Fictional case · Hospitality
Sam’s Coffee Kiosk
Reaching the morning trade before the mall opens
Sam, the town, the site and all figures are invented; no site approval, lease, app build or successful pilot is assumed.
Sam owns a café in a semi-rural town where many customers are tradies, but the shopping mall where it trades does not allow opening before 8 am—long after the utes have passed. A landholder offers a roadside kiosk site, and Sam imagines Early Crew Coffee: a short breakfast range, prepaid orders and an app that times each crew’s coffee to their arrival. Then she remembers she still has a café to open at eight, and someone still has to make every drink.
What the case found
- A busy road is not the same as having customers you can reach. Direction of travel, turning movements, room for utes with trailers, permitted hours and services all have to be confirmed before the kiosk—or the app—matters.
- Crew collection saves vehicle visits, not production work. Every drink in a four-person order still has to be made. At the trial booking cap, four crew pickups fill an entire 15-minute window before any walk-in arrives.
- About 70 coffees a morning just cover the costs. Each coffee-equivalent sale contributes about A$6.35, so roughly 70 cover A$440 of staff, rent and running costs. At 80 coffees, only A$68 remains—and one extra shift would create an A$112 shortfall.
- A 10% crew discount turns a profit into a loss. At 80 coffees, a builder’s requested discount reduces sales from A$848 to A$763.20, turning the A$68 surplus into an A$16.80 loss.
The structural question
Can Sam make the early morning stop reliable without creating two businesses that both require her at the same time?
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Read with the bookChapters 2–3 (noncustomers, the Buyer Utility Map and testing the offer), Chapter 5 (the Price Trap) and Chapter 7 (the Fragility Trap). It also covers the PMS Map (Chapter 4), the Holdup Trap (Chapter 6) and the nine blocks (Chapter 9).
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Inside the full case study
The site before the softwareWhat Sam must confirm about access, hours and preparation before any app is built.
What the tradie app would doSix functions—from saved favourites to crew collection—and the privacy and safety limits on tracking.
Hot on arrival is an operating systemCapacity per 15 minutes, the morning model and the Price Trap, worked through in tables.
Growth and the two-site decisionExpansion versus integration, crew accounts and the evidence a bounded pilot must collect.
Key ideas in this case
- Three kinds of sales — purchases won from competitors, purchases previously skipped, and purchases shifted from Sam’s own café all show up as kiosk sales; only the first two add to the business.
- The Price Trap — when a small price cut removes far more profit than the extra sales can replace.
- The Fragility Trap — two outlets diversify the trade, but without cover and buffers they multiply the calls only the owner can answer.
