I was working in a small provincial town recently and spoke to the owners of two coffee shops approximately thirty yards apart. They were on the usual, slightly decimated, High Street that can be found in almost any town in the UK. Lots of “To Let” signs and empty stores. In between them was a… Read More »
And don’t forget about our webinar on Tuesday! We’re going to be going through the seven main ways (for almost any business) that you can drive new customers through your doors. It’s a totally free one hour webinar and we hope to provide you with some real value as well as introduce an entirely new… Read More »
Recently I’ve been working with a lot of very successful operators… Recently I’ve been talking to a lot of operators who are really struggling… Today I realised that, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, these two groups thought entirely differently about one key factor… They way they think about the customers in relation to the success or failure of… Read More »
At Caffe Culture this year much of what Hugh and I will be doing is talking about marketing. In our coffeeshopquestion survey (which if you haven’t filled it out yet – please DO!) the biggest issue so far is an inability to attract new customers. Therefore this will be a major part of our talk.… Read More »
Today’s Guardian has yet another story about the closure of pubs and clubs. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/06/bars-pubs-bust We’ve talked about this many times and in many formats but it continues to be a great opportunity for coffee shops. The reality is that the big three historical centres of a community are all disappearing: 1. Churches – as a… Read More »
Hugh and I were kindly invited by Jeffery Young of Allegra Strategies to attend the UK Coffee Leader Summit on the day previous to Caffe Culture. These events are always useful from a networking perspective (even though that’s generally an expression that puts the fear of god into me) but there was some great content… Read More »
On Sunday and Monday of this week Hugo and I were speaking at the Hotelympia show in London. Ultimately both talks went very well and we had good audiences at both but it was a graphic illustration of the need to have a strong “reason why” in terms of promotion. There had been very little… Read More »
Every coffee business of almost any type (even the unsuccessful ones) manages to generate some fiercely loyal customers. These customers very often visit every day and sometimes will visit several times a day. Occasionally they can be irritating and offer you all sorts of advice that you could easily do without. But ignore them at… Read More »
I have been on my travels in the last 6 weeks and thinking of my trip am reminded of a brilliant comment a Brazillian made to me ; Coffee is like Sex …. Everybody wants it but not many know what good is! Businesses spend a lot of time and energy extolling the virtue of… Read More »