January 2017 | Business View Magazine

48 49 COFFEE NEWS Preferred vendor „ Machias Savings Bank www.machias savings.com past year was a mixed one. “We’re down a little bit from 12/31 last year, but we’ve never had a good year during an election year,” he avers. He believes that elections engender uncertainty, which makes entrepreneurs more risk-averse. “We have not had a lot of new people coming in with money to invest in going into business.” In addition, the company had a considerable amount of turnover in 2016, with people either dying, moving, or becoming too ill to operate their franchise. “There will always be turnover,” Buckley claims. “The only difference with us is we’re a hands-on kind of business, and for somebody working at home, if they get sick or can’t continue for any reason, we don’t have staff that can go in there and run that newspa- per until we find a buyer. So, we have to find people in that market willing to step in and buy those areas and take them over.” The good news is that the operation has been pretty successful, this past year, in doing just that. “Our numbers are considerably ahead of any year in the past,” Buckley states. “So we’re proud of that.” More good news concerns Coffee News’ consistently high rankings from Entrepreneur Magazine. “We were ranked Number One in Ad- vertising Services in the Franchise 500,” Buckley reports. “We had more franchise units than all of the other Advertising Services put together. We were also rated as the 33rd Best Home- Based Franchise.” In addition, Coffee News was rated the 26th Top Low-Cost Franchise; the 184th Top Global Franchise; and the overall 158th Top Franchise in the Top 500. Finally, Buckley says that the company has moved to new and larger headquarters in Ban- gor, and has upgraded its internal systems. “We’ve been using a system called Infusion- soft for our sales and CRM program,” he states. “Recently, we started using FranConnect, which is a franchise-oriented system and it’s pretty sophisticated. We’ve just signed an agreement with them, and we’re in the process of going through the training to replace Infusionsoft with this new FranConnect system, and we may even offer it to every one of our franchisees, worldwide.” As 2017 begins, Bill Buckley is optimistic that Coffee News will continue to be one of the world’s best franchise opportunities, as well as the planet’s number one restaurant publication. After all, everyone loves to read, and everyone loves to eat and drink outside the home, from time to time. With a winning combination like that, things can only get better for Coffee News.