Overview and background of Shake Café
Shake café is a family business located in Florence. The company was initiated seven years ago as the owners tried to find a job after college. The business was started with the idea of providing an alternative way of eating to the traditional city of Florence while emphasizing on health, freshness, quickness, and simplicity. The main idea behind the establishment of Shake café was to provide both locals and visitors to Florence with greener, healthy, and fresh, fast food in a friendly environment. At the moment, Shake café has three locations in the heart of Florence, Cavour, del Corso, and Santa Maria Novella. The company has more than thirty employees, although the owners significantly take part in running and performing duties within the business. The main focus of the business is to enhance sustainability by manufacturing its bamboo fiber cups and rewarding customers with a purchase discount when they use the cups. The company also has its glass water bottles. However, it encourages customers to limit the use of plastics and carry their water bottles from home.
Starting a café in the center of Florence
The first step is to identify the right location. Florence is a small complicated city. Therefore, business owners need to conduct extensive research on the most appropriate location for establishing their café. The owners must then pay for an exit package to obtain an effective long-term contract with the property owner. Obtaining a license is another step that follows after obtaining the right site. The business owner must buy a license to obtain a government permit and operate the business. The next step is writing a business plan. This involves providing a layout of the business idea, products and services, and source of finance for the intended business. Obtaining for the business is sometimes challenging. Sometimes business owners are forced to obtain financial help from the bank, which is also a hectic process. The fourth step is to complete the restaurant design. This will involve contracting architects and engineers to design the café. Completing the restaurant design requires a substantial financial investment. However, it becomes more comfortable if the business owners can do it by themselves without hiring professional input. Step five to opening a café is hiring staff (Wallace, 2019).
The hiring of staff is an important management aspect for any business organization. By hiring its staff, a business creates a team that will help it perform its operations and meet its objectives. Therefore, during the process of hiring staff, the business managers need to focus on establishing good relations and developing trust with the hired employees. Marketing is the final step in opening a café. Marketing involves creating awareness about the business and products and services that it offers. There are various marketing strategies that businesses can incorporate to market their products. For instance, marketing by word of mouth is an effective strategy that worked for Share café.
Challenges faced by Share café
Since the beginning, Shake café has overcome several challenges in opening, managing, and expanding its business. As the business continues to grow, it struggles to ensure that its concept grows with it. Therefore, the owners of the business are forced to identify various creative ways of ensuring that the business concept continues to grow without losing its relevance. The process of hiring staff for the business was also a major challenge as the owners found it hard to find individuals that they could readily trust with the business. The marketing aspect of Share café was not difficult as the owners engaged in marketing activities using word of mouth. Bureaucracy and corruption are the major political challenges that have had significant challenges in running the business. To obtain business permits on time, one needs to have a lot of influence or make several payments due to the effect of corruption in the country. Several laws dictate activities that businesses can undertake, which is a great hindrance to new business owners.
The long queues and processes make it hard for business owners to undertake their activities in time and even open up new branches. License, permits, and taxes imposed on restaurants and bars by the government take huge portions of the company’s income earnings and making it hard to expand the business effectively. Additionally, the company’s management struggles to develop and implement an effective pricing strategy. Due to the lack of adequate skills in inventory management, the management finds it hard to identify fair prices for its products, especially the foods introduced to the menu. The company’s owners, therefore, think that it is effective to employ an inventory management assistant to help them.
Analysis of current shake café strategy
Shake café focuses on the provision of food value to its clients by buying and selling fresh food products from the market. The company also focuses on providing its customers with nutritious food in the form of fresh and healthy fast food in an easy and accessible manner. For instance, the company makes a standard menu where clients come and make food combinations that they require on their own. In this way, shake café enhances the provision of value to its customers, which is its core focus. Value provision to customers is also based on freshness, nutrition, and various options that are healthy for consumers (Iraldo et al., 2017).
The food value, which is majorly based on the provision of vegan products, attempts to match the customer value as it attempts to address the various nutritional needs of the customers. The fact that it offers a menu with several ingredients from which customers choose their food allows the company to provide customer value and food value at the same time. Additionally, many local and international customers know their nutritional needs; therefore, it is easy for the company to address these needs based on their food choices from the menu. The provision of food value that aligns with customer value is a business strategy that Shake café employs to ensure that attracts and retains more customers.
Shake café also focuses on building and maintaining a positive sociological position as a core business strategy. The company builds this position by creating and maintaining a positive relationship with its suppliers, employees, and the external environment. As a startup small family company, Share café makes it a priority to invest and trust its members of staff. For instance, Share café management builds its relationship with its employees by showing appreciation to their efforts towards the growth and sustainability of the company since its inception (Burns, 2016). The company holds constant talks with its employees to understand their needs and support their growth ambitions. For instance, by holding talks with the employees, the company’s management identifies employees who require more responsibilities to improve their earning.
