David Abrahamovitch | Grind: How to build a DTC brand

Building a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand offers an incredible opportunity to connect with customers and foster long-term brand loyalty. But while the rewards can be significant, so too are the challenges and barriers to entry. That’s why I wanted to speak with someone who has successfully navigated this journey for our season focus on sales.

From modest beginnings in a Shoreditch coffee shop in 2011, David Abrahamovitch has built Grind into one of the UK’s leading DTC coffee brands. Having built a hugely loyal customer base, it’s estimated a Grind coffee is enjoyed every 2.8 seconds in the UK. David’s business has also grown through partnerships with the likes of British Airways & Soho House. 

Keep listening to hear David’s advice on how to build a DTC brand & how to leverage community-building to generate sales. 

David’s advice:

1. Accept that everything is sales; sell to yourself constantly
2. With every small sale you are building a following and a brand
3. Pitching your product should not worry you; you know more than anyone else about it, so you have nothing to fear
4. Always know your numbers; but also tell the story of the history of the brand, and your plans for its future
5. Be optimistic - but not delusional!
6. DTC is more work in that you have to have a website / attract people to that website / and  deal with the packaging and the posting
7. Whereas  selling through a retailer you only need to advertise the product
8. BUT DTC gives you access to customers’ data and allows you to build a relationship with them
9. So selling through both the above is perhaps optimal
10. Advertising is essential for DTC selling - Facebook / Instagram / email / tube car panels are all useful; expect to spend up to 30% of revenue on marketing which will be a constant burden
11. Retaining customers is everything; the product must be a good one
12. If customers unsubscribe, find out why so that you can fix the problem
13. Use AI to help with small repetitive edits, not to replace people, just to speed up what they do
14. In order to attract young talent, create a culture that they will understand and like; always be thoughtful with your team and make sure they understand their job, their position and the company mission

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Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2024 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.  Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason. 

FF&M recommends: 

• Buzzsprout podcast 'how to' & hosting directory
• Canva has proved invaluable for creating all the social media assets and audio bites.

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod.  Link &  Licence

Transcript

Juliet: [00:00:00] Building a direct consumer brand offers an incredible opportunity to connect with customers and foster long-term brand loyalty. But while the rewards can be significant, so do are the challenges and barriers to entry. That's why I wanted to speak with someone who has successfully navigated this journey for our season focus on sales.

From Modest Beginnings in a shoreditch coffee shop in 2011, David Abramovich has built grind into one of the UK's leading DTC coffee brands. Having built a hugely loyal customer base, it's estimated a grind coffee is enjoyed every 2.8 seconds in the uk. David's business has also grown through partnerships with the likes of British Airways and Soho House.

 Keep listening to hear David's advice on how he built this most amazing DTC brand. If you'd like to contact David, you can find all of his contact details in the show notes along with a recap of the advice that he has so kindly shared.

thank you, David for joining. How to start up today? It would be great if you, before we get into the all the things, GTC and sales, if you could [00:01:00] introduce yourself and a bit about the business that you started.

David: Sure. I'm David Abramovich. I founded Grind in 2011 when I took over my dad's old mobile phone shop. Which was the family business and turned it into a single site, coffee shop, selling takeaway coffee and pastries and stuff like that. And since then, grind has grown and become All Things Coffee in, in lots of different places, 

as I'm sure we'll talk about.

Juliet: What made you go, because I think you studied economics in London and you interned at Barclays in Santander. What took you from that into starting a coffee shop from a mobile phone shop?

David: Yeah, so there, there was a, there's a crucial one that was missed there, which was, when I was in my third year of uni, I, joined a startup basically, or co-founded a startup. I was a late co-founder with a friend of mine. and that was a tech business. It was. Me and my best friend from school and then a couple of older guys,who had originally founded it.

We ended up raising lots of money in [00:02:00] venture capital and went on kind of a crazy journey with that business for three or four years was called inter Resolve at the time. So that was what really moved me away from what I had felt was the default path, which was going into the city and doing banking.

that kind of felt like the default path, but this. moved me away and it became very clear that I didn't wanna do that other path. and then it was during, it was during that journey at the other business that, unfortunately my father got ill and passed away when I was, 24. And the mobile phone shop was the family business.

