YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Svenson

lines on the record: 65
first: 2023-07-24
most recent: 2023-07-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I'll be honest, guy, I just think my lucky star is every day that Allie puts up with me and has adapted to... All those changes you talked about, Allie just keeps getting better and better, and I just try to keep up with her, but it's been. It's definitely been the blessing of my life to have a partner like her. And it has been incredibly collaborative and a lot of give and take. And we're human, which means we're imperfect. We always focus on this theme of it's about progress, not perfection. And you've had these challenges together. And I'll tell you, there's nothing better than that. Sharing that with someone makes the journey just so meaningful. And count my lucky stars every day.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of people who want to be a part of that as an employee. And then over time, you'll attract customers, hopefully, who understand that you are about more than just a product or just about profit, that you are also about giving back. And they're going to want to be a part of that.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, the big opportunity is to continue to lean in to this macro trend that is both, I think, powerful, but also incredibly needed to tap into the potential of capitalism and of business to be a force of change, a force of good in our society. We have so many issues in our country and our communities, and they're not all going to be solved by the politicians, so they're not all going to be solved by the nonprofit sector. I think companies need to be more accountable for the health of the communities that they rely on for their survival. And I don't think that that is a zero-sum game. I actually think that if you do that and you do it well, you can build a business that is better and stronger and more defensible because you're going to attract and retain and engage a group.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2,500 squad members that we're going to be able to provide opportunities to and bring into this community where they can find belonging and connection and opportunity. And that excites us. Now, that also allows us to build hopefully a more successful business, which will give us more fuel, more resource to do things for our team. So for instance, this last year we introduced an education benefit through an organization called Guild where people are able to access classes on a whole range of skills and access a BA. And we have had an incredible take-up. People are thirsty for those types of opportunities. And we would love to go deeper into that and we'd love to offer more and more to provide that rich experience to really help people. And so growth is a part of that.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it is still a game of one step at a time. And I can tell you with great conviction what our next step is and what we're focused on and the opportunities we have and the improvements we're making. But three to five steps out, our industry is changing so rapidly and the needs of the consumer and technology and even now with robotics and AI, it's an incredibly dynamic environment and it's exciting, but it does mean that we have to be really thoughtful about how we're evolving with all the changes. We get excited about growth because for us, growth opens up pathways for people. Right now we have about 12,000 squad members. If we were to open another hundred stores, that's going to be another...”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's interesting. I think as we've gotten, we've been in this game longer and we have an incredible team around us, you would have thought that our planning would have become a lot more thoughtful and sophisticated. And in many ways it is.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Challenge of having to get that meal into someone's hands so the radius that you have to work from is still more or less constrained by the same constraints you have for any restaurant. You can only deliver a meal with a certain quality within plus or minus five, six, seven miles depending upon the topography. And so it becomes really challenging. Some people say, well, as opposed to having these five restaurants just build one ghost kitchen. Well, just the dynamics of distance doesn't always allow that to. Yeah. To”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We really focus more on the more successful we are and the more stores we have, the more people will be able to employ and therefore the impact that we wish to make will be bigger. And so that's a real driver and motivator for us. Just specifically on this question of ghost kitchens, I'll be honest with you, it's not really an area that's super appealing to us. And there are a number of reasons why. One is we believe one of the roles that Mod plays is a venue or a location within which the community can come together and connect in person and be a place of celebration and human connection. This whole idea of ghost kitchens is a little, it's not a model that makes perfect sense or hasn't been perfected yet because a ghost kitchen is a location from which you can ideally build a restaurant meal more efficiently because you don't have the more expensive real estate. But you still have the same”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we needed to do all of that in five weeks. And so it's been, the last three years has been a real adventure. The business has changed from what it was”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prior to the pandemic, 95% plus of our customers would come into MOD, a restaurant, and either walk down the line and build their own product or pick up their product and take it out. Since the pandemic, a much higher percentage of our business or our customers approach us differently, either through delivery or through our digital channels. And so that's actually part of our story today, which is how we need to continue to evolve In 2019 there was a study conducted. We had an investor who joined us at the time and they commissioned a big study by a big consulting firm and they did a deep dive into the business and the industry and our brand. And we had a very thoughtful plan to develop greater off-premise capabilities and digital capabilities. And it was like a five-year plan. And all of a sudden, the pandemic hit.