opposite: they price honestly, they turn a weekly customer into a twice-weekly one by being consistently good and consistently fast, and they let the town’s lower costs do the competing for them. Frequency beats footfall in a town of regulars.
What we see in Borders takeaways is that the price cut is always the first idea and never the one that works; the second order from the same customer is worth more than the first from a new one, and it costs nothing to win.
How much commission does Just Eat take from my takeaway?
Around 30% on orders Just Eat delivers and 14% plus VAT where you deliver yourself, on Just Eat’s own published rates, and a May 2026 guide to reducing Just Eat commission puts the all-in cost of a marketplace order at 25% to 31% of the sale once fees and promotions are counted. On a £20 order that is £6 gone before the food. In a town of regulars the collection trade is the profitable core and the apps are the top-up, so price app orders separately, put the web address on every bag, and move the weekly customers to ordering direct.
How do I control waste in a takeaway?
Weigh what goes in the bin for a fortnight, then change the prep list rather than the menu. Most takeaway waste is prepped food that never sold: rice, chips, sauces and salad made for a Friday that turned out like a Tuesday. Record the leftovers by item each night, set prep to the day of the week and the fixture list, and check portions against the costed recipe every week. A shop with regulars has the easiest prep list in the trade to predict, because the same people order the same things on the same nights.
How much should a takeaway pay for electricity?
Around £16,900 a year for cooking alone on average, on Business Comparison’s 2025 guide to takeaway electricity, from about £9,600 for a sandwich shop to £21,800 for an Indian takeaway, and chip shops with the fryers on all day have been reported paying over £15,000. The lever is the contract first, then the kit: never let a fixed deal roll onto out-of-contract rates, run the fryers and hot-holding to the trade rather than the clock, and read the meter weekly so the bill stops being a surprise. In Hawick, where rent and rates are kinder than elsewhere in the Borders, energy is often the biggest fixed cost left to attack.
How much does a business coach cost in the Scottish Borders?
Between £500 and £3,500 a month plus VAT for one-to-one coaching, depending on the coach’s experience, according to Alan Wick’s May 2026 guide to UK coaching fees, and the bill runs for as long as the coaching does. What moves the price of any advice is how much of the work the adviser does for you: coaching talks you through it, and a fixed-fee diagnose-and-fix piece of work goes through the numbers with you and makes the changes. The Profit Clarity Framework is the second kind: a fixed £1,495 + VAT for 30 days on your takeaway’s real numbers, and nothing after that.
Where can a Hawick takeaway owner get help with the numbers?
That’s exactly what the Profit Clarity Framework™ does: a 30-day diagnose-and-fix process on your real numbers at the fixed fee above, built for owners who are on service every night, and it leaves you with a more profitable takeaway. We’ve set out how it works for the town’s takeaways on our Hawick takeaway page, including how little of your time it takes and what we’d need to start. There’s also an overview of the framework for takeaways, and the same numbers at work in two busier towns in our Jedburgh takeaway article and our Galashiels takeaway article. Most clients who commit to the framework and follow our recommendations see a full return on the fee within 90 days.
Photo © John H Darch, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph (geograph.org.uk/photo/4890073)