SmartCompany50 rank: 14
Revenue: $1.4 million
Growth: 74.7%
Founders: Carmelina Pascoe, 37 Mark Pascoe, 40
Based: Melbourne
Employees: 5
Industry: Property & business services
Website: www.mycoffeeshop.com.au
Carmelina Pascoe (right), a coffee lover, was 33 when she started the business with partner Mark. Australians were developing a maturity in their taste for coffee. But the office market was not being serviced properly by the existing players in the marketplace, which were large companies that did not have the equipment that offices need and very small companies that couldn’t service larger clients adequately. “We decided to provide coffee machines and beans to offices and homes that could make great coffee easily, and provide a full back up service that takes care of any service issues,” she says.
The first strategic mistake was to focus on the product, not the market. When they looked at what the customer wanted – who after all was buying a premium product – they moved from selling coffee machines to a complete service package, offering free installation and training, guarantee, two years parts and labour warranty.
Bad advice and lack of experience nearly put the business under. “We had one month to turn things around or lose the business and our family home, remove the kids from their school and start from scratch,” she says.
Free rent and extended family loans helped the business, as did useful advice from an accountant. Cashflow was a huge problem, but they learnt to put in place shorter credit terms and made companies fill in account application forms agreeing to terms.
The company makes huge use of the website, using pay per-click advertising and monitoring the traffic on a daily basis, fine tuning ads to provide better returns. “We now receive 10,000 unique visitors per month. Approximately half of these come from pay per click.”
The aim is to dominate their market segment and be the leading supplier of coffee and equipment to business in Australia. They have expanded into Sydney and are also adding more product lines.
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