Dale Harris: the World Barista Champion on the road to Ithaka - Part 1

So what is your business, Dale? I find this really difficult.

I have three or four businesses under one brand called Ithaca.

So we have an e-commerce business, we have a cafe and we have a wholesale business, which is actually like the real fundamental business engine of what we're doing that allows us to do what we want to do.

We buy really good coffee.

Coffee that I think is really good and we share it with people with honesty and authenticity.

That's very much my vision of what good coffee is.

And I hope that people want to understand that better.

And I hope over time that will be shaped by my team that I'm growing and by the customers that that message resonates with.

But what makes it really difficult is if I say all those things, it sounds exactly the same as every other coffee company.

We buy good coffee.

We sell good coffee, right? So right now, my only USP is me.

And I hate that.

Yeah, it's hard to scale you.

And also, yeah, hard to differentiate a business just based on

good coffee.

And like, there are some ways around that.

It's like, we have other USPs.

Like, we're in Birmingham and there are only a small amount of groceries in Birmingham.

So that's a USP to customers that are there, right? But they're not the only customers I want to reach.

Mm-hmm.

That's the thing, though, because you've got those three different businesses.

You've got the e-commerce, you've got the physical location, tasting room, and then wholesale.

So you've got customers who are going to experience Ithaca in three different ways.

And you need to let each of those sets of customers know how you're differentiated and sort of find some kind of emotional connection with them.

And they're all looking for some, like they all have different customer needs, right? We also need to make sure there's a common thread because it's so complicated to explain three stories, right? Or four stories or a hundred stories.