Archive for the ‘Coffee Shop Business Plan’ Category
Bentonville, AR (PRWEB) May 28, 2009
It started with President Obama’s speech in February, where the White House outlined a small business recovery program that included tax and spending provisions to aid small business during these challenging economic times.
More than 600,000 small business owners rely on Sam’s Club everyday to run their stores, day care centers, restaurants and home offices. In order to show its support of main street entrepreneurs, the warehouse club launched the Small Business Savings Drive and committed to visiting 100,000 small businesses and identifying $ 270 million in savings by the end of National Small Business Week.
Year to date, Sam’s Club met its goal tallying $ 270,071,142 in savings for small businesses that completed a free cost comparison of which $ 199,001,512 in savings, came during an eight week blitz where Sam’s Club associates met with 100,444 small business owners throughout America.
“We did it and are so proud of our associates in our clubs for their effort. This is just the beginning and while national small business week may be over Sam’s Club will continue to offer the cost comparison service,” said Catherine Corley, vice president, Small Business at Sam’s Club. “While there are signs the economy is improving, small business owners are still cautious and reducing their costs remains a high priority.”
As part of the campaign, Sam’s Club associates visited small business owners at their place of business, walking through their everyday supplies and helping them to estimate yearly cost savings were those same supplies to be purchased through Sam’s Club. From chicken, to coffee cups and paper to toner, Sam’s Club Associates helped business owners find hidden cost savings.
“Business owners were surprised to find unexpected ways to save on every-day items. For example, a real estate office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was paying 5 cents apiece for 12-ounce foam coffee cups, Corley stated. “Sam’s price was 2 cents, helping the company save more than $ 13,000 a year, whereas a restaurant in Prescott Village, Arizona, will save $ 2,475.66 a year buying 4.5-ounce chicken breast fillets from Sam’s.” she added.
Sam’s Club also introduced a simplified business membership process enabling part-time business owners and solo entrepreneurs access to its Business Membership. Now, applying is as easy as showing a business card or letterhead and these hard working business owners can shop during exclusive gold key business hours from 7 am to 10 am weekdays.
In addition to the Savings Drive effort, Sam’s Club also joined forces with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and expects to host a series of local events and an online tool kit for small business and it announced plans to connect its 47 million via the Sam’s Club Business Exchange, where initially small business owners can come together online to share, learn and connect.
Call
Have questions about how Sam’s Club can help your business find savings solutions? Call us!
1.800.SAMS.CLUB (1.800.726.7258)
Click
Surf over to www.SamsClub.com/smallbusiness to see cost comparisons from small business owners just like yourself!
Visit
Visit your local Sam’s Club today to discover your small business savings opportunities
For more information on Sam’s Club Smart Business Savings Solutions
This email is privileged and confidential
Susan Koehler
Senior Manager, Corporate Communications
Sam’s Club Public Relations
Phone: 479-277-8066
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New York, NY (PRWEB) March 12, 2008
Jalima Coffee (http://www.jalimacoffee.com/) in conjunction with Gillies Coffee will host a coffee cupping at the upcoming third annual Coffee and Tea Festival at the Metropolitan Pavilion in NYC on April 12-13, 2008. Attendees will experience a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness a coffee cupping; something quite spectacular, something that most consumers have never, ever seen.
On Sunday, April 13th, 2008, Marcela A. Zuchovicki of Jalima Coffee will lead an interactive coffee cupping and tasting session at the 3rd annual Coffee and Tea Festival NYC. Similar to wine tasting, and rarely seen in public, cupping allows the participant to evaluate and compare different coffees on five major characteristics: flavor, acidity, aftertaste, fragrance, and body.
Ms. Zuchovicki, seen recently on the Food Network hit show Unwrapped: Caffeinated will be using some of the very best coffees from around the world, including beans from Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Hawaii, and others. This demo will deliver a rare opportunity for consumers to see what goes on behind their favorite cup of Joe.
