TCMBA #18 - 3 Ways to Grow Your Coffee Business
It’s so easy to get stuck in the day to day of your coffee business.
Each day there’s a goal:
📦 Get the coffee boxed up and ready for the UPS pickup.
🌷 Make customers smile when they see their latte art.
🚛 Ensure the pallet of coffee made it on the truck.
But when are you taking time to plan for how you want to grow the business?
Maybe you don’t want to grow. You love showing up to the office each day. You love routine, your team, your products, your community.
Knowing that is gold!
If you’re looking for more or are finding your business isn’t looking quite as you had imagined, then it’s time to start planning.
If you can’t take a day or two to sit down and dream up what’s next, then you know exactly what will happen.
You’ll get the same result.
In three years, you’ll find yourself where you are today.
Laser focused on the daily goals, without the full potential of your business realized.
Once you’ve scheduled a little time to start dreaming, I have a practical tip for you.
Decide how you want to grow.
There are only three ways to scale your business:
Increase your market share
Grow with the market
Expand into a new market
Let’s consider these a little more.
As you read through them, notice your reaction. Does it excite you? Repulse you? That reaction is information! It’s telling you something!
In my experience, the things I quickly and easily move on from? Not my thing.
A tightening in my chest? That’s longing. That’s fear of success. That’s my dream.
Try these three on and see how they feel…
Increase your market share
Feeling competitive? This is when you build a strategy to take over the competition.
What this takes is oscillation and synergy between product development and marketing.
Marketing uses your product strengths and capabilities as a starting point and researches the market and surveys consumers. Then, marketing feeds the results to the product team.
The product team starts developing based on consumer data and works with marketing to get a pulse from consumers. Keep doing this, keep iterating.
To make a dent in the market, this product can’t be incrementally better.
It needs to be something that changes coffee drinkers’ perception of your competitors.
“Why would I order from Other Brand when This Brand is so obviously giving me everything I want and more.” That’s what should be swimming (subconsciously often) in the heads of your target customers.
Grow with the market
The big names we now know in the specialty space, the ones who have sold large stakes in their companies to multinational corporations and have strategic alignments with the giants?
They were early and took the risks that have now made “specialty coffee” a household term.
Waves were made in the wake of these pioneers, which were eagerly ridden by more and more roasters and cafés. While not the lunatic fringe, this second generation had the keen awareness to recognize something big was happening. Or, they just got the coffee bug.
These folks grew with the market.
But now, in 2023, with Nestlé and Keurig Dr. Pepper making strong plays in our space, growing with the market looks a little different.
Using this strategy doesn’t look like it did in 2010.
Consider the tactics the giant players are using, but bring to bear your specialty values like social impact, environmental sustainability, and farmer profitability.
Our pod-generation is making convenience a must-have for consumers.
Find a way to make it specialty and grow with that market. Or find another area of our market making waves to ride.
Let someone else blaze the trail. Then swoop in and make the trail even more awesome.
Expand into a new market
Using coffee as a launching pad to other products and services can be a great way to diversify.
Not having all of your eggs in one basket is wisdom we all know but don’t always apply to our businesses.
Maybe you have an amazing space and love creating experiences. You could expand into venue rental and event planning. You’ve got the coffee for catering!
Or you love recipe building and photography and are ready to make a book.
Do your customers keep telling you that your housemade plant-milks are unlike anything they’ve had before? Could you spin that off into an RTD product?
A lower risk way of expanding into new markets is through collaborations. Could your coffee be featured in new products that you’ve considered expanding into yourself? To test the market and learn about production, distribution, and sales?
New markets aren’t always new products. They’re also new geographies, channels, or customer segments.
We all have unique connections to new markets, whether it’s the country our family emigrated from or our friend who owns a barber shop. These could spark new business entities that expand beyond borders or become the partner for America’s barber shops.
The opportunities are endless when considering new markets, just be sure to understand your market really well and test, test, test.
Here are some examples of horror-show new market expansions:
The Evian bra that could be filled with water.
Mineral water from Coors.
Cheetos lip balm.
Mistakes like these are incredibly expensive, so make sure you have the consumer data to back up your plans.
So where did you end up? What feels like the path to take?
If you need someone to talk to about it, you can find me here.
When you’re ready for help, here’s how we can work together:
Follow me on LinkedIn for more free content.
Access weekly group coaching in The Coffee MBA Community.
Need deeper support? Work with me 1:1.
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