by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
David Bell stepped out of the conference room at Coffee Perks’ main office and tried on a company shirt for the first time. The coffee and supply vending service’s newest franchise owner asked for president Susan Hartley’s appraisal as he smoothed out the shirt’s fresh creases.
“It looks like a perfect fit,” she said.
When the idea of franchising her business first occurred to Hartley five years ago, she knew the venture’s success would largely depend on her ability to find buyers with the proper combination of capital and what she called “entrepreneurial spirit.”
She wanted people who weren’t afraid to work long, odd hours and shared her commitment to customer service. In Bell, she’s confident she’s found her man.
Bell and wife Tamatha are the first owners of a Coffee Perks franchise. They will manage the premium coffee and snack vending service in St. Johns and Nassau counties. The Bells pay an upfront fee based on the size of the market and pay 8 percent of their gross sales for the right to distribute the Coffee Perks brand.
Hartley hopes to sell another four franchises by the end of next year. She says she’s received interest for all the Florida territories and is negotiating with buyers who could expand her company to Georgia and Louisiana. Future buyers will have to share Bell’s drive and dedication, and of course his bankroll.
“He had to have the capital too,” said Hartley, laughing after ticking off a list of Bell’s attributes. “But what we saw in David was a dedication to customer service, business acumen and he is solidly rooted in the community.”
Not that Bell was a shoo-in from the start. Hartley and sister Beverly Cleary, Coffee Perks’ vice president, put him through a rigorous scouting process that included financial and background checks, hours of interviews and a daylong drive-along with Coffee Perks deliveries.
Bell subjected himself to what he described as a “very, very thorough” examination process, because Coffee Perks offered what other franchise opportunities didn’t: a flexible schedule and a customer base that overlaps with his office cleaning business. Bell and his wife already split time between his nights running his cleaning business, Cleaning Concepts, and her day job at ADT Security. Add two children to the equation and it’s clear that free time won’t heavily into their future.
But Bell said distributing Coffee Perks was one of the few options he and his wife could even consider. “We couldn’t afford to be sitting in a storefront all day,” he said.
For Coffee Perks, franchising offers growth. It opens a door to a vast market of possible partners, all of them with money in hand. It’s a stark change from Hartley’s early days when start-up capital was tough to come by.
“There was a day when I begged, borrowed, pleaded for money,” she remembers now. “It’s kind of fun now, to have people with money knocking on my door.”