The two day festival will feature everything related to coffee and tea and will offer attendees the opportunity to sample different coffees and teas from around the world. Jalima Coffee was started 3 years ago by three women and lifelong friends, each professionally successful and all at a crossroad looking for a new challenge. A business idea was launched to start a specialty coffee venture to capture the most delicious flavors in the world: high altitude, organically grown coffee, bird friendly from the cloud forests of Mexico and to build a company committed to bio-diversity: social responsibility, economic sustainability and support of preservation of ecological projects and the environment.
Since August of 2005, the Jalimas (Janet, Libe and Marcela) have placed their line of exceptional 100% Arabica specialty coffees in approximately 250 specialty stores and gourmet food markets throughout Northeast, Florida, and the Mid Atlantic region of the USA. Jalima Coffee products can be found in some of the renowned gourmet food destinations in New York City such as Amish Markets, Garden of Eden, Georgia’s Bake Shop and Zabar’s in New York City; all 26 King’s Super Markets in New Jersey; some of the Whole Foods Markets in VA, MD, DC, OH, and specialty stores in the west coast of Florida to mention a few.
Since 2006 Jalima Coffee has been available at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/105-9716309-8166819?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Jalima+Coffee&x=22&y=18) and through www.jalimacoffee.com, making Jalima Coffee available anywhere in the U.S. and beyond. Through the company’s website and internet catalog, Jalima Coffee is also sold to members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities at over 400 member campuses and their students, faculty, staff and alumni in the US. Quite an impressive start for the new kid on the block!
To compete with the big guys, naturally, no small order but these three women entrepreneurs will accept nothing less. Their focus these days is on building brand awareness, loyalty and expansion of their products, origins and distribution network regionally and nationally. Making Jalima Coffee a household name in the competitive specialty coffee industry will take unyielding belief in their product, their mission and themselves.
Tickets are on sale now for the 3rd Annual Coffee & Tea Festival: NYC will help raise funds and awareness for Cup for Education, the official charity of the event. Cup for Education helps the poor and rural coffee communities of Central and Latin America build schools within their communities and provide the basic tools needed to educate the future generations of coffee farmers. Visit www.coffeeandteafestival.com for more details. Limited exhibitor opportunities remain. Inquiries should be made immediately to 631-940-7290.
Jalima Coffee plans to continue its outreach to consumers through exhibitions and seminars to raise awareness of not only the exceptional quality of high altitude Mexican arabica coffees, but also the important mission of social and environmental responsibility in the coffee industry. Jalima Coffee (www.jalimacoffee.com) was conceptualized in December 2004. Since its inception, Jalima has partnered with several organizations to support social, sustainable, educational and ecological projects such as the El Triunfo Conservation Fund in Chiapas, Mexico, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) to support their educational initiatives, Andares, A.B.P. that provides work opportunities for the disadvantaged, and many others. Jalima Coffee has a line of three biodiverse coffee products from Mexico: Jalima Certified Organic Coffee from Chiapas, and H&A Gourmet Coffee, Regular and Decaffeinated from Veracruz.
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Winding Up A Company
In these hard economic times business is very hard. If you are a company director looking for a bit of advice because your coffee shop business is struggling, you have come to the right place. I have created many articles which try to help a director take the right steps in either closing or liquidating a business or pre-packing a sale and starting again.
Firstly if your coffee shop company is insolvent you have a duty as a director to close the company and not incur any further debt, unless you can be pretty sure that you can put in place a rescue plan to turn that business around. If you can’t them you need to liquidate the company yourself or take professional advice on how best to close the business in an orderly fashion.
By far the most popular choice is to engage an insolvency practitioner to call a meeting of creditors on your behalf, prepare the statement of affairs, hold the meeting and then deal with all the procedural aspects of liquidation necessary to make sure all creditors now what is going on and how they can participate in any dividend. This is called a CVL or creditors voluntary liquidation.
There is a fee for all this and generally it will be about £5000 whoever you use around the country. There are some advertisements for liquidations at less than this but by the time all costs are accounted for, it will still come in at about the same sum.