The management of Share café also has a personal relationship with its suppliers. The relationship enables the company to solve any issue that may arise while undertaking business transactions. The management often organizes for face to face meetings with its suppliers to sort out financial issues and develop payment plans. The company keeps such arrangements with its suppliers to establish and maintain some level of trust. The company also establishes strong relationships with its suppliers to enable it to make plans on how to effectively address unforeseen situations such as disruptions in business operations caused by the pandemic. The business relationship with its external environment is based on the services that it provides to the customers (Thaichon, Quach & Surachartkumtonkun, 2019). By focusing on enhancing sustainability, Share café ensures that it takes care of the environment by avoiding pollution and taking care of the health of its clients through the provision of healthy and nutritious food.
Future projects for Share café
Share café plans to open a fourth branch to extend its business activities within Florence. The opening of a new branch will create more opportunities for Share café to expand its presence in the market, the ability to serve more customers, and increase its revenue earnings. Share café also intends to invest in the purchase of a cold press machine that it will use to make juices for distribution. On machine and equipment investment, the company’s management undertakes extensive research to identify the best equipment that is affordable and one that is environmentally friendly. This project will help Shake café to increase the range of services that it offers to its clients. It will also help the company to meet its core objective, which is to provide healthy and nutritious food to its customers while enhancing sustainability. The third project that Shake café intends to undertake is growing its own vegetables and producing olive oil. The goal of this project is to help the company reduce its spending on the purchase of fresh supplies from the market.
Current situation at Share café
With the widespread coronavirus outbreak, Share café closed its business operations as directed by the government. After the lockdown was effected, the business stopped all its operations and is currently waiting on directives from the government to resume business. However, it is clear that when people resume their normal activities, the business does not plan to immediately open all its branches and go back to operating business as it was before the pandemic. Therefore, as one of its plans to resume normalcy when the government finally set citizens free, it will only one of its branches and monitor its progress since the world is currently facing a situation that is quite unpredictable.
Current progress of Share café
Share café developed a new menu that is more seasonal, local, and nutritious for its clients. The new menu incorporates products such as avocado and ones whose production is not very sustainable. The company believed that it was a product that most clients required. The intention of developing the new menu is to keep its products more sustainable and healthy. However, the company incurred losses since the menu was new to clients. Clients had to take time to learn and adapt to the new menu introduced to them. Therefore, the company did not record many sales for it. In many situations, the introduction of a new product requires extensive research on customers’ perception and reception of the new product (Zhang & Liu, 2020). Business owners also need to research on the customer needs that the new product intends to satisfy. Therefore, to effectively introduce the new menu to its clients, Share café needs to educate its customers about the health benefits that it has and why it is better than other existing menus.
The introduction of the new menu must also take into account the different kitchen designs for other locations. Since the menu was prepared from Cavour, the other locations lack the work design that is similar to it. As such, while preparing the new menu, the business management has to care to ensure that the other locations are not affected by the available workspace. The preparation, putting the menu together, and presenting it to clients is essential. Therefore, the company must work with easier steps and procedures to ensure that it develops the best outcome.
Recommendations for improvement at Share café
Currently, Share café has fair strategies that it uses to grow and retain its competitive advantage in the market. However, in Florence city, many restaurants are currently opening up outlets at strategic places to offer competition to Share café. As such, the company needs to either identify new business strategies or improve the existing strategies to enhance its continuous growth and build its competitive advantage. To attain this objective, Share café should implement the following recommendations;
- Diversify the range of products and services that it provides its clients. Currently, Share café focuses only on the provision of greener, healthy, and fresh, fast food products to its local and international customers. The company can diversify the range of products that it offers to its clients by providing fruits and an assortment of fresh juice to its clients (Iraldo et al., 2017).
- The company should also invest more in advertising its products through channels such as social media and television. An intensive advertisement of the company and products will help in creating more awareness about the company and its products, thus attracting more clients. Additionally, the advertisement message should focus on teaching consumers about the health and nutritional benefits of its products.
- The company should also focus on undertaking market differentiation. This can be achieved by focusing only on the provision of a particular food product. Market differentiation will help it target specific customers and improve its sales. The company can also undertake market differentiation by providing a wide range of services that target a specific group of consumers (Burns, 2016).
Conclusion
Share café is a family business that focuses on the manufacture and sale of greener, healthy, and fresh, fast food in a friendly environment. Located at the center of Florence, Share café attempts to ensure that it provides its customers with an assortment of healthy and nutritious food that they choose by themselves from the menu. The company has adopted business strategies such as being environmentally conscious, developing relationships with staff and suppliers, and opening up branches in new locations to help it operate effectively.
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