Coalfields Coffee: Where to Go?

Abstract

Gary and Renee Harris are a husband-and-wife team of entrepreneurs who are planning on opening a coffee shop in southwest Virginia. Gary has worked in food service and Renee has been a business manager for a small medical practice. They plan to rely on this experience and their passion for cooking to succeed. They intend to open a breakfast-and-lunch-focused casual restaurant—a coffee shop rather than a diner or full restaurant. In their home town of St. Paul, they do not believe there is sufficient traffic to support their endeavor. Instead, they are looking at three other possible locations. Each town has both advantages and disadvantages. They need to sign a lease soon, which means they need to decide where to locate. They have separately ranked the potential locations and, to their surprise, have done so in exactly the reverse order of each other. They now must reconcile their differences and explore what drove them to make such divergent evaluations. Excerpt UVA-ENT-0184 Rev. Dec. 19, 2019 Coalfields Coffee: Where to Go? Introduction Sitting at their kitchen table early one morning in 2011, Renee and Gary Harris agreed that they finally had almost everything in place: a solid business plan, a great network of suppliers, an appealing and well-priced menu, start-up capital from their own personal savings and friends-and-family investors, and what they thought was a good name: Coalfields Coffee. Now what they needed was a location. The Harrises lived in southwestern Virginia in the town of St. Paul. They had both grown up in the area, gone away to college, built their careers, and raised a family out of the area. Now that their children were grown, they had decided it was time to follow their lifelong plan to come back home to St. Paul and start their own business. Gary had worked in food service for a large national wholesale company that sold to local hotels and restaurants, and Renee had been the business manager for a medical practice. They thought that with this experience and their passion for cooking, they could run a small restaurant. . . .