It was his business. So I found myself with. The responsibility and I guess the opportunity of doing something with this business and this physical location, that business had.

Juliet: this is probably a whole topic for another episode, but I'm so sorry to hear that you lost your father. Do you feel like that distraction of the responsibility helped with the grief [00:03:00] Somewhat.

David: no, not really. I don't, to be honest, I mean, nothing can help with the grief of that. It was more okay, I think I'm quite good at compartmentalizing stuff. And, the grief was the grief and that was awful. But also there were just practical things that, that had to change and had to be dealt with, and there was a team of people working in this store requiring a salary to be paid from a business, which.

 so he had prostate cancer. He was ill for three or four years, so it was a very distracting thing and he obviously wasn't focused on the business. the business wasn't in great shape by the time we closed it down. and then really, I never considered. that we would close the business down and hand the keys back to the landlord because it felt like our building, like if anyone's from London, it's our first store Shoreditch Grind.

it's right on the edge of Old Street Roundabout. It's a tiny little circular building, surrounded by skyscrapers. And we now have the cinema sign on the front. So most people who have been through East London know the building when you mention it. [00:04:00] And even though we didn't own the freehold, it felt like it was our building because I'd spent so much time in there, doing my summer job there, repairing Nokia 82 tens and stuff like that upstairs.

so it was never a question of do we give it back? It was more, what shall I do with this building Now we've closed down the phone business.

Juliet: Yeah, it's so interesting you say that and I, sorry, I asked that question, which I know wasn't one of our questions is 'cause my father passed away six months before I was made redundant and I suddenly, it was like, I can't afford to lose my apartment. I've lost enough. And it was like, head down, get on.

There's got to be another path to this. And also having the privacy of lockdown to have grief at home with not having to go into work. It is like I'm sobbing at my laptop and no one can see. I'm just like. Politely emailing new business. So it is weird how these things happen and what

puts you into that spot. 

David: yeah, if anything, I've always felt slightly strange that something so good has come out of something so bad and like you can't quite reconcile that because, I would delete grind in a heartbeat. [00:05:00] I'd delete the entire journey out of my life to have the thing that started it not have happened happened But but then grind has been the most amazing thing in my life. So it's very hard to reconcile something really great coming from something, really bad

Juliet: yeah, and as my dad pointed out, oh, bless him, he was like, shit happens. we just gotta crack on with it and make the best of it, which is absolutely what you have now done with grind. And of course it goes without saying that your father would be incredibly proud that premises is still within the family and that you've built this amazing 

business. 

David: I hope so.

Juliet: I'm a not a coffee drinker, and I have seen the grind brand grow from strength to strength. And when you notice a brand that. Isn't relevant to you. I think that says something, and it's a relatively young brand considering its world domination. You've got partnerships with British Airways, Soho House.

For you, going into that one, destination to where you are today, sales has obviously been a huge part of that. [00:06:00] How, as the leader of the business would you define sales?

David: Yeah, everything is sales. in reality, everything is sales. so

whether you like it or not,hiring. Employees, building the team is sales, right? You're selling them the dream raising investment for the business. You're selling them the dream and the vision and where you're gonna go.

And then obviously, all businesses require revenue. Pretty much every business I can think of has a customer. I can't think of any business that doesn't have a customer. And therefore you have to persuade those customers to, transact with you in some way or another. so business is sales, and.

You have to get comfortable with that pretty quickly. And I don't know anyone who's built a business, I don't think, who's also had formal sales training. there are amazing salespeople out there who are professional salespeople and they will just go sell anything to a customer and they'll go, they'll see that customer, [00:07:00] they'll go through the process, they'll sell the product.

They'll sign the forms and they'll get the check. but that's not really the same kind of selling you have to do as an entrepreneur, I don't think, you have to sell to yourself constantly. you have to constantly convince yourself that despite all of the odds, this is worth it.

and this is sensible, so you almost, I can't think of anyone that you are not selling the journey to, you're selling it to your family. You're selling it to your friends, 

Juliet: your previous ex-boss.

