For UK restaurateurs tired of watching quiet services go to waste
Turn quiet tables into business purchasing power.
The covers you don't fill on a quiet Tuesday, the private room that sits dark, the lunches that never quite pick up — put them to work and earn Silva to spend across the network.
A table that goes empty tonight can never be sold again — so put that quiet capacity to work and spend it back.
No cash changes hands for Silva · You set the covers and services you open up · UK members only
Sound familiar?
No restaurateur goes looking for a capacity exchange. You just want these fixed.
Every restaurateur feels at least one of these. Almost none connect them to the empty covers they already have on the books.
Do early-week services run half empty?
Mondays and Tuesdays you can never quite fill, whatever you try.
Are food and energy costs climbing?
Every invoice creeps up while margins get thinner.
Does the private dining room sit dark?
A whole room set aside, earning nothing on the nights it goes unbooked.
Are no-shows eating your covers?
Tables held, prep done, and the seats stay empty at service.
Have discount apps trained diners to wait?
Customers hold out for the next deal instead of paying full price.
Do fixed costs bite hardest on quiet nights?
Chefs, front of house and rent are paid whether the room is full or not.
What almost everyone misses
The quiet lunches, the empty midweek covers, the dark private room — that unsold capacity is real value already sitting inside your restaurant. Silvatree is the mechanism that turns those empty covers into business purchasing power you can spend.
The idea
One week’s work. Two pots, not one.
The old way: work hard, cash in, cash out, bills paid, nothing left. With Silvatree you generate the same cash, but you also fill a second pot by selling idle capacity to Silvatree members. The two-pot way is: cash in, less cash out, some cash remaining — and Silva in, Silva out, paying the rest of the bills. The second pot is business purchasing power.
Wages, rent and tax drain it. A full week of work — and nothing left to show for it.
Your cash pays the expenses that can only be paid in cash — rent, wages, electricity, leases, taxes. A second pot fills from idle capacity you'd have wasted, and pays for marketing, repairs, printing, accounting, cleaning and tradesmen.
1 Silva = £1 for tax & accounting · spending power inside the network, never exchanged for cash.
How it works
Three steps, from quiet table to purchasing power.
You have spare capacity
Half-empty midweek services, a dark private dining room, quiet lunches — covers that expire the moment service ends, every single day.
Silvatree puts it to work
We match the covers and services you choose to open up with members who want to dine. You get paid in Silva for tables that earned you nothing before.
You spend your Silva
On the things your restaurant already buys — accounting, marketing, laundry, maintenance, refurbishment — keeping your cash in the bank for the bills that only take cash.
New to the idea? What is a Capacity Exchange?
What you can put to work
Find the spare capacity inside your restaurant.
If it goes empty when it isn't booked, and tonight's version can never be sold again, it belongs here.
Quiet early-week tables
Fill the seats on the nights that run half empty.
Empty daytime covers
Put quiet lunches to work when the room is barely a third full.
The unbooked room
A whole room that earns nothing on the nights no one has taken it.
Early and late tables
The 5pm and last-sitting slots that regularly go unsold.
Quiet-period covers
Open a fixed menu on your slowest services without touching peak trade.
Idle event capacity
Bar areas and back rooms that sit empty between bookings.
Experience covers
Premium seats that only earn when someone is in them.
Between-season tables
The quiet fortnights either side of your busy stretch.
Why it's safer
Business trading, without the borrowed money.
Most trade exchanges quietly let the owner/operator run up a large negative trade balance it never has to repay — diluting the value of every other member’s credits. Silvatree is built so that can never happen.
We can never owe the network
Silvatree's own accounts have a hard zero floor. We can't hold a negative balance or extend ourselves a line of credit — full stop.
Silva is earned, never printed
A Silva only exists because a real trade happened between two members. It can't be created out of thin air or bought for cash.
A Reserve Fund stands behind you
If a member ever leaves owing, the Reserve Fund absorbs it immediately — so positive balances stay protected whatever happens next.
If we ever wind down, we go last
Our own balance is wiped out first, leaving more in the pot for members. We put the network ahead of ourselves by design.
How we prove it
Our ledger is built so the network always sums to zero.
This isn't a choice — it's how we protect the system, and it's how the ledger was constructed. Here's what that means for your balance.
