The Very Good Marketing Guide

INTRODUCTION

Coffee crunch

Shane is a software engineer with a firm in Perth. He's 38, married, has two kids, likes his job, but what he really loves is coffee. He loves playing around with different beans, trying new flavours, blending profiles and learning how it all works. He started off roasting his own beans for his morning hit, but his friends loved his coffee so much, they asked him to sell them some coffee beans.

So he did.

His coffee became so popular, his local café asked him to supply them with some beans. So he did. That got so successful, he thought, ‘Why don't I make a go of this and build a coffee roasting business?’ Everyone wants coffee, right?

So, he quit his job, bought a premium coffee roasting machine with $40 000 from his mortgage, invested $10 000 on packaging design and branding, and paid $7000 to a website developer to build him an e-commerce website.

It started well, but after five months, a new, much larger coffee roaster negotiated deals with his coffee shops. Deals too good for them to refuse.

To make matters worse, the supply contracts he had negotiated with a major hospitality group were cancelled when the company was bought out by a multinational.

And his new website? He was getting some hits and a few 250 g bag purchases, but not nearly enough to cover his costs.

Now Shane's in deep. He's got a warehouse, stock, overheads to pay and no customers. He's bleeding cash, losing sleep at night, and wondering what he did wrong.

Shane did a lot of ...