David: Yeah, exactly. everyone, and I guess, you are then selling to customers day to day as well and that's obviously very, specific on the circumstances.

you might have one customer, which is a big enterprise customer, which generates all of your revenue. for us, we are the very opposite. we do have some very big customers, you mentioned a couple of them, people at British Airways, so house, but the vast majority of our revenue.

Comes in transactions, which are individually less than 20 pounds. it's a very large number of customers and that kind of [00:08:00] sales is about building, it's not about, I can't go pitch everyone that buys a flat white or buys one of our packs of coffee out of a supermarket.

Juliet: Otherwise that just doesn't work. But, so that's about sales, which is. Building a brand, creating a great product, creating, a following for the business and building brand recognition, which is another form of sales, How did you get comfortable with that? Because obviously you learned it pretty early on. you've opened a shop you are selling. How did you learn how to do it? I.

David: I, I think I got comfortable with it even before grind actually in other businesses that I'd been involved in, primarily the one I. The one that I mentioned. And I think, when we were raising money for that business, we had to go sell ourselves to investors. And I think, when it comes to, you know, how do you get comfortable pitching your business or presenting it to people, I always just remind myself that I know more about this thing than anyone else.

It's not like I'm going to do a seminar on quantum physics and there's loads of other [00:09:00] unbelievably smart scientists in the room who are gonna disagree with me. this is my business that I'm building and it's my vision and I know it inside out because I created it. So on that basis, it's very hard for me to be wrong when speaking about my business, and therefore, why should I be afraid to sell it because.

I know more about it than anyone else and that kind of weird, slightly warped, slightly flawed logic is what kind of helped me get really comfortable with, do you know what? I can just go sell this business to anyone.

Juliet: I think there was a guest in episode or season three that was saying, you have to be so unbelievably deluded that your business is gonna succeed, that everyone else will just believe you too, and. Knowing it inside out and knowing your numbers. And a lot of people, we did a seasonal investment. A lot of people say businesses don't fail because it's not a good idea.

They fail 'cause they don't have any cash flow. And actually knowing your numbers, which obviously very much linked to your revenue and sales and clients is the best thing you can do. And presumably [00:10:00] with your background, you had some good experience with that. What would you advise a founder who might not be numerically savvy to do?

David: I actually look, you have to know your numbers clearly, and you have to understand, you have to know what you're talking about and there's a gap between, you have to be optimistic but not delusional. I think, I've had conversations with people trying to pitch me for investment, and I've just thought they were delusional.

And actually, you want someone who's extremely optimistic, but most of the time you don't wanna take a 1 million to one odds bet, right? You wanna take a hundred to one odds bet or a 10 to one odds bet you're investing in startups, that's fine, but you don't want, you don't want delusion.

I think it's all about storytelling, actually. I think. No one is impressed by someone who stands up and recites their kind of EBITDA margin and their profit margin and their cashflow, and talks someone through a balance sheet in theory, right? Like people want to hear stories and I don't mean making up a story.

I mean telling the story [00:11:00] and expressing what you are going to build, what the opportunity is, what got you to this point, and how you're going to build a business. So actually, I don't think you need to be a maths genius to be an entrepreneur. And there's countless examples of amazing founders who are dyslexic and amazing founders who are, terrible at maths and 

Juliet: Incredibly neurodiverse. 

David: Yeah, exactly. And Richard Branson is probably the most famous example of someone who claims never to have read a p and l or understand the balance sheet really. and he's done. He's done. Okay. Right. So it is all about storytelling, I think.

Juliet: I love you for saying this. 'cause in our day job, we teach people how to own their PR in house and it's all about storytelling. And it is absolutely, if you tell someone a story, they're gonna remember it more than something else and it's more heartfelt and more relatable. So thank you for that.

How long did it take grind to generate revenue?

David: I get about 45 seconds I think, because day one for Grind was one physical store. [00:12:00] we opened the door at 7:00 AM and a few people walked in and I guess the first person came to the till and bought a flat white. And I actually remember that exact moment as well 'cause I was there and I'd been there all night trying to get us ready to open.

yeah, technically we generated our first revenue probably within our first minute of actual trading. But it took us about nine months to get to that point in terms of fitting out the first store, and these days. When we fit out a store, it takes three or four weeks because we're a bit more organized and we've got, serious contractors doing it with plans that have been in progress for months.