The network always sums to zero. Every Silva earned is a Silva owed — the whole system balances to nothing, by construction.
No outsized balances. No member is allowed to sit on a large positive or negative position that could destabilise the network.
Silvatree's own accounts are always positive. The company can never hold a negative balance. It can never owe the system. It cannot issue itself Silva — it can only earn it like every other member. Both the rules and the platform architecture enforce this.
These rules are set out in the Silvatree Exchange Terms & Conditions — the rules the whole network runs on.
Straight talk on fees
Three fees. The same for every member.
There are no tiers at Silvatree — no bronze, silver or gold, and no badge attached to how much you trade. Every member pays the same three fees, worked out the same way, and what you pay turns on one thing: how much of your existing spending you decide to route through the network. Charging by size of business would be arbitrary, because a large firm might trade very little and a small one a great deal. A flat fee would mean the smallest members subsidise the largest.
Joining fee
2%
of the spending you declare
- Minimum £200, maximum £6,000
- Paid once, on admission
Monthly subscription
£20
a month, plus 0.2% of your declared spend ÷ 12
- £24.17 a month on a £25,000 declaration
- £20 more in months you put nothing into the network
Transaction fee
6% + 1%
in cash, and in Silva
- Paid by the seller on each exchange
- The 1% in Silva funds the Reserve Fund
That is the whole structure. There is nothing else to pay — no tier to upgrade to, no charge for finding you buyers, and no fee for closing your account.
- ✓All fees are exclusive of VAT.
- ✓We never charge interest on Trading Headroom, and never take security or personal guarantees.
- ✓If a full year of genuine engagement has not delivered, we refund your joining fee.
What members say
From members
“I joined Silvatree 2 months ago and have already accumulated three new clients for my digital marketing services.”
I have been able to go from operating at 50% capacity to 75% and have subsequently been able to use my Silva to pay for a business coach who is helping me to scale my business and attract more clients, as well as paying for my accounting services and bookkeeping.
“As accountants we have experienced a great influx of new clients that we would never have previously had.”
This has increased our bottom line, and enabled us to help many who would otherwise not have had the cash to pay for our services — which means we can pay for many business expenses in Silva that we would otherwise have paid for in cash.
Questions
Restaurants: common questions
- What counts as spare capacity for a restaurant?
- The covers that go empty when they aren't booked: quiet early-week services, unfilled lunch sittings, off-peak tables and a private dining room that sits dark. Tonight's empty cover can never be sold again, so it is exactly the kind of capacity the exchange is for.
- Do we have to open up every quiet table?
- No. You set which covers and services you release, so you can protect your busy Friday and Saturday trade and only offer the midweek and off-peak seats that would otherwise stay empty.
- What can we spend the Silva we earn on?
- On things the restaurant already pays for through the network — accounting, marketing, laundry, maintenance and refurbishment — keeping your cash for the suppliers who only take cash. Silva is a unit of account (1 Silva = £1 for record-keeping) and is spending power inside the network, not cash you cash out.
- Who would be sitting at those tables?
- Other UK member businesses and their teams, matched to the covers you choose to open up. Silvatree is UK members only, so you're filling quiet services with genuine trade rather than discounting to the public.
Silvatree works across sectors
One model, told through the spare capacity in each industry.
- Hotels & staysMidweek rooms, off-season nights and unsold spa slots.
- Salons & clinicsUnbooked chairs, quiet treatment rooms and slow mornings.
- RetailSlow-moving stock, quiet hours and empty shelf space.
- Print & productionIdle press hours, quiet studio and finishing time.
- Media & outdoorUnsold billboards, unbooked airtime and blank pages.
- Trades & servicesGaps between jobs, cancelled bookings and quiet weeks.
- Professional servicesUnbilled hours, bench time and quiet post-year-end weeks.
Find out if Silvatree is right for your business.
Book a free suitability call. We run an expense analysis, share a capacity & profit report, and tell you honestly whether it's a fit — we'll be the first to say if it isn't.
Not ready to join? No pressure. Go on our standby list and we'll get in touch whenever there's business we can send your way.
Not sure yet? Take the 2-minute readiness test.
Short of time? Talk it through with our AI capacity adviser — available 24/7. It'll cover most of what we'd discuss on the call.