These costs can come out of the assets of the coffee shop company and indeed many businesses do have just enough assets or cash to take this final step. For many businesses, the central core of what the business does is still profitable and so often directors will want to continue to trade. This is easily possible and a sale of assets can be arranged to a new company and a lease re-assigned by a landlord, which often leaves the new company trading on in the same line of work from the same premises.
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Article from articlesbase.com
(PRWEB) October 7, 2003
Public Access Wireless LAN Case Studies
October 1st, 2003
Mind Commerce Publications
There is simply no other research on the market of this kind. This highly valuable and timely report focuses on the public access WLAN or Âhot spot market from a case study perspective. No other report focuses on the existing worldwide hot spot business from the perspective of the hot spot operators themselves.
This report answers important questions:
 What is working and what is not working in the hot spot market?
 What are the rational business models for hot spot operation?
 Who are the leading worldwide hot spot operators and why?
 Which hot spot operators will be successful for the long-term and why?
This report provides additional valuable information including:
 Profile of the types of hot spot customers and their usage demands and requirements
 Business case analysis for hot spot operation
 Case study review, analysis and recommendations for representative hot spot service providers in three continents including 11 operators in North America, 10 operators in Europe, and 12 operators in Asia.
ÂBy mid-2004, we predict that many small hotspot operators will go out of business in North America. A few will be bought out by large telecom operators, who finally commit to the hotspot idea and actually start launches.Â
Who will survive? Who will prosper and why?
Hot Spot Operator Case Study Coverage:
North America
T-MOBILE
WAYPORT
BOINGO
HOTSPOTZZ (FORMERLY WIFI METRO)
HEREUARE
SURF AND SIP
FATPORT
TOSHIBA (COMPUTER SYSTEMS GROUP)
PRONTO
COMETA NETWORKS
CAFÃ.COM
Europe
TELIA HOME-RUN
SONERA
TELENOR
BT OPENZONE
TDC MOBILE DENMARK
WLAN GMBH
METRONET (AUSTRIA)
MEGABEAM
APTILLO NETWORK
SWISSCOM
Asia
CBCOM (CHINA)
CHINA MOBILE (CHINA)
SMCC (SHANGHAI, CHINA)
NTT-C (JAPAN)
NTT DOCOMO COMMUNICATIONS (JAPAN)
HANARO TELECOM
KOREA TELECOM
SINGTEL
STARHUB (SINGAPORE)
AIRBORNE ACCESS (PHILIPPINES)
AZURE (AUSTRALIA)
BLINK (EPLDT) PHILIPPINES
PCCW IMS (HONG KONG)
PCCW IMS Hotspots
YELLOWSPOTS (MALAYSIA, ASIA)
Case study coverage for each hot spot operator includes:
 Number of hot spots deployed
 Hot spot operator strategy
 Pricing structure
 Partners
 Outlook and recommendations
Sample summary excerpt from report:
Metronet (Austria)
Metronet is AustriaÂs biggest hotspot operator. It signed a deal with T-Mobile Austria to provide WLAN hotspot access to T-Mobile customers as well.
Metronet Hotspots
Metronet has approximately 290 hotspots, located in coffee shops, airports, and hotels.
Metronet Subscription/Access Options
Metronet has several subscription plans available.
Business Plan: 19.50 USD per month plus .35 USD per MB
Student: 6.50 USD per month plus .35 USD per MB
Surfer: 13 USD per month plus .65 USD per MB
Prepaid: 21. 50 USD for 120 minutes
Metronet Strategy
Metronet has adopted the strategy of offering many different plans suited to a variety of users. It has deployed a relatively large number of hotspots, and will continue to expand rapidly throughout 2003.
Metronet Outlook and Recommendations
Metronet will continue to expand the hotspot business and become an innovator during 2003. On the negative side, we believe that its plans are for the most part too expensive and, for the non-corporate customer, difficult to understand. They should rework the subscriptions on both fronts. Nonetheless, the outlook for Metronet favorable, especially if it maintains its deployment pace, markets more aggressively and lowers prices.
