Business has a natural rhythm

Business pioneers are only rich and famous when what they pioneered was successful. However for every one pioneering business that has succeeded and made it big, thousands failed. On the other hand, if you start a business in something that already exists and is known in the market, your chances of success are much higher. That’s why banks love it when you buy a franchise, and they’ll lend you loads of money. Because what you’re going into has been tried and tested.

Tonic is a new concept in the market. We’re not a healthy nation, so proper juicing is still a very novel concept. We know about smoothies because of companies like Innocent, but we don’t understand the idea of paying more money for a fresh smoothie when you can buy one in a bottle at a fraction of the price. They pasteurise milk, so it must be ok for smoothies, right? Errr...no. But for people to understand that, you have to not only educate them, but explain that it is worth paying for the health benefits of drinking fresh. Most people buy smoothies for the taste with the firm knowledge that it is made from fruit therefore it mush be healthy. Finally we live in a cold, damp country most of the year so we prefer hot drinks. That’s understandable. That’s where the whole loose leaf tea concept comes in. We have accepted that coffee cannot be instant, it must be some espresso-based concoction that costs £2.50 and we’ll buy at least one everyday. However when it comes to tea why the hell would I pay more than a quid when i can easily make one from a tea-bag!!?? The whole idea of drinking loose leaf tea, specially brewed in our tea makers, is not really taking off despite lots of marketing. People like our teas, they agree that they are much more superior in taste to tea bags, plus we pump the health angle too. But they just cannot get their head around paying £2 for them.

In short, we chose a business that was always going to be an uphill struggle. Even Starbucks took a long time to convince people that they should drink espresso-based drinks and pay double the amount the normally pay. Unfortunately we were not prepared for this uphill struggle and expected people to instantly fall in love with our products (which they did, just not enough of them!).

So we really need to work with what people already know and understand, and also work with the weather. In the end we decided that we needed to introduce porridge, since it still has a healthy theme and we can top it with lots of fruit. We also decided that people would want coffee in the morning with their porridge and, considering the margins on coffee, we’d be stupid not to do it. We’d retain our high-quality angle by using freshly roasted Monmouth coffee beans for the coffee, and organic oats and milk for our porridge.

It was an instant hit. Queues were out the door. Sales finally started picking up. Still nowhere near where we needed to get to, but definitely improving. We figured that as it went on, we’d get more people buying our other products too like snack bars. I also figured that they would start to try some of our other products like the juices, and just being there everyday we could start to really market the benefits of our juices and smoothies. The value of a porridge is low, but that of a breakfast smoothie is double. So as we move towards summer I figured we’d get them to switch to the breakfast smoothies and bingo, we’d be breaking even. We also used the opportunity to market the teas, and did tasters on many mornings. It was time to step up the marketing.