Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 17

At the start of the year I had two sites trading, both small independent stores, one in South London and the other in Wandsworth. Results were hardly spectacular, with sales of 40 to 50 cups per week. I realised that I needed to be in more professional retail environments and the meeting just before Christmas with Spar could not have come sooner. I was keen to get what we had discussed formalised on paper.

By March I had a letter of commitment from Spar to working “in partnership over a trial period to bring the best coffee offer to the consumer.” The plan involved me undertaking assessments of a list of potential locations in order to identify a minimum of ten trial sites. If all went well we expected to be reviewing the trials in the autumn and planning a 100 store roll-out.

Spar was excited to bring convenience coffee to the British marketplace and they sent me their internal scoping document. It was highly complimentary to my little company. They had met with four other businesses and selected Coffee Nation for a number of reasons: knowledge of the independent sector; willingness to work with Spar to develop the offer; and vision and skill in looking to develop the concept.

With an initial list of 30 Spar stores from which to work – all keen to sell coffee – I clocked up the miles visiting them around the UK. I was armed with data on store size, weekly footfall and sales turnover, and I felt I was going about this in a professional manner.

I had also been introduced to the Alldays convenience store group. I thought I would start at the top so I wrote a letter to the CEO, feeling that as I was the managing director of Coffee Nation I could talk to the MD of any other business.

By mid-February I had met with the Alldays CEO and new business development director. They wrote to me setting out their goal of hot drinks becoming “a valuable high margin revenue generator featured as a standard offer across our estate. We have both seen coffee approaching 10% of store turnover in the US and this remains the target we must aim for.” They also agreed to work with me exclusively on the trials.

Alldays had an estate of 700 stores and Spar some 2500. The potential seemed almost limitless and I had commitments in writing from both these groups. Alldays agreed to pilot 20 machines in grab’n’go locations. This was bloody exciting!

I was keen to get something on paper with Nestlé too. They wrote to me describing Coffee Nation as innovative and entrepreneurial. They set out how consumers were starting to embrace quality food solutions available out of home and how “Coffee Nation offers the retailer an ideal way of exploiting this trend.”

I relocated the business away from my tiny office in Soho and for about the same price I rented a two room office in a managed workspace building called Leroy House in Islington, North London.