But, we were making it up then, and we'd run out money about five times in a row as well, trying to get to that point. I guess the short answer is 45 seconds. The longer answer is nine months.

Juliet: I am really jealous of all of the DTC brands I sit next to in coworking offices. 'cause they have the Shopify ding on their phones and I look at 'em 'cause we're project led web services, we're podcasting pr so it's very different types of work. And we all have sort of five clients a year [00:13:00] max, and hear all these dinging on their phones.

I'm like, oh, I hate you for that.

But it's, it's such a 

David: nice. Yeah, it is. I've had this conversation with a few people, but I think the seminal moment in building a D two C business is when you turn those notifications off

because they become unbearable and constant. because, if you're selling a few thousand orders a day.

You can't have a ping on your phone every time. So actually you reach the point where, well, I actually just need to turn this off. She's driving me mad 

Juliet: you have a bad day, do you turn them back on again

David: no.

Do you know what I haven't? I might, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that tomorrow though. I'll do it on Monday. Monday's always the biggest day. So yeah, I'll do it on Monday and see what happens.

 And speaking of DTC, and for anyone that doesn't know it's means direct to consumer, what would you say is the difference between A DTC brand and a non TTC brand?

So at the highest level, are you transacting directly with your customer through your own website or are your products being sold through an intermediary such as a supermarket? so we do both, but there will obviously be brands which are exclusively [00:14:00] available.

Online and then other brands which are exclusively available as a product which is sold by someone else, such as, such as a 

Juliet: Yeah. And is it true that you would have the retailers, helping with brand awareness, but obviously the margin is less profitable than the DTC and they chicken and egg, they feed each other.

David: Yeah, it is just a completely different thing. So in one scenario, you've got a website that no one is visiting and you've got a product and you are prepared to ship it to them once they put their credit card in and when they do put their credit card in, you get to keep all of the money, but.

You've got to provide the website, you've got to figure out how to get 'em to come to the website and buy something. You've got to ship them the product and you've got to build the customer base. So there's a lot that comes out of that revenue. You keep, when you're talking about a grocer, you've just gotta convince them to put your product on the shelves.

And the sticker price that the customer paid you as the manufacturer of the products might only get about half of that. [00:15:00] However. You have not gotta get people into that store and you haven't got to send them the product in a box and you haven't got to, you, you do have to do advertising and marketing so that they're aware of the brand so that they choose it.

But it's just a very different model because, in one scenario you've got to do everything including customer service and creating the relationship with the end customer and you end, you do end up with a different relationship with your customer as well.

one of the beauties of D two C is. Once you've transacted with me, once you've given me your email and your postal address so I can send you emails ask you to buy more things and let you know about new product launches. And I can also, understand are you male or female and how old are you?

And where do you live in the country? And I can pull that together with. Lots of other data and start to learn much more about our customers. You do get some of that in grocery, so in grocery, when people use their, Tesco club card or their Nectar Sainsbury's card, as a retailer we can get access to anonymized kind of [00:16:00] demographic data so that we know that overall these are the kinds of people buying our product, but it's nothing like us.

As granular as you get from D two C. So you know, D two C is an amazing way to build relationships directly with customers for sure.

Juliet: And presumably AB test, any marketing, any outreach to learn what works, what doesn't work with your client.

David: Yeah.the menu of things that you can do is just way greater in D two C, right? You can email people, you can text people, you can give them offers, you can give them. Limited editions, you have their contact details, so you can do anything you can think of really. Whereas in grocery, beyond, going two for one every now and again to try and encourage people to try the product.

And beyond kind of broad marketing on billboards or television or things like that, there's a much more limited range of things you can do. But if you're looking at food and you're looking at the food space, in particular, which obviously we are in the food and drink space.

The [00:17:00] vast majority of sales are going through supermarkets, so where do you buy all the stuff to eat and drink that's currently in your house? I'm guessing it all came from the supermarket one way or another. Maybe they delivered it to you. Maybe you went and got it. But,there is a huge customer base spending huge amounts of money in grocers, so it is a massive opportunity to tap into.

Juliet: We're taking a quick 30 second break from this episode to ask, are you thinking of starting your own podcast? If so, this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself. This course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it.

