Graham Cooke is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Cafe Last. He has spent years in the SEO and internet marketing space, and his team have done over $600k in sales in 2020 alone. He loves building teams, systems, and new companies.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Cafe Last all about?
Cafe Last is all about providing our customers with the best coffee and espresso experience online. We have nearly every top brand in the industry, from La Marzocco to Nuova Simonelli and more. We pride ourselves on offering a personalized, cafe-like experience that can’t be replicated at any other store.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My team and I started Cafe Last in We soft-launched in Fall 2020, and we just crossed the $100k monthly revenue mark in December 2020. I attribute this to my amazing team that brings together a variety of crucial skills. Ad management, user experience, SEO, and more. We have all spent years honing our skills to become as proficient as possible. I started learning about marketing in 2017, left my full-time job in 2018, and never looked back!
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
Our plans to grow the company are to double down on what is already working for us. Onboarding more high-quality suppliers, investing more in content marketing, SEO, and hiring more customer success representatives. In entrepreneurship, once you have found a winning formula, it’s all about doubling down and scaling your efforts. It can be easy to get distracted by other potential business ideas – for me, the wheels are always turning. But it’s crucial to focus and scale one business at a time.
What was the biggest problem you encountered building this product? and how did you overcome it?
The hardest part, undoubtedly, is when you are starting. I’ve heard statistics that something like 99% of people who start a new business fail. I would posit that this isn’t because people are incapable of success, it’s that they don’t know how to move forward tangibly. Additionally, we want immediate results, and in entrepreneurship, you do not get immediate results. You work day in and day out so months down the road you start to see success – that is a hard thing for most people to do.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I have made plenty of mistakes in my lifetime. Fortunately, Cafe Last has been the result of years of hard work and learning from my mistakes – so when it came to starting this business, we didn’t make a ton of mistakes. However, in the past, my greatest mistake has been expecting things to go my way, simply because I wanted them to. In reality, we are all at the whims of the market, and forces larger than us. Instead of pushing against the tide with your business and complaining that something should be a certain way, work on learning and improving your business so it is congruent with those forces.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
At Cafe Last, we separate ourselves by giving our customers a cafe-like experience. When you shop with us, you’re becoming a member of our family, and we strive to treat you as such. This is something that most stores, in general, don’t do – we don’t view it as a transactional experience, you’re joining our family.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I try to learn something new every day. Even if it is not directly related to my business, the act of learning will help you make connections and see things in a brand new light. In many ways, I accredit my success as an entrepreneur to my lifelong love of learning. Nowadays, there are a million different platforms to learn from – books, videos, documentaries, courses. If you are always learning, you are always growing.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
That is a great question! Here are a few that have changed my life. The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, which is about how small decisions we make everyday compact over time and define us.
Cashvertising by Drew Whitman, which has an extremely silly name but is a must-read for anyone interested in advertising or marketing. This book shows you why people purchase and is a crash course on consumer psychology.
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley is a classic and one that is still worth reading today.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I could go back to my teenage self and show them how much I would love this work, so I could start it sooner. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I was growing up, and I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur when I was younger. If I had known then what I know now, I would have started doing this years ago!
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
For us, it has been a combination of paid traffic and SEO. Paid traffic is fantastic because it allows you to experience results quickly. Organic traffic is a long-term plan, but it allows you to drop your customer acquisition cost tremendously. They synergize quite well.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
You have two things you can spend when you are starting your business – you can spend your time, or you can spend your money. If I had $1,000 to start a new business I would look into selling services to generate more capital for a larger business. Lead generation, website creation, running companies marketing channels – whatever I could do to turn that $1,000 into $10,000. From there, I would use that capital to build to scale.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
The best piece of advice I can give you is to set small, tangible goals. It’s easy to look at other people around you that seem to be doing tremendously well, but if your goal is to go from $0 to $100,000 a month revenue, chances are it’s going to happen. Start small and build upon your goals, brick by brick. Break those goals down into daily, weekly, and monthly goals, and before you know it, you will get there.
What is your favorite quote?
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” – Warren Buffett. This is great because it elucidates what I was saying in the previous question – a sapling doesn’t sprout into a mighty oak overnight. It slows happens, day after day, year after year. Once it does, it’s tremendous and stable. This is what you want your business to do as well.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can reach me via email at support@cafelast.com, our website CafeLast.com, or on Instagram at @cafe.last.
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