Entrepreneurship and Small Business

For any business to prosper it has to provide a service exceeding what its competitors are offering. This is why it is critical to identify, analyze and make comparisons looking and product, pricing, demand, availability and location with our competitors. Geographically, the closest competitor is grounded coffee. They are a small business, who lack a general sense of community since there have not yet been established in the area. However, Truro Cathedral Restaurant is more of at an advantage because, apart from being the communities’ favorite, the cathedral generates income through its tourism trade. As of recent they have untaken strategic plans such as renovating there coffee shop in order to appeal to younger customers. Chalmers and short Ltd , however do have the greatest geographical advantage because they are located along the sea front, this has enabled them to experience economic growth at a faster rate compared to the neighboring competitors. Our biggest competitors would be one of the two leading companies in the business Costa Coffee and Starbucks. These two are both well established businesses and an advantage to them is that they have a huge amount of customer loyalty due to the brand. As a result most customers would prefer to go to one of these franchises as to suppose a newly opened coffee shop. However, because they are multinational cooperation’s, there are unable to have flexible prices due to price being determined by external factors like economic crisis. As a starting business we would be able to capitalize on this situation and also be able to experiment with different marketing strategies like prize give always and, raffle tickets. This helps to maintain healthy relationships between the employees, customers and clients, Hence recommendations from customers boosting income and empowering the brand of the business. We aim to creative an innovative, thinking spot in order to outsell our competitors, a step towards this is introduction of an electronic library. We plan to buy kindles for the shop which the customers can take advantage off as they relax with a cup of tea or coffee, alongside the books in the café and also a “book for book” system, were customers who are willing to sign up for a small membership fee would be given a card which would permit them to swap one of their books for one in the library of their choice. We believe, Truro being a very community based area would benefit from this venture as none of the local competitors are offering this service.
Due to the location we hope to capitalize on the tourism season especially during the summer, we will have a delivery, were the drinks can be served to customers at the beach. This will help diversify the business and generate more clients. Our competitors have not been able to initiate such ideas and we hope our brand will change the manner in which coffee shops operate.
Over all even though it will be challenging to compete against the more established companies in the area, we as a collective know that with our business plan, innovative ideas and enough research we are on route to establish a business which will not only earn us profit but also longevity.

We took time to focus some of the strength and potential weaknesses of our business plan. A major issue is funds, bigger companies like Starbucks have availably of funds and this enables them to market their product to wider audience generating more income. We do not have this option to our dispensary, however we plan on getting the local community