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I was gonna say on that, how did Grind acquire their customers? Where, how did you find them or how did they find you?

David: Yeah. so as we went [00:18:00] into the pandemic,we had a dozen or so stores, 300 staff or something like that, 300 and the team, and 99% of our revenue at that point came through the high street. Today our revenues as a business is a third high street, a third direct to consumer, and a third.

Grocery and B2B. and

Juliet: Who doesn't want that in a business, you've completely like mitigated all risk.

David: it doesn't feel like that every day, but, we definitely diversified across lots of different channels, that gives you a sense of how much the business has changed since that first lockdown. And we made some decisions.

About nine months to a year before that lockdown to launch a direct to consumer business, we started developing our compostable coffee pods. We decided they were gonna be subscription, they were gonna be through the letterbox. We bought equipment, we moved roastery. people think sometimes that it was just a covid thing.

it was absolutely [00:19:00] accelerated by Covid, and I don't think it would've happened with anything like the same kind of. Dramatic increase without covid clearly. But we were really lucky that we made those decisions like a year before the first lockdown, so that by the time the lockdown happened, we could actually take advantage of it.

But what we had done by that point was we'd had eight years of trading on the high street by that point. So we had a brand, we had a few hundred thousand social media followers. We had. A few hundred thousand email addresses. We had people signed up to our loyalty scheme.

So that meant we already had a relationship with, let's say, I don't know, somewhere between half a million and a million people who we could then email and use our social media to say, Hey, all of our cafes are closed. Please come and buy some coffee online. Please support us. And that we would send an email and it would generate 10,000 in revenue or something like, 

within a few hours. and so it was that that gave us the [00:20:00] confidence and the ability and to then double and triple down on D two C while all of the stores were closed. in a way we did big 3D marketing campaign over eight years called Rolling Out Grind on the High Street to build a customer base to then.

Tap into D two C. I'd love to say that it was all a master plan, but it definitely wasn't.

Juliet: you said earlier on it's, we were lucky, but I think, and a lot of, every single founder I've interviewed has said, oh, we were lucky 'cause of this. We're lucky. 'cause I don't think there's any luck. It's just a lot of hard work. And you put the, I was gonna say, the grind into it, you really, I.

Determined to make a success of this, and then certain things happened in the world, and obviously you said accelerated it. So people say to me, oh, you're really lucky that you've done so well. I'm like, it's not really.

David: Yeah, listen, I think I have made plenty of bad decisions along the way, but we made some good decisions, including let's take the brand into D two C. And then we were just so lucky with the timing [00:21:00] of, you know, we literally had containers of stuff arrive three weeks before the lockdown that 

had those containers not arrived, we'd have had no stock to sell to people when the first lockdown came. Somewhere someone got on a plane from, China to Italy to London or what, whatever the flow for it to end up in the UK was, and had that whole chain of events happened a month earlier.

I don't think we would be in the same position because you then just couldn't get stock, you couldn't get product, like everything stopped. So I'm very grateful for the, for the timing of 

Juliet: timing. And on the DTC channel, you've scaled obviously very quickly in terms of your marketing mix. What has been the most effective channel for you?

David: Facebook, when I say Facebook, I mean Facebook and Instagram because when you run ads on, if you run ads on Instagram,

Juliet: So paid not organic.

David: Yeah. Paid through Look. Okay. it's very hard to measure organic. It's very easy to measure.

Juliet: Speaking to someone in pr.

David: Yeah, exactly. PR is the ultimate [00:22:00] example of it being hard to measure organic 

So if I talk about comparing the paid channels with one another, then Facebook and Instagram have been, I. The most effective. It's the channel we spend the most on. and it's been consistently the most effective for a long time. But, email is fantastic as well.

Email is an amazing channel. And of course Organic is an amazing channel and has probably delivered us more customers than anything else. and, and the other one actually is Tube car panels are unbelievably, I. Effective for a London audience.

I wish there was a tube in Birmingham and Manchester and everywhere else and other major cities because, to put your brand on a tube car panel doesn't cost that much. it's tens of thousands to run a campaign, not hundreds of thousands or millions, and. a lot of people use the tube and a lot of people stand there looking at those,and we've seen that's been a really consistently effective way to build the brand and reach customers as well.

