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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 9: Danny O'Neill - President of The RoasterieDanny O'Neill - Differentiation in your market
Danny O’Neill, President of The Roasterie, talks about differentiation in your market. Danny goes on to describe how changing your strategy can have its trade-offs, including influencing your company’s value and mission. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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A growth factor 10x in 7 years seems quite ambitious to me. Is this a reasonable goal?(8 votes)
I beleive that depending on what your buisness model is and the groups that you're marketing to, it is an ambitious goal, it is thinking big, but it's not unreasonable.
If you tried to keep this growth rate up without changing your company's model or expanding your market, then Robert Haavind is totally correct.(8 votes)
Really want to know about those business opportunity they turn down!(7 votes)
That is a key point! He keeps his business focused on the mission, on the value parameters that make the business unique, not only money. From the start up perspective it seems crazy to turn down money, but not when that money starts controlling the direction of the business more than the leadership. Turning down work can be the hardest and smartest thing a business person does.(1 vote)
- It seems like being at the beggining of production " the farmer" is not a very good position for growing. is it always best to be in the comercial side of the product?(3 votes)
- Those are two completely different business. Not even related.
Growing coffee it´s more related to growing corn than to sell coffee.(2 votes)
- At1:32Danny says that the company can be more nimble and quick when it is larger. What does this mean?(1 vote)
- Economies of scale? As a larger buyer of input products he can command better prices, thus increasing his margin and cash flow. Increased profits may afford new opportunities that would be too risky for a smaller business.(1 vote)
While I take my steps into Entrepreneurship I have really not had a great interest in building my ideas I feel more excited in having a Entrepreneur approach and mindset while supporting non-profits I don't know why but the excitement I get when helping a team problem solve or develop strategies and helping non-profits be successful makes me happy.
Can someone be a Entrepreneur based within a company?
What roles within a company allow a entrepreneurial mindset?(1 vote)
when was this put out?(1 vote)
1:32Video transcript
- Danny O'Neill with The Roasterie. Basically you buy green coffee
and it's not too different than if you wanted to buy corn on the cob or something like that, but we're buying something
and we're transforming it. Popcorn might be a good analogy. People, they don't care
about their kernels of corn. They want popcorn. Grains of popcorn aren't
going to do anybody any good and then popcorn at the car
wash isn't going to do any good. They want it sitting in a theater, or they want it sitting at home. So what do you people want? And where do they want it? When do they want it? Then can you get it to them? Freshness is key, key, key, key, right now if we do the
same day, which we do. You order today and we're
gonna roast it today, ship it today. You're either going to
get it today or tomorrow. So we have this sophisticated map, and it's just Kansas City
in concentric circles and what we really wanna do is concentrate on that phase one, you're gonna get your
coffee today or tomorrow. You just back up 500 miles. Now we probably have 5000
competitors that we didn't have. How many competitors do you want? So this is really a compelling
point of differentiation. It also speaks to every value
that we have about freshness. But there's so much within phase one. I think we have 114 or 15
million people in there. There's a lot of room for
us to grow within that. We wanna grow 10 times where
we are right now by 2020. There are aspects of size and technology that can actually make
us better, more nimble, and quicker than we
were when we were small. But at some point in time,
whether you're baking bread or making wine, there's a
point that there's trade-offs and you're not gonna be special anymore. You know if it's handmade by scratch and you could slice and dice
and explain it scientifically and go through the ratios but
if you did a blind taste test most of the time, scratch wins. And the scientist the
bookkeepers, the accountants would love to fight and argue about that but at the end of the
day if you have a pallet you can generally tell. Is this still delivering on an our values? Is this still delivering on our mission? I tell my folks, I say to
them "I really don't care "how sophisticated, or how intellectual "you wanna get about it." I just just look at our
logo, our package, our coffee in whatever environment that
you're suggesting it be in, and I think, is that brand building? Or is that takeaway? We've turned down some
significant pieces of business that would not be helpful to our brand and that we didn't know anything about and at the end of the day,
it would of been just about money and it wouldn't
have made us feel good.