I was having a conversation with some great friends of mine (Alex and Jane) about business and what it's like to run a business, as they have both done for many years of their lives and how the slow demise and death of businesses come about from the lack of quality and how when you walk into businesses that are on the down, you can tell. This got me thinking about the perfect cappuccino again.
Just before the COVID pandemic, people I became friends with (Bill and Vinnie) bought a small, rundown cafe in south Nottinghamshire on a farm pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
They rebadged it, renamed it, and started rebuilding it, and they called it Caffe Velo Verde. I've written about it here before.
Bill was a former police officer at quite a high level and, after retiring from the police, decided on that new adventure.
He was also into cycling, so it seemed to him that building something around the cycling cafe culture would make sense, and Bill and Vinnie did a great job of this.
They created a refuge for cyclists initially, and they built it up without spending too much money into a lovely, lovely place to stop on your bike, meet with your friends, and have a coffee, a cake, and a sausage sandwich (the sandwich being my drug of choice at Velo Verde).
There's a point to that, so just read on.
And so, what Bill did was he realised that the most important thing at Velo Verde was, well, the coffee because it was a coffee shop.
And so, he invested in the best coffee machine he could and the training of his team to the best of his ability, as well as the understanding of the coffee world.
He learned how to pour the perfect cappuccino, and then he shared with me how to test what a perfect cappuccino is.
I use this test everywhere I go now. It basically involves resting a spoon on top of the froth over the lip of the cup, taking a hand off, and seeing how long it takes for the spoon to fall into the coffee.
Hint - It shouldn't fall in.
Soon, I was able to test the cappuccinos all the time, and on very rare occasions when someone else made them, they weren't quite perfect.
I never called that out because that's the nature of things, but if I did, Bill would have sent it back, and that's because he was in charge of the culture of the whole place, and that was a metaphor for what the culture of Velo Verde was like.
And so you can apply that to your own business; the metaphor for the perfect cappuccino is the thing that your business is, and every aspect of your business should be a perfect cappuccino, or you should be striving for that.
That's important in my business and in dentistry, and particularly in independent dentistry because if we don't aim for the perfect cappuccino (if we decide to aim for instant coffee made in a Styrofoam cup with no top and lukewarm water), we're f*ck*d.
People have already cornered that end of the market.
You will never beat IDH, Bupa or Portman Dentex to the bottom of the market because they can buy the coffee cheaper at that end, they can pay less for their team, and they can do everything at scale much cheaper than you.
What you get to do is make a perfect cappuccino or whatever your equivalent of that is.
You get to appeal to your market, to your tribe, to your niche in a way that they can't possibly do because no one is allowed to be an individual, and whatever they say in those organisations, there is a degree of corporate management which will not let you be the person you want to be.
And so, the end story of the perfect cappuccino is that recently, Bill and Vinnie sold Velo Verde after a five-year adventure and building it up from almost nothing (my understanding is that what they paid for it was less than what their monthly turnover became very quickly).
They decided to bail, and quite rightly and totally understandably, and he sold it on to someone who came from a much larger hospitality background than an independent coffee shop.
And so, the gentleman has taken over Bella Verde over the past few months and my friend Simon and I (who first introduced me to him to Velo Verde and to Bill) have been going along.
The first thing that happened was they changed the sausages - Interesting.
There wasn't any problem with the sausages, in fact, they were brilliant, actually and they came from a butcher close by in a village just down the road but I think the new owner decided they were too expensive, and it was an easy way to cut costs with no one noticing.
I noticed; I'm sure other people did, too.
Then, the perfect cappuccino test started to fail, and it actually failed in many different ways.
The new owner himself has decided to be on the till all the time, taking all the orders and dishing out all the cake.
And so, everybody else in the kitchen (sometimes 25 people now in Velo Verde) is supervised by other people.
Velo Verde had this thing with Bill and Vinnie where different people had different things written on the backs of their polo shirts.
Bill or Vinny were Directeur sportif.
It meant they were in charge of the overall show, the culture, the quality, and what was happening, like the directeur sportif of a Tour de France race team.
Bill and Vinnie were not cyclists, not racers, they were people who checked out what was going on, made sure it was ok, and made sure the quality was always great.
If you're a Domestique in a cycling team or at Velo Verde, you do the work.
And so what the new owner hasn't realised is that Directeur Sportif is not the guy who's on the till, it's the person who oversees the person who's on the till, but they missed that point.
And so, what happens now is that you order your coffee and cake from a long queue because he's quite slow at the till. Then you go and sit down, and then your cake arrives first, or your sausage sandwich, and then you wait 15 minutes for your coffee, and by the time you've finished eating, your coffee arrives, and it's a little bit less than satisfactory.
It was never like that, and now you're disappointed because the Velo Verde promise has been a little bit broken. The cappuccino fails the perfect cappuccino test, and the sausage sandwich isn't quite as good.
To add to that, the price has gone up since he took over.
I understand that entirely because he has to pay the mortgage and the bills to buy a new business, but the metaphor and the moral here is this...
If you want to increase the price and quality of your business, you must give more than people are paying for.
The absolute analogy with dental practice is associate percentages.
If your associate is on 50% and you cannot afford to reinvest in your business, then meet with your associates, cut their percentage to 40%, increase the prices so that they make more money than they were making before, and invest most of that money in making the business better to justify the rise in prices. Keep a little bit back for yourself and give more to your associates than they had before.
This is simple and logical.
Anyone who doesn't understand that a lower percentage generating more money at the end of the month is better than a higher percentage on lower money is an idiot and better out of your business.
But the key here is that you cannot increase prices and decrease quality. People will notice, and they will leave, and all you will do is discount to get them back. It's a ridiculous false cycle.
Blog Post Number - 3880
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