Juliet: And are [00:23:00] you a big advocate of, you are doing well in lots of these outreach channels and they're all talking to each other and they all third time, fourth time someone see it. Fifth time someone purchases. So the organic's helping the paid and the paids helping the organic in your gut, what's the one thing that if you had to switch off everything you would keep

Oof. or would it not work? 'cause they all need to happen.

David: yeah, I think it's a bit of a cop out answer, but I think it's really different at different parts of the journey. So like reaching your first customers is all about. Organic for me, because there, should be a universe of customers out there that just naturally are gonna find out about you, read about you, stumble across and buy your product and like it, and leave you a good review and tell some other people.

So you know, that's the most important thing at the beginning. But obviously the more aggressively you want to scale and the bigger. In absolute terms, you want your customer base to become so if you wanna sell your product to tens [00:24:00] of millions of people, that's the whole of the uk.

So I now need to build national awareness, and it's impossible to do that. Well, it's not impossible, but it's virtually impossible to do that for a consumer. Business unless you are, achieving some kind of virality, like, you know, Instagram or if you are an app that goes completely viral or Uber maybe, or something like that.

But, for a kind of regular consumer business you're gonna have to use paid marketing to build the brand. How many times do you see gigantic apple billboards for the latest iPhone, right? that's the world's most valuable company and probably the most amazing consumer products ever created.

Juliet: And yet they still cover every major city in the world in gigantic billboards, and they still run TV ads because you have to just reinforce the brand and your brand position constantly. I remember, 'cause my background was working for Chanel and they never, the private company would never declare [00:25:00] numbers and there was rumors going round that are no wanted to buy Chanel. Like it's not gonna happen. So they declared their marketing report and they, I think it was something like. They spent the same amount in marketing as the owners took home in their pocket every year because they just had to keep up there and keep reaffirming the messaging.

David: Yeah. it's not uncommon to spend 10, 20, even 30% of your business's revenue on marketing. 

And that's what, talking earlier about the difference between the channels, you do in D to C, you're not sharing the margin with someone else, but you've got this big marketing burden that you have to, invest in as well.

I.

Juliet: And in terms of retention, 'cause obviously acquisition is super important, but then hanging onto these clients, especially if you are offering a subscription service, how have you tackled that?

David: I don't believe. Look, there are obviously tricks with retention, right? there are tips and tricks which people will tell you you can do. And if you email people in this way before their subscription order runs,in reality, retention is about.

Are you doing a good job? retention is the [00:26:00] ultimate scorecard for a business in lots of ways, particularly if you are a subscription business. I think even more so because retention is everything. So it's, is the product really good? Does it work? Does it last, is the packaging good?

is your fulfillment team doing a good job? So are you doing what you say you would in terms of getting people the product on time? Is it arriving? In a soggy box because some courier didn't do the right thing or, are you doing that whole thing? are you communicating with your customers?

Are you reinforcing through packaging, through things you put in the packaging? Are you reinforcing your messages and your brand and. Do customers still like you? I've got some subscription products in my house and I've been a subscriber for years and years and years, that company's doing a good job, right?

They've given me no reason to change and look with grind, we've got people who've been subscribed to our coffee pods basically since the beginning now, which is more than five years of. coffee pod subscription. So you are giving that customer what [00:27:00] they want.

 but, what we try and do as much as we can is speak to the customers who unsubscribe and ask them why. is it about price? Is it about flavor? Is it about something else? And the things that you learn from that are astonishing because people cancel for reasons that you wouldn't even have dreamt 

A reason and then random things happen that you would not have put in your spreadsheet of the reasons of why people

Juliet: Like 

David: cancel. 

Juliet: got an example,

David: a customer has completely got the wrong end of the stick about what a flavor is supposed to be like because of the way you've described it.

And actually when you look at it through their lens, you say, yeah, do you know what? I can see how they've come to that conclusion. Or just little things like 

They've got confused. Yeah. Like they've got confused between the colored rings that we have, and they thought that one flavor was another flavor, or just, turns out that they've been subscribed for six months, but they haven't received it for six months because it's all been going to the neighbor.

