48 Business View - January 2016
taurant market. “Now, the other thing,” he says, “is
this: restaurants are very competitive, so those that
said ‘No’ to me, would periodically go around to all the
other restaurants to find out what they were doing and
what was going on in their locations. And everywhere
they went they saw Coffee News. Even though they had
said ‘No,’ initially, they were calling me after about six
months to say, ‘Listen, we’d like to have Coffee News.’
So that’s how you get the other five or ten percent. No
restaurant wants to be without something that every-
body else has.”
Buckley eventually bought two more franchises to
serve all 115,000 people in the greater Bangor area,
as well as some small towns in the outskirts of the city.
And, business was very good. “I bought three franchis-
es and my net income in one year, after all expenses,
was one-and-a-half times what I had been making as a
regional vice president of the largest bank in the State
of Maine,” Buckley admits. “And I had it down to where
I was spending about two days a week on it.”
Daum soon realized that Buckley had figured out how
to make the business work and called him with an of-
fer. She said, “I don’t have anybody that’s qualified to
franchise in the U.S., would you be interested?” “And
I said, ‘Sure, this would be great, I’d love to sell fran-
chises’. So, basically, she awarded me the right to sell
her franchises in the United States. I became a sub-
franchisor and I sold 20 franchises the first year. At
the end of the second year I was up to 40. At the end
of the third year, I was up to 80 franchises. By the end
of the next year, I was up to 160, then I was up to 320,
and it just kept growing.”
Daum and Buckley’s partnership was soon to become
FRANCHISE
