Business View - January 2016 49
much closer. “We had realized that sometime in the
future one or the other of us was going to die and we
needed to protect the company,” he says. “So, we en-
tered into a buy-sell agreement. We bought life insur-
ance on each other’s lives and paid the premiums.
Jean passed away in 2007. In 2008, I had the rights to
buy her company in Winnipeg with the proceeds from
her life insurance. So, now I own all the Coffee News
franchises in the world. She had the worldwide opera-
tion; I just had the United States. But, we became the
tail that wagged the dog, because she had 125 fran-
chises in Canada and we had, at one time, close to
800 in the U.S.”
The Great Recession hit Coffee News hard, with res-
taurant closures presaging franchise failures. “We had
six important restaurants close one month in South-
ern Maine, so we’ve had a lot of turnover with Coffee
News in the last five, six, seven years,” Buckley la-
ments. “We’re just starting to rebuild. We’re doing ev-
erything in our power to come up with ideas about how
to sell more franchises. There’s no number that we’re
targeting, we’re just trying to sell more. We advertise
in some magazines, we have blogs, and we actually
pay our franchisees to run ads to sell our franchises in
their editions,” he quips. At the company’s most recent
convention, Buckley says that a one-time offer was
made to any existing Coffee News publisher, in good
standing, the opportunity to buy one additional fran-
chise at its original 1995 cost of $495, rather than the
current going rate of $6,000. “We’ll sell 50 or 60 fran-
chises at that price,” he says. The company’s goal is
to get back to being one of the top 25 fastest-growing
franchises on the Franchise 500 List published by En-
trepreneur magazine.
Buckley believes that the success of Coffee News is
predicated on two things: its value to its advertisers
and its value to its readers. “The ads in Coffee News
are exclusive,” he says,” that means that only one busi-
ness of each type can buy an ad. And we don’t sell ads
to restaurants because we want them to take it. In my
editions here in Bangor - which are the longest-running
editions in the United States - I still have three adver-
tisers that were in my very first edition. Businesses ad-
vertise in Coffee News and they stay because they tell
us they get good results.”
Regarding its readership, Buckley offers an analogy:
“The Reader’s Digest takes multi-page articles and
condenses them to a page and a half. We take a page
and a half article and we condense it into one para-
Bill with Little Bill
Jean Daum
FRANCHISE