Method of research and analysis:
The primary market research was obtained through a series of interviews with experts in the field as well as discussions with hot spot operators and on-site interviews at various hot spot venues with local service managers, venue owners, and customers. The primary and secondary market research analysis was conducted by Mind Commerce WLAN expert, Zaga Novakovic, with input and review from other experts in the field.
Mind Commerce believes this research represents the most comprehensive analysis of worldwide hot spot operators to date. This research enables the WLAN supplier, service provider and investor to compare business models, strategies, pricing plans as well as evaluate best practices and the outlook for various operators. For more in depth consultation and/or customized research, contact Mind Commerce at Research@MindCommerce.com.
About the Author:
Zaga Novakovic worked with Ericsson for six years as senior product manager for 3G and business development manager for packet data in which she has engaged in forecasting, product development, 3G business strategy development, fraud prevention and developed business in the areas of WLAN and AAA. She has worked closely with operators all over the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. She is also a published author in various industry periodicals including Telecommunications International, Telecommunications the Americas, and USA Today. Zaga may be reached at Zaga@MindCommerce.com
About the Publisher:
The Mind Commerce® mission is to provide customized research, consulting, training, and writing services for the telecommunications and IT industry. Mind Commerce clients include manufacturers, developers, service providers, industry organizations, and government. Mind Commerce clients include manufacturers, developers, service providers, industry organizations, and government. Mind Commerce differentiates itself from its competition by meeting the unique needs of its clients through customized product development and service delivery. For more information, visit the web site at www.MindCommerce.com.
Robot From Fresh Roast Systems, Inc. Becomes First Automated Coffee Roaster to be Recognized by Ken Davids
Key Biscayne, FL (PRWEB) May 6, 2007
Fresh Roast Systems, Inc. announces that Texas Roast Coffee has received an impressive 89-point review from leading coffee authority Ken Davids of Coffee Review for coffee roasted on their fully automated roasting machine.
“The Fresh Roast System is the sous-chef in our kitchen,” says Texas Roast owner Jeff Schneider. Schneider founded the Rockwall, TX, coffee shop and roasting business less than one year ago after returning from military duty in Iraq, with no prior coffee roasting experience or formal training.
By obtaining such a high rating on Coffee Review’s 100-point scale for their Cowboy Coffee blend, Texas Roast enters an elite class of specialty coffee craftsmen. Mr. Davids describes the blend as having a “very impressive aroma” and “grapefruit notes with distinct cedar and semi-sweet chocolate.”
“Ever since the review, online sales of our coffee have been booming,” says Schneider.
“This achievement is going to raise some eyebrows in our industry,” notes specialty coffee industry consultant Andrew Hetzel. “Some traditionalists will always be skeptical of new technologies, but I believe that this proves automation can be an effective tool that will allow any business to roast craftsman-quality coffee with minimal requirements.”
Mr. Schneider is planning additional Texas Roast locations in coming months, each of which will be outfitted with its own automated roaster.
About Texas Roast
Texas Roast serves fresh baked pastries and fresh roasted coffee daily in their coffee shop at 2435 Ridge Road, Rockwall, Texas. For more information call (972) 722-6336 or to order coffee online, visit their website at http://www.texasroast.com.
About Fresh Roast Systems, Inc.
Fresh Roast Systems of Key Biscayne, Florida, is the creator and patent holder for the Fresh Roast System ventless automated coffee roaster, a self-contained computer operated coffee roasting machine that allows any business to consistently produce fresh-roasted coffee without the staffing and environmental drawbacks of traditional coffee roasting equipment. For more information, call (305) 361-0463 or visit their website at http://www.freshroastsystems.com .
Media Contact:
Matthew Weisberg, General Manager
Fresh Roast Systems, Inc.
650-325-1795
# # #
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Vocus, PRWeb and Publicity Wire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vocus, Inc. or Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.
Now, we need to consider the second equation of the business plan, which covers the financial plan coffee shop. This will include your forecasts of revenue for the next one year and projections for the next three to five years. Many owners who are non finance literate will face a lot of challenges in this section. You may want to hire an accountant with experience to help you. If you want to save the costs, you must take the time to understand the basics of accounting and costs accounting.
