At the heart of Edible® is simple mission to help people celebrate life’s most special moments. From annual family events like birthdays and anniversaries to life’s unique milestones like retirement or holiday get-togethers, our primary objective is to help people cheer these special moments with extra sweet memories and smiles! We love helping our customers celebrate, but equally as important, is we love acknowledging the stores and employees that work to deliver our products for these special events. Additionally, we take pride in our entrepreneurial spirit and the same spirit that resides with the franchise owners that work directly to provide those sweet treats in your local community. As you acknowledge life’s special moments, we want to celebrate the special franchise owners and teams that deliver the delicious fruits and sweets that you expect. Today, we celebrate Adam Christopher Barnes and his Edible store in Orlando, Florida!
Adam opened his Edible location in April 2005 and has been helping the Orlando, FL community celebrate life’s special occasions for over 16 years! Adam and his team pride themselves on preparing and delivering fruit arrangements that are always freshly crafted from fruit that’s grown and picked to our Fruit Expert® standards. Additionally, they have the best variety of gourmet chocolate Dipped Fruit™, too! Adam was able to navigate the last year with remarkable skill and achieved a lot of success. He recently discussed how his experience and leadership skills were used to build a $1 million store. Congrats Adam!
What have you done differently this year versus last year to become a million-dollar store?
First, I’ll have to say I believe we were trending toward $1M prior to my ownership from a sales standpoint. We purchased the store considering ourselves as a $0.00 store so that we could set the growth bar higher for ourselves from a sales standpoint. From an order fulfillment standpoint, we were told by our in-store manager that when things get too busy, the store requests that orders are turned off so that we can have time to catch up on production. Once we learned this, we saw this as a great opportunity to increase our gross sales by adjusting our production speed, eliminating the need to turn orders off. Thus, we assessed order process speed, created production metrics and fixed this from a productivity standpoint such to fulfill orders faster. Additionally:
- We have an amazing Fruit Specialist team.
- We made product add-ons mandatory in phone sales script.
- We developed a field sales team using a corporate account executive model for Zone 4 selling.
- We added a bonus structure for our delivery ambassadors to encourage field sales and bounce-back offers in Zone 4.
What have you done differently to engage with the community during the pandemic?
We’ve engaged Zone 4 through an Account Executive model. We created a sales lead role, who works in-store but also travels to local businesses to build accounts and establishes regular, reoccurring orders, purchased in larger quantity or in bulk by businesses such as car dealerships, banks, doctor offices etc.
How did you build your customer base?
Our existing customer base has come from the SEO efforts from corporate. When we took over the store, we noticed Google reviews at our specific store were overall very poor, so our first order of business was to develop a higher rankings and retention. We began a retention program to reach out to customers who’ve had previous grievances and address their concerns while offering to provide them a make-good offer as well.
What have been your most successful marketing tactics for Edible®?
We’ve yet to implement various tactics in length, so to identify one more successful than another for us is premature, however we anticipate our “Enjoy your sweet ride” campaign with local car dealerships will be strong. Our local co-op is doing a phenomenal job with the local TV ad-spend campaign. This is certainly extremely effective.
What kind of culture exists in how you run your store, and how did you establish it?
When we initially took over the store, there seemed to be 18 Supreme Court justices on staff and no clergy (lol). So, the culture was relatively tense at best. We quickly promoted the part time assistant manager to full-time store manager, and promoted our top performing Fruit Specialist to Operations Lead, and our top inside Sales Rep as a Sales Lead. Once we established a staff handbook detailing communication and leadership protocol (chain of command), we seemed to see an improvement in the culture, because leadership, guidelines and metrics were more clearly defined. The culture from a camaraderie standpoint right now is strengthening overall. When I’ve done site visits, the energy in Zone 2 is high, staff listen to music and there is an up-beat fast-paced cadence in our workflow.
What has been your most satisfying moment as an Edible® store owner?
Seeing our in-store manager take ownership. Empowering her and being able to quickly step back and watch her lead has been very inspiring for myself as an owner/operator.
How do you define success in this industry (outside of financial)?
Staff development. As a leader, seeing staff at any level become inspired to make a career and further pursue their own professional development in the same field is indicative of true success.
What advice would you give to your fellow franchisee?
I don’t think I know enough yet to give advice. Maybe, just exalt, exhort and encourage your staff, and encourage your leadership to lead them by example.
Who, and what, has been your greatest inspiration?
That’s an easy question to answer. My parents. They were birthed from third world circumstances, sacrificed, never complained, raised 4 kids, sacrificed even more, became business owners and now in their mid 50s, which in my opinion is young, are blessed to sit back and do what they want to do!
From all of us at Edible®, thank you Adam for your dedication to executing our mission and taking pride in delivering WOW-worthy gifts to the people in your community!
