Monthly Archive for
March 2009

From our Urban Coffee HQ

Well the outlet was becoming available in the next couple of weeks (End of Feb 09) but was under lease until the end of March 09. The good news was it had not been advertised yet so we were the first to knock on the agents door.

We got the keys from the current leaseholder and took a look around. It was pretty much perfect for what we wanted to achieve.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

We had decided by now that we wanted the location to be near the business districts of Manchester or Birmingham because we felt that represented the best customer demographic for the coffee shop.

So a shortlist for both cities was drawn up. We then spent a day in each city walking the ground and taking photos of empty places. The rents difference between Manchester and Birmingham was significant – in most cases Manchester was over 3 times higher than Birmingham. This quickly brought us to the conclusion that Manchester would not be a great place to start with but could be good for a 2nd outlet once the first was a success.

None of the properties in Birmingham took our fancy as either they weren’t quite in the right location or too big or too small. Then we noticed a shop in a great location which had relocation signs in the window, so we popped into ask when they were leaving and who the landlord/agent was.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

From our 6 week tour of coffee shops for sale we realised that they were over priced and none offered value for money. Moreover location was critical and none we looked at were in a great spot.

So that left us with the decision, did we keep on the search or did we just start a coffee shop from scratch. The answer was if we could find a suitable retail outlet in the right location then we would do it from scratch.

The search began for retail outlets for rent in Birmingham and Manchester. We also embarked on a market research mission to learn everything we could about coffee.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

Over a period of 6 weeks we found various cafe’s and coffee shops for sale in Manchester and Birmingham. We visited lots of these cafe’s and coffee shops, spoke to the owners and observed customers.

Here is what we found out – most of these types of businesses don’t have very good financial records and the ones that do have don’t necessarily reflect reality if you know what I mean ;). So you can’t rely on the financials they provide.

It also became clear that business agents live in a different world, they value these businesses by checking the wind direction rather than any clever metric. It would appear that if the business owner says I think it’s worth £70k and thats what I would like for it then that is the price that gets advertised. This price usualy can’t be backed up by any facts or figures so is a work of fiction.

In most cases we judged these businesses to be worth around half of what they were being advertised for. We are also convinced the only way to work out what kind of revenue this type of business is really doing is to sit outside for the lunchtime period (12pm-2pm) and count the number of customers going in. Then work out their average sale per customer by asking them what a customer typically buys * that by the number of customers and you have the bulk of their daily revenue. Add a bit on for breakfast trade and the rest of the day and you have the daily revenue * this by the number of days they are open a week and you have the weekly revenue.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

A friend and I had been banding around business ideas for years, constantly looking on businessesforsale.com and trying to spot the next big thing.

Well, we finally decided that a coffee shop would be a great business to start, it has a relatively low cost of entry and is not so complicated that a layman couldn’t pick it up in a matter of months.

So a decision had been made all we needed to do was find a suitable coffee shop, the search began. Since I was based in Birmingham I started the search there and Amir started in Manchester where he is based.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

Coffee Cupping is like wine tasting but without the headache in the morning. Urban Coffee runs regular coffee cupping events where you have the opportunity to sample different coffees, learn to identify the different growing regions and more.

What’s a cupping?

Cupping is a method of evaluating the characteristics of a particular coffee bean. Cupping allows us to compare and contrast coffees, and helps us get a better understanding of each coffee.

It also helps us taste coffee in its basic form and appreciate some of its finer points, which can differ from bean to bean, depending on the region from which it was harvested.

Our Events

If your interested in attending one of our Coffee Cupping events or if you would like to run a Coffee Cupping event as a team building or corporate entertainment then feel free to contact us.
cath @urbancoffee.co.uk

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

Our customers are lovely and say nice things about us just look:

Claire Pritchard
Found amongst the piles in the WONDERFUL Urban Coffee Company in Birmingham.

Rebecca Sykes
@urbancoffeeco has great communal table & does delicious local soup by The Soupery

Rickie J
Realised last tweet little aggressive so to balance, going to coffee shop HEAVEN today @urbancoffeeco

 

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

We use something called Net Promoter® to measure how we’re doing. Net Promoter® is the standard customer service benchmark for organisations around the world. Through it we’re able to plot our success against brand leaders like Apple, Amazon and Virgin Atlantic.

The idea behind Net Promoter® is very simple – we ask just one question “Would you recommend Urban Coffee Company to a friend or colleague?” and ask you to answer using an easy number scale:

We use the results to calculate a Net Promoter® Score (NPS). To get a high NPS we need most people to give us a nine or ten on the scale. If they don’t we know something’s wrong.

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From our Urban Coffee HQ

We know we are not prefect even when we try really really hard sometimes we get things wrong. So we like our customers to tell us exactly what they think – good or bad. It helps us improve and get things right.

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