So they're fuming because you've been [00:28:00] charging them, something at some point has gone wrong and they've not actually been receiving the product. just real life stuff that happens that 

normally. you can go back and fix lots of those things.

But, we went through a really interesting time where we'd attracted our first, I don't know, 10,000 subscribers or however many it was. and they were really, really happy. But as we started to, cast the net a little bit wider, the newer customers we were acquiring became less happy in terms of.

The taste feedback. And we eventually realized that, the first customers that we had acquired were those people who were using specialty coffee shops and drinking coffee in a certain kind of format and way, they were drinking espressos or long blacks or flat whites from specialty coffee shops using really high quality beans and that's what they thought could look like.

And that's how we designed our pods. You then start to get into the homes of customers whose [00:29:00] main coffee outside the home is coming from the big chains, which is a lower quality product, typically more darkly roasted, just it's a different style of product. So the thing that they're comparing you to is different, so their expectations are different.

Juliet: So you end up having to introduce new flavors. Maybe some darker roasts and some pods or bean and ground or ready to drink cans, whatever it might be, that suit a different, slightly more mainstream audience than the first people that you acquired. But knowing who they are and why, and I noticed that your B Corp as well, we had got, I think ours a year and a half ago and feedback is such a huge part of B Corp, of just ask and just tell me when I've got egg on my face. 'cause then I can improve. But if you don't ask, you don't know. 

So that's so interesting.

You've often talked about how you are incorporating AI tools into your business. could you talk a little bit about that, where you're at with that?

David: Yeah. So we've done, a fair bit of that stuff with Google, I think is the, [00:30:00] is probably the thing you are referring to. it's been really interesting and we've got a lot of different people in the business doing a lot of different roles. So we've got everyone from I.

Actual developers building our website who are obviously super tech savvy. they're in the top 1% of being tech savvy. But then there are people in our high street stores whose primary job is interacting with customers or making food in kitchens or making coffee. And, these are not people that are spending the whole day at a computer.

So it's really interesting to see how these tools can work with different parts of the business. So, you know, for the, developers. that's checking code, running code through it, even generating code that they then tweak, quite advanced stuff for the guys in the stores, it's, can you look at this rotor?

pull a report from the till system and pull a report from the rotor and say, where does this make sense? Or where does this not make sense? Where am I overstaffed? Where am I understaffed? And obviously the tools that you use to build a rotor for a cafe, have that built in.

They [00:31:00] access your sales data anyway. But it's another check to say, does this make sense? or then you've got the brand team our brand team are producing continuously just mountains and mountains of stuff, Be it an ad for Facebook, be it a new menu for the stores, be it a thing to go on the shelf in a supermarket, be it something for the British Airways magazine.

just packaging the list that they have is unbelievable. So if there are ways that they can use AI and which they are to speed that up, it's super helpful because they continuously have a backlog of stuff to do. So any, small, repetitive. Edits that can be handled by AI is amazing.

and we don't see it as replacing anyone at all. It's just trying to make everyone 20% faster in the same way that, when people first got a laptop instead of a pen and paper, they could go a lot faster and do things much better. it didn't remove the need for the human, it just made them much, much more effective.

Juliet: Talks to, [00:32:00] my favorite quote so far from the whole show is Automate, delegate, solve From You and Yong. It's find the process, have the difficult, someone say anything that's recurring, find sort it. and that's fascinating. And something that we do is a question from our previous guest, which was Laura Harnett from Seep who, I Dunno if you'd seen, had just got Trinity's investment on Dragons Den.

So very 

David: Okay. 

Juliet: time for her. 

David: What's Seep? 

Juliet: Seep is a plastic free cleaning brand. So she has a mission to get rid of the yellow and green sponges from our lives, with a very beautiful alternative and is absolutely killing it, but has just gone into Tesco's. And she, but she saw her and she said, I've just spent Monday night driving around North London looking at all the te Tesco extras to try and find our product on the shelves, like it's a glamorous life.

I was like, go, you. Yeah. but her question for you is how do you attract and keep the best young talent? Because I feel like everyone has said that people are the hardest part. how do you tackle that?