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Allie's title as protector of the purpose. And I think that's a great way of summarizing the contribution she makes. In addition to that, she's got a magic touch around our brand and how the concept evolves and the way we deliver value to customers. And I get involved with a lot of the details of how do we build the framework and the infrastructure and the team to actually now go and execute on it.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the advantages that come from being that market share leader over time, being the Starbucks of the category, the Chipotle of the category, the Panera of the category, as opposed to the second, third, and fourth brands in those categories, many times it's even hard to think who that second, third, fourth brand is.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were the fastest growing restaurant brand in the country for, I believe, four years, three or four years. And that's a nice accolade. It's not something that we put on our resume. It's not something we view as that important other than it is a reflection of the fact that we were growing really fast back then. But we also recognize that that rate of growth, particularly for a small and not fully developed organization, was going to come with a cost in terms of a heavy investment in infrastructure, a heavy investment in new market opening, a heavy investment in mistakes, because anytime you're growing that rapidly, you are going to make mistakes. And that was very conscious decision that whatever mistakes we made, whatever collateral damage, if you will, there comes from going too fast would be more than made up for by winning in this category and having”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny. I remember sitting in our little office that we had in the early days of our growth and we had a whiteboard and we were talking about our growth strategy. We literally took out a map of the United States and somewhat arbitrarily started to carve up the country in the markets that we would enter. Ourselves as company markets, and the markets that we would then go and seek out franchise partners in. I look back on it now and think, wow, if we were answering the same question today, we would be pretty thoughtful with research and analytics. And at the time, we literally got up, we took this map and took a marker and started circling regions of the country.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was frenetic. It was exciting. It was exhausting. And it was all driven by this mission of we want to win in this category because the payoff or the end that we're pursuing is to build this highly successful, healthy platform that we can use to make a difference in our communities and in the world around us.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chose only partners who, importantly, were people who we felt philosophically aligned with, who we enjoyed, and who understood our purpose and really bought into it, and that could build out a relatively large market. So today, 85% of our stores are company owned, 15% are franchised, with nine partners who are fabulous, incredibly valuable, and experienced operators. In that second five year chapter of our growth, on our fifth birthday twelve stores in Western Washington, five years later on our tenth birthday, we had over four hundred stores spread across seventy plus discrete markets around the US. So that second five years was”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that first five years, having started or kind of pioneered this category of fast casual pizza, halfway through that first five years a lot of other brands started to enter the category. And back to the conversation about Seattle Coffee Company, there is an advantage for the first mover, that person or that brand that gets out and secures the right real estate, builds that relationship with customers. If you allow a brand in a category to get too far ahead in a particular market, it's hard to supplant them. So as these other brands were entering the market and they were all franchised, we would only be able to push ourselves so far with company-owned growth and we would ideally bring in partners who could help us expand into those markets that we would not otherwise get to. And so we brought franchising in as part of our strategy, but we did it differently than a lot of brands.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. So you're exactly right. We had 12 stores in western Washington, and it was at that time that we sat down as Allie said and had a long conversation about what we wanted to do with Maud. Did we want to keep it regional and live, frankly, a more comfortable life and just drive to all the new stores and know everybody? Or did we want to take a swing and see if we could turn this into a true national, maybe even international brand and really expand this platform that we'd been talking about into something much more profound? Now, most of that growth that we then embarked on was company owned growth. But you're right, we did also bring in a franchising model because”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our motivation was to create a platform that we could use to make a positive social impact that would endure and sustain beyond us. And we knew we wanted to focus on people. And starting with the employees or our people. But