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Print This PageMartyn Dawes
Speakers, Inspirational, Motivation, Teamwork & Leadership, Business & Management, Innovation, Entrepreneurs, Marketing & Brands
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Martyn is one of the UK’s most successful consumer products entrepreneurs of the last 10 years. He founded Coffee Nation in the late ‘90’s and quickly developed the business to be the UK’s leading brand of takeaway coffee sold from 600 locations across the UK.
Coffee Nation has been ranked year after year as one of the UK’s fastest growing private companies, has been a recipient of the Sunday Times Fast Track Innovation Award and Martyn is an Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner for Consumer Products.
Martyn grew up in the Midlands, dropped out of A levels and worked in a foundry and tractor factory before moving to London and starting his first business aged 23, a management consulting firm. Successful but frustrated he risked all to start a business with a “real product” founding Coffee Nation in 1997.
On a trip to New York he noticed how big the market was for takeaway coffee – not trendy coffee bars but “a dollar a cup sold from convenience and drugstores”. His vision was to put takeaway coffee into Britain’s newsagents.
So started a three year adventure that almost ended in disaster. Out of cash and busting his overdraft limit he then had his eureka moment of creating a self–serve mini-coffee bar with gourmet coffee inside supermarkets and petrol stations.
His breakthrough thinking allowed him to raise £4m of private equity funding in 2000 when all around him were rushing to raise funding for internet start-ups. As most of these fell by the wayside his business became a household name landing contracts with Tesco, Esso, Sainsbury and across all the UK’s motorways with Moto and Welcome Break.
Martyn’s vision was to create a bold new market category in the rapidly growing coffee marketplace. Despite many telling him that he’d be squashed by Starbucks or that no one would pay for a coffee in a petrol station he stuck by his vision and by 2006 over 1 million people per month were buying Coffee Nation.
Since then the company has gone on to be sold successfully not once but twice in 2008 and again in 2011 securing its place as a great British success story in the coffee market.
"Martyn recently gave a talk to our MBA students about his experiences of starting, growing and successfully selling Coffee Nation. Martyn's presentation was a perfect blend of the history of Coffee Nation and useful lessons for aspiring and existing entrepreneurs all delivered with enthusiasm and humour. I can strongly recommend Martyn as a speaker and hope that we will be able to welcome him again at Cranfield soon"
Cranfield University, School of Management
Cranfield University, School of Management