David: it is really hard. and, culture [00:33:00] is the, answer, which is one word, right? Like you have to just create a culture in which people want to be there. They like the people they work with, they understand. What they're supposed to do. They understand how they're being measured, they understand who to report to, and they understand where the company is trying to go and what the company's mission is.

And those things are all easy to say, but they're really hard to do. in reality, when you are onboarding people constantly, when you're growing fast, just the basic stuff, like when people turn up, making sure they know how the business works and how they're gonna be measured and who their colleagues are and who does what.

So it's a 

huge amount of, yeah, 

it's a huge amount of hard work. and then, culture takes years to build, but can be destroyed in minutes. So it's really about just, being super thoughtful about all of your major interactions with your team and, and I think how you treat people 

When things are not going well is really important as well. So I often [00:34:00] reference, during the pandemic, you know, lots of people laid off, tons and tons of people, hundreds, thousands of people and lots of businesses did a really poor job at communicating with their staff what was going on, what was gonna happen.

Will I still have a job at the end of this or not? and we worked. Super hard at, no one's gonna lose their job. We're gonna figure this out. This is where we're going. Okay. We are now pivoting a bit into D two C. This is really exciting. And we put tons of effort into communicating with our team throughout that period.

And there are loads of people who are still with us from then or before. And I think people remember how. How you treat them when it's tough Times more than when it's good times. I think, you pay someone a bonus. 'cause the company had a good year. Great, thanks. I really appreciate it.

But it's worn off after about a month. But like, how you behave when the going is not so good, I think is actually more [00:35:00] important.

Juliet: Absolutely. I think we're wired that if you have a hundred comments and 99 a positive and one a negative, you remember the negative. It's like, well, that's. Great. But with team and morale, I think that's super important and that reputation that will spread like wildfire if it goes wrong.

It's something super important to protect and obviously grind has the most phenomenal reputation. So you're doing something right.

David: Oh, thank you.

Juliet: What would your question be for our next guest?

David: Can they tell me how to have a successful work-life balance? 'cause I think I'm still figuring that one out

myself. 

Juliet: of people say it's hard because you love what you do and therefore you want to do it more, but then you forget that you need stuff outside of work. And this, there's a lot of, canceling going on for, I think it's the hormo and the brew dog guy saying that we just love working all the time and there's nothing wrong with that and live and let live, but.

Everyone's like, no, you need to not work. You need to have time away from work, but it's hard when you love it so much.

David: Look,I think it is the, I said the question as a joke, but there probably is a real question there, which [00:36:00] is just, how do you as whoever this next individual might be, define a successful work-life balance. 'cause I think 

that's the point. It's different for everyone and I think it's okay for it to be different for everyone.

Some people love, I think you, you mentioned James from BrewDog, who I know, relatively well and yeah, he loves it and that is genuine, right? He wants to work on his businesses all the time. and that's great for him, but that doesn't work for everyone, right?

and, other people want to have a really clear separation between. Home and work life are not I guess that'd be a good question to ask 10 people to be honest. how do you define it and get a range of views?

Juliet: I'm actually gonna go back for this entire season 'cause we're doing season roundups now and webinars that. Emily Austin, your PR guru, was on our last one and do a bit of a, here are the top three questions from everybody and get everybody's answers 'cause it, everyone is in the same boat.

Everyone's facing the same challenges in that sense. One piece of advice someone gave to me was just know how you tick and [00:37:00] know the end of your day. If it's six o'clock, fine. If it's 10 o'clock, fine, whatever it is, stick to it and end your day. Laptop down. And if you're working from home, go outside. have a separation from it.

But it's really hard. It's really 

hard,

David: It's really hard.

Juliet: but I'm kicking myself 'cause I work that hard 25 years for other people before I then work for myself. I'm like, dammit, I should have banked those hours for me.

David: Yeah. Yeah. Should have done.

Juliet: But no, I will let you know. I will send you the answer when I get it from our next Thank you so much for your time today.

It's been great chatting to you, and huge congratulations on all things Grind.

David: Oh, thank you. You too. Congratulations on the podcast. It's great.

Juliet: Thank you. Tune in next week to hear Lauren Curry, OBE founder of Upfront on How to build resilience in sales. And if you'd like to tune into last week's episode to hear Laura Harnett from Seep, she talks about how to make sales more sustainable.