Losing customers hurts. Especially when you only have 3 (wholesale) customers. Honestly, it was a bad fit from the beginning. This customer was hard to schedule with. It was hard to set up demos with them. They were more demanding than everyone else. Less flexible. Less responsive. They had a bunch of requests and demands that nobody else did.
- 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.