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Positioning is about making sure that everything you do matches up with the end consumer. That means everything. When you’re creating your business you need to think about keeping the following items consistent and coherent with what your market will want. You’ll need to use the ‘Bob and Brenda’ technique in the people section to get this completely right, but with this customer avatar in your mind you can, in addition to your location and name, clearly look at:

Signage – how brash can you be? Will it jar with the customers? How can you make it as obvious as possible without offending?

Menu creation – how does it flow throughout the day? How does it match or conflict with your competitors?

Staffing – attitudes, style, education?

Uniforms – will they be formal, cool, casual, relaxed?

Pricing – you must be as brave as you can but can’t price yourself out of the market.

Furniture – will it encourage people to stay and lounge? Do you want that? Marketing – how will you get hold of your target market? What messages

will they want to hear? What will turn them off?

Merchandising – how can you position products to sell best?

4

People

Now that we’ve established that you need great passion to get started and that this passion has produced a great product, we need to focus, and that means really focus, on the people side of things. Understanding people and how they work is the key skill. This includes customers and staff. This means doing extensive work on how to hire, train and retain great staff, and extensive work on the concept of ‘customer shoes’ and the psychology behind that.

Hopefully we’ve now made it crystal clear that you’re not going to either hide yourself away at the back barking orders or do everything on your own muttering quietly under your breath ‘if you want a job done properly you’d better do it yourself’.

An essential, and occasionally infuriating, truism about business is that no matter how good your product is or how great a location you have, unless you can fully understand people and how they work, your business simply won’t succeed. And that means an understanding of all people that you come into contact with – customers, suppliers, staff, bankers, partners etc. You will need to learn how to manage all of these individual groups effectively, so that your business can reach the potential objective that you laid out so clearly when deciding what you wanted from it (begin with the end in mind).

Our experience and understanding of how to grow and develop business has come though a variety of sources. We both sat through (and if we’re honest largely ignored like the rest of the class) the ‘people’ parts of our degrees. At the age of 20, filled with great ideas and bravado, you can find vastly more

interesting things to do than mulling over the intricacies of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs and trying to remember exactly what ‘self-actualization’ means. Our priorities lay in the slightly less esoteric pleasures of girls and beer, which may not ultimately have been a bad thing.

Real understanding of people and how they work and behave hits you like a brick when you open your first business – particularly within the hospitality or catering arena. Suddenly grand theoretical notions of how to motivate staff fly

out the window when you’re faced with a group of employees earning a couple of pounds an hour with about as much interest in your passion and vision that you might have in the inner workings of an abattoir.

So once you have set your grand notions to one side you can quickly (and usually painfully) recalibrate and work out exactly how you are going to get people to buy in to what you want to do as well as persuading customers that what you do is a great thing. Between us in the past 20 years we have recruited and employed in excess of 500 members of staff. We have operated businesses in markets and industries far outside of coffee shops, in areas such as classic retail, distribution, marketing services, the internet (somewhat disastrously it has to be said) as well as the obvious and oft-mentioned chip shops and restaurant sectors.

In our consultancy business we have worked with clients with hundreds of employees and spend hours developing recruitment, training and development programs that particularly resonate with employees in the coffee shop business. We do a lot of video training and analysis and have spent hundreds of hours, with and without clients, pouring over videos of busy coffee shops to observe how staff and customers behave at different times of the day and in varying circumstances. This is occasionally tedious but most of the time utterly fascinating and with some fairly elementary understandings of body language, tone and facial expressions, you really can unlock the keys to how people behave and what they ideally want both as an employee and a customer.

We say all this not in a sense of ‘look at us, aren’t we brilliant’ attitude, but to emphasise just how deep we go in terms of understanding people within a coffee shop scenario and how incredibly important it is for you to apply some of these lessons even before you open the till on day one of trading in your shiny new coffee shop. We also emphasise it to illustrate that our one big theory that came off the back of this research and experience was backed up by a hell of a lot more than just a fancy MBA and reading a lot of books.

The key concept that comes out of this, and which you can directly apply to all your dealings with people in your new business can be summarised by two words. Or more specifically two names: Bob and Brenda.

BOB AND BRENDA; UNDERSTANDING HOW