January 2017 | Business View Magazine

46 47 COFFEE NEWS News will be partnering with a U.K.-based com- pany to bring a daily, hard newspaper distribut- ed electronically to hotels, colleges, hospitals, and major governmental organizations by email to be printed out and distributed to avid readers in worldwide locations. This four-page daily, similar to USA Today, but much smaller in size will contain eight ad spaces available for purchase by local businesses in each commu- nity. In addition to being a hard copy paper, it will also be available digitally in the hotel or on campus by tapping into the IP of the local organization. This daily newspaper will initially be available in 34 languages and be offered free to the reader, just as Coffee News is free to its readership and has been for nearly 29 years. Another item of big news concerned the com- pany’s expansion into South Africa. “In January, we went to South Africa to visit with Trish Hardy, our master sub-franchisor,” Buckley reports. “We have 15 franchises, there, so we went over to meet them and do some training. I took one of our senior instructors with me and put on a two- day conference. We met so many people who were excited about doing Coffee News.” In addition, Buckley relates that this past sum- mer, a new franchise opened in Panama City, Panama, and he says that he is working with a contact in Casablanca, Morocco who may open up to eight franchises in that city. The company is also in negotiations to sell country rights in Brazil. “So the international market is starting to pick up a little bit for us now,” he says. Buckley says he hopes to add another 20 franchises by this year’s close. “And that will be a real spurt for us,” he declares. To further capitalize on the company’s interna- tional expansion plans, Buckley reports that last April, he hired a Spanish-speaking executive to provide better training and support, and, hopefully more sales in Mexico, Central America, South Amer- ica, and Spain. The company has also contracted with Zoom, a firm that specializes in online video conferencing services. “It will give us a way to train new international franchisees,”Buckley explains. “We’ll be able to conduct a classroom type environ- ment with them regardless of where they are in the world. And now that we have the new internation- al development officer on board who speaks Span- ish and this new training tool,we think we can do a much better job of training people in every country around the world.” On the domestic front, Buckley says that this Jean Daum Bill Buckley