What does financial plan coffee shop covers?
A. Revenue projections
This is the most basic assumption in the financial plan coffee shop as revenue will dictate how much you spend on everything else and how much profits you can make. Start off by estimating the number of potential customers in your target market and how much they will spend per day. As you are a new coffee shop owner, make an estimate of how big of the market share you cam get. You have to take into account the market share of your competition. This exercise alone will force you to think whether you should even be in the business in the first place.
B. Monthly Operating Costs
You have to list down every single operating cost in the financial plan coffee shop like staff salaries, utilities, rental of equipments, supplies, and marketing costs and so on. Allow a certain percentages for wastages and emergencies. This exercise will force you to implement good costs control to be a profitable coffee shop.
C. Funding sources
Most of the businesses fail due to insufficient planning and they run of cash within two year of operations. Before you even begin looking for a location, you must calculate how much financing you can acquire in the financial plan coffee shop.
I will list down some of the sources you can tap into as all of them have been covered in another article. These are:
a) Own savings;
b) Family members and friends;
c) Supplier financing;
d) Bank borrowings;
e) Investors; and
f) Government grants.
D. Breakeven analysis
This figure sets an important daily and monthly milestone for your staffs and you in a financial plan coffee shop. It lets you know how many cups of coffees, in quantity and money terms, you need to sell in order to break even. Anything that exceeds will make your business a profitable coffee shop. As you focus on that number, you will appreciate how precious every single customer is to meeting your daily and monthly goal.
Conclusion for financial plan coffee shop
This is a guide for you to come out with a financial plan coffee shop. You may want to come up with graphs and pie charts to show visual representatives of what your business may look like, especially to investors and bankers.
Further reference on financial plan coffee shop
Find out how you can start your own financial plan coffee shop using less than $25,000 or less and none from your own pocket. Check out this book on financial plan coffee shop.
If you have enough passion in your business, do you still need a coffee shop business plan? As many people have fall in love with the taste of coffee, we are fast becoming a nation of coffee addict. However, a good coffee drinker does not automatically make you a good coffee shop owner. You have to operate the coffee shop like a business and to do that, you need a well thought out coffee shop business plan. After that, you need a well executed business operations.
Let’s cover what a coffee shop business plan is not first. It is not a mere slogan like “Customers are number 1!” It is not a corporate mission statement. It is not even a financial plan. In fact, it is a combination of a lot of things. To make things easy to understand, we shall break it down into a few simple parts. Another thing you may want to consider is not to just copy and paste some template and treat it like your own. When you put in some thoughts, the coffee shop business plan have power and you will make your business grows in accordance with the business plan.
With a good coffee shop business plan in hand, you immediately have three major advantages over coffee shop owners who do not have. First, you have clarity over which path to take your business over the next one year and in the next five years. Secondly, you banker will be more confident of your business acumen and will not hesitate to approve your loan. Lastly, the investors can see that you have done your homework in the coffee shop business plan and will be comfortable investing with somebody who understands risks and rewards.
Qualitatative factors in the coffee shop business plan
A. Your Target Market
You cannot hope to sell to every coffee drinker as they belong to different target markets. Before you even begin your marketing, you must understand your chosen target market and their needs. You must understand their buying habits, their hang out place and their demographics. Then, you position yourself to cater to that specific group you are interested to serve.
B. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Your business does not exist in a vacuum, so you need to research and understand your competition. Learn what they are doing that works and observe how they set up their coffee shop layouts, what kind of food they are serving, how it is served and their pricing strategy. In the initial estimate of the coffee shop business plan, you should know how big is the market share and how many coffee shop can serve this market profitably. If a new competitor lower the price, can you still maintain profitability?
After taking into account your interest target market and the competition, you will notice a gap in the marketplace. This gap is called the underserved market. When you have discovered a great way to serve this niche, you can come up with a different way to sell to and serve your customers better. This way is your USP. You must be able to communicate your USP well to your customers and they also must perceive that your USP is important to them.
