Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 26

I met with various espresso machine distributors and coffee companies and some of these suggested they could invest in the company in return for preferential terms on their equipment. Of course, they were starting to see there really could be a new market channel here. Convenience retailing was fast growing and I offered a new route to machine and coffee sales.

Various offers came in and I spent considerable time trying to close these deals. On many occasions since I have thanked God that none of them came off. They all came with conditions. I’d be tied into a single brand of espresso machine, I’d have to use their service team to maintain the equipment, base my company out of their site, use their call centre teams and administration support, etc. It was Nestlé all over again but in a different guise and all for small amounts of money and big equity stakes (I think the worst was an offer of £30k for 30% of the business).

Another realisation that came to me was that many of these companies, whilst successful, were all selling someone else’s product. They were decent businesses and great people but despite my precarious state I had something truly different and exciting. I wanted to build a high-growth consumer company that was doing something nobody else was. I’d got the formula right now – I just needed someone who believed in this.

I held my nerve and met with an old contact from my consultancy days. Martin and I met a number of times and I took him to Faversham to experience the new concept. He got it, we had good rapport and he saw it as the democratisation of coffee, or “coffee without the bollocks” as he put it (no newspapers, no leather armchairs, no muffins).

He agreed to invest £30k. We signed and he transferred the money at the end of the week. I still have the bank statements: -£40k went to -£10k. I had a stay of execution.

I gained an enthusiastic supporter in Martin. It was a fair deal for both parties. He is a dear friend to this day and he eventually made good money from his very bold and brave investment back in 1998. I gladly offered him a seat on the board, which he held until 2002. He helped me on many occasions.