A Twelve-Year Apprenticeship: What Columbus Coffee Taught Me About Franchising

Everyone has their franchising origin story. Mine began in 2002, although I didn’t realise it at the time.

Recently, I was at the Columbus Coffee 30th birthday celebrations and it took me right back to those early days, when I first walked into the business expecting to stay in New Zealand for just one year.

Columbus had only just opened its fourth café – the first to be opened by a franchisee and the franchising journey was very much in its infancy.

I joined almost by chance. I had a solid food and beverage background, but I knew absolutely nothing about franchising and certainly hadn’t considered it as a career. Overnight that changed. I became the first employee of a new company formed when Graeme Tait bought into the brand – Café Brands, with a vision of growing Columbus Coffee through franchising.

What followed was a twelve-year apprenticeship in franchising that you couldn’t design if you tried. Because the business was so young, there was no “that’s not my job.” I was able to touch almost every part of the brand and system as it grew: café design and fit-out, new store openings, leasing negotiations, rewriting manuals, and recruiting our first head office team. I helped design training programmes, wrote operations checklists, and spent countless hours on the floor with new franchisees and their teams.

I worked on franchise system development, negotiated supply contracts, ran barista competitions, helped organise our first conferences (including one where we literally made the franchisees cook their own lunches in a Ready Steady Cook-style challenge), and travelled overseas to coffee and franchising expos to see how the best in the world were doing it.

Looking back, it was a unique privilege that few franchise executives would experience today. It also came with a huge amount of trust from my managing director, who liked to joke that he spent more time with me than with his wife. With that trust came room to experiment, to make mistakes,(I certainly made many!) and to learn quickly.

I learnt a lot, but three lessons have stayed with me.

First, franchising is not easy and it is definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme for brands or budding entrepreneurs. Progress can be painfully slow and often feels like two steps forward and one back. But when you put in the work, the rewards do follow. For me, that meant helping open more than 60 cafés – including 17 in one year – and celebrating two Franchise Association of New Zealand Supreme Franchise Awards.

Second, nothing is achieved without a team. In franchising that team extends far beyond head office; it includes suppliers, designers, shopfitters, bankers and many others who all have a stake in the brand’s success. Coordinating that ecosystem taught me how powerful true partnership can be. I’m friends with and in business with some of that team today!

Finally, franchising is, above all else, a people business. Systems, processes and products matter, but they only come to life through people – the internal team, the partners, and most importantly the franchisees who invest in and deliver the brand every day.

That chance start at Columbus Coffee in 2002 didn’t just give me a job; it gave me a career in franchising, a deep respect for the franchise model, and a toolkit of skills and experiences that continue to shape the way I work with and support brands and franchises today.