Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 9

Whatever business idea I did eventually land on, I was going to need to be able to fund its birth. Trudi and I talked this through and agreed that I take £50K from DRC to fund my new venture.

At around the same time, I attended a business start-up conference and exhibition and talked to the accountancy firm Baker Tilly, who had a stand there. I explained to one of their corporate finance partners that I had £100k – a small lie, but it sounded better than £50K – to invest in a new business. They were interested in working with start-up businesses, so now I had money, a business model and an advisory firm keen to work with me.

I just had to find the product. I asked myself where would be a great place to look for new ideas and before I knew it I was booking a ticket to New York. It occurred to me that great ideas often come out of the US and they inevitably find their way across the Atlantic.

I had never been to New York and here I was off to find an idea for a new business to start in London. I suppose this kind of thing is part of what makes being an entrepreneur such fun; it is an adventure that unfolds day by day and if you relish this you will relish entrepreneurship.

When in New York, each day I would head into town on the subway and pick a different area to explore. My tendency was to look at retail businesses, who sold direct to customers. From what I saw, three opportunities stood out:

1 A small retail outlet called Custard Beach. It sold tubs of frozen yoghurt for customers to eat in or take away.

2 A restaurant and cinema called The Screening Room. This was basically a large, casual restaurant with various cinema screens incorporated into it.

3 Filter coffee being sold in convenience stores (c-stores), like 7-Eleven. I remember seeing all types – suited business people, office workers, delivery drivers, builders, New York cabbies – buying cups of coffee to take away in Styrofoam cups for a dollar a go.

All of these appealed to me. Custard Beach was fun and the product tasted great. People were clearly buying and loving it; it could be a real success rolled out across London. But I had a nagging doubt – the British weather.

The Screening Room was just opening and I could see the concept working in the UK, particularly London. However, combining food and cinema seemed a big task and it was also reliant on the right kind of property.

This left the coffee in convenience stores. What appealed was the sheer volume of filter coffee in plain cups that was flying out of the door of these no frills convenience chains. There was no real estate, no staff and I was aware that coffee bars such as the Seattle Coffee Company had started opening in London. Maybe there was a new trend emerging for coffee drinking in Britain?

I was in New York for a week and then decided to visit the largest shopping mall in America – the Mall of America in Minneapolis – in the hope that I might see an exciting idea there. After a long day walking this enormous mall, one night I found myself flicking through the yellow pages in my hotel room. I reached ‘coffee making equipment’ and decided to call one of the companies listed. They were very helpful and I arranged to meet them the following morning at my hotel.

When I went downstairs to the lobby I was met by a representative of the company who took me out to the car park, where there was a very, very large A-team-type transit van branded in the company’s logo and colours. He slid the side door open and a fully kitted out coffee equipment showroom emerged, complete with leather swivel chairs and the most enormous coffee machine. He gave me the full demonstration and I sampled the coffee, which was amazing.

Three things occurred to me; the machine was huge, could I really see this in a newsagent? Also it was not a machine that a customer could use themselves. Finally, it was expensive, or at least I thought so, and I’d need to sell a lot of coffee to make this work. If this idea was to be the one I ran with I’d need a much smaller, lower-cost machine that was really easy for people to use.