- getting more wholesale customers - right now we've actually only made contact with 6 out of 100 owners on our list of independent coffee shop prospects. So the first 2 months of 2021 will just be a lot of being pounding pavement and forcing these meetings to happen. So the first leg of this will be purely brute force.
- division of labor - well, funnily, I've been out of Chicago for the last 2 months, so Tom has *had* to run kitchen ops, delivery, and do in person demos. During that time, I did a lot of the strategic/marketing/support work that can be done remotely - set up all the tech (accounts, email, fb/ig, website, invoicing software) ran the initial online campaigns, I reached out to prospects, set up the appointments, created schedules so everything went smoothly, payment processing, etc. This falls roughly along our natural skill lines anyways.
-- podcasts or blogs: hmmm... in food in particular, I'm a huge fan of Nick Kokonas's writing. Also in food, there's an interview on Noah Kagan's podcast that I thought was really good about growing a food franchise: https://okdork.com/mama-fus/. What resonates for me is that in both cases the operators are "re-inventing" a lot of things within the industry because the standard best practices don't serve their needs well. Overall, 2 podcasts I really like are Conversations with Tyler and My First Million.
I really have enjoyed reading your posts. Sucks about the customer, but it sounds like they were a pain in the ass. I have a couple questions:
- how do you plan on getting more wholesale customers?
- how do you decide which duties belong to you and which belong to your business partner?
- any other podcasts or blogs that you follow which inspired this Substack?
Hi Nick! Thanks for the kind words!
- getting more wholesale customers - right now we've actually only made contact with 6 out of 100 owners on our list of independent coffee shop prospects. So the first 2 months of 2021 will just be a lot of being pounding pavement and forcing these meetings to happen. So the first leg of this will be purely brute force.
- division of labor - well, funnily, I've been out of Chicago for the last 2 months, so Tom has *had* to run kitchen ops, delivery, and do in person demos. During that time, I did a lot of the strategic/marketing/support work that can be done remotely - set up all the tech (accounts, email, fb/ig, website, invoicing software) ran the initial online campaigns, I reached out to prospects, set up the appointments, created schedules so everything went smoothly, payment processing, etc. This falls roughly along our natural skill lines anyways.
-- podcasts or blogs: hmmm... in food in particular, I'm a huge fan of Nick Kokonas's writing. Also in food, there's an interview on Noah Kagan's podcast that I thought was really good about growing a food franchise: https://okdork.com/mama-fus/. What resonates for me is that in both cases the operators are "re-inventing" a lot of things within the industry because the standard best practices don't serve their needs well. Overall, 2 podcasts I really like are Conversations with Tyler and My First Million.