Ferg Brown Businesses are having to adapt to survive in the midst of the Covid-19 restrictions. One coffee supplier, Roasted Brown, has come up with a way to extend its own online sales, while also supporting its customer base. Here, Ferg Brown tells how he had to think fast to put the scheme into play in order to keep going:
As a business owner, there was this ever-increasing pressure setting in and as the hours passed, the realisations around cashflow, losing sales, honouring contracts and salaries and “what about the money owed to us” all bore down heavier and heavier. I think in times like this I tend to get upbeat and try to reassure the people around me, so my first reaction was to reassure my staff they still have a job and they’d be paid as normal for the foreseeable.
Our online shop has always been very solid, we have a healthy number of subscriptions and a wonderful crew of loyal home brewers buying coffee regularly. I knew this would grow, but I had no idea by how much, with so many people working from home and realising their local cafés were now closing too. We worked hard on ideas and finally came up with a system that could work for our customers, the end customer and our own business. Eventually, we launched “Our Shop is Their Shop”.
The campaign has gone really well so far and it’s continually growing. We’ve since been asked can we donate the sale to other shops that we don’t supply, but we’ve limited it to only the cafés we supply so that the sales generated can build up and actually make a difference. Businesses need a bailout this time, we don’t need loans. I think the government should literally put money into business accounts to ease the pressure and shore up our industries and job creation sector.