C. Your coffee shop location and layout
When you know where your target customers are likely to hang out, you already narrow down the choice of locations. If you target students and metropolitan customers, you need to lease a place at a shopping mall and set up some Wiifi facilities. When you target the busy morning crowd, maybe a coffee stand is sufficient. The location is different again if you target people who wants to chill after work or for a special social event.
The coffee shop layout plan is also important in a coffee shop business plan to set up to suit the target customers. There are many decisions to make like how many tables are suitable to be set up, what kind of collection system to be used, how many kitchen utensils to order and so on. If the customers are the morning rush type, a small setup will do as they will most probably order and go. For those looking for a relaxing setting, you may want to make your renovation of your place as relaxing as possible.
D. Products
You need to test your product and get feedbacks from customers which one they like. Depending on your USP, the food you offered must be specially catered to the customers you targeted in your coffee shop business plan. Do not try to be all things to all people. Be a specialist in one particular niche so that you are knowledgeable about it. Then, you can make an informed recommendation to your customers. Above all, make your products high quality and value for money.
E. Equipment Needs
Again, I need to emphasize that it all begins with your target market. This includes the equipment needs. Please refer to the article on this for more details.
F. Marketing Strategies
The marketing strategy in your coffee shop business plan depends on your branding you want to invoke in your customers. The objective is to drive home that your coffee shop is the place to visit when they need their coffee breaks. You have to align your marketing message and materials to the USP you have chosen.
For upscale coffee shop, it may make marketing sense to make some heavy investments in renovation and eatery wares. You want to portray an upscale image, remember. As for promotion, you may want to try free method first. When you have created a story about your coffee shop, you can do a write up on your coffee shop business plan and send it to the media. They are also looking for contents, so it a win-win situation for both of you. Another method is to write postcards and personalized letters to invite your local patrons for special events like birthdays.
For morning rush market, you need to emphasize speed and quality. Your coffee shop may not need to be renovated in an upscale manner. The customers are interested in getting their coffee fast anyway. You marketing focus are different now. You need to place your signs and banners in places where the traffic is. This includes places like bus stops, mass transit stations and other visible public places. No need postcards as they will not be able to visit you leisurely.
Here are a few marketing methods that can be applied to any model you choose in your coffee shop business plan:-
a) Have a unique logo,
b) Have a website so that the local patrons can find you,
c) give away T-shirt to get free advertisements,
d) business cards with your contact details, and
e) word of mouth marketing
You need to allocate budget on the most effective marketing methods in the coffee shop business plan. The only way to go at the beginning is to implement a few ones first and then pour in the money into the ones that gives you the biggest bang for your buck.
G. Risk Factors
Lastly, you must think of all the possible worst case scenarios. Almost all things that can go wrong will eventually do. It is a matter of timing. You just need to anticipate them and come up with mitigation measure in the coffee shop business plan. The examples of risk factors are:
a) A big competition comes and wipe your coffee shop business
Have you thought of how to deal with a potentially powerful competitor? How about the one with better products and bigger financial muscles?
b) Change in coffee shop trends
When the consumer taste changes, can you adapt to them and still be profitable? In every change in strategy, there is a lot of risk of failure. Success hinges upon good execution of the strategy.
c) Fire that damages coffee shop equipments
A fire may disrupt your operation for a few hours or days. You need to come out with second equipment in case of emergency.
d) Staffs problems
Your staffs are the direct front lines that deal with customers. So, if there is a rude staff, it will drive away the customers. This is an unavoidable problem when you are employing people to run your business.
e) Changes in laws and regulations
Any changes in laws may potentially disrupt your business. You need to be aware of any changes to adapt yourself.
Conclusion for coffee shop business plan
These are some of the most important points you must include in your coffee shop business plan. It may take you a few drafts before coming up with a good one. You may also revise them with your staffs, investors or bankers to see if the existing one still makes any business sense. If not, you need to change them in accordance with market changes.
For figures on coffee shop business plan, please refer to part II.
Find out how you can start your own coffee shop using less than $25,000 or less and none from your own pocket. Check out this book on starting a coffee shop.