Sydney building company Interach offered to help global coffee-shop chain Starbucks with its new Australian office - it got work on another 250 Starbucks outlets as well.
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Entrepreneur: Geoffrey Powell, Managing Director
Company: Interarch Australia Pty Ltd
Business type: Commercial office design and fit-out
Founded: 1995
Turnover: $2M - $10M
Head office: Sydney, New South Wales
Contact details: +61 2 9247 8300
The Interarch Australia Story
When Geoffrey Powell learnt from the project manager on a site where Interarch was completing an office design and fit-out that the world’s largest coffee-shop chain was looking for space in the same area, he acted quickly. Powell made direct contact with Starbucks International, the quintessentially American Seattle-based coffee house. What Powell discovered from that contact - and how he followed it up - provides an object lesson in how very big contracts can be won by very small companies.
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Key learning points:
- New-business research - Winning big clients begins by discovering and researching their needs.
- Custom-made proposals - Being proactive and tailoring your proposal to fit those needs creates client confidence.
- Free gifts - Offering free personalised assistance builds rapport and paves the way to proposal acceptance.
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Powell says: “We have a process that we use with our research and our follow-up where we try to find out as much about the [target] company as we can before we put our proposals together and we tailor them to suit that particular client. Even with an off-shore company, the information you can get electronically through the internet means that research is not hard at all.”
Starbucks wanted their Australian head office, incorporating their first local coffee shop, as a showroom and staff-training facility in Sydney. Powell found out that every Starbucks shop was purpose-built in the same style, right down to the reception counter, the seating, even the floor-coverings. Everything was manufactured in the United States to fit local site specifications and mass-shipped by container from Seattle, saving the company about 12% on each shop fit-out.
Powell ascertained that Starbucks, being totally new to Australia, had much to learn about local building codes and standards. He realised that when Starbucks got to Sydney, they would need someone with local knowledge and expertise to advise them, steer their development applications through local council, secure their construction certificate, and then co-ordinate the services and trades required for the job. He tailored Interarch’s proposal to fit the needs his research had uncovered.
Powell says: “We contacted them and gave them our proposal for their head office and first shop fit-out and they accepted it. Then they came back to us and asked if we would give them a proposal to handle all of their development applications for the 250 coffee shops they were doing over the next three years!”
While he acknowledges that Interarch’s sound work at the same development site in which Starbucks had chosen to locate contributed to the new players on the block feeling comfortable with them, Powell believes that building a personal rapport with the client is important.
Powell says: “We did assist a lot in helping them understand the local culture and I think that went a long way before we even became involved with them. We gave them a list of things they needed to do that probably helped them a bit. So we did offer them a service first before we actually got the bigger project.
“I think the way people are doing business now is more and more on a personal basis. People just don’t have time to go out and get fifty quotes on different jobs, they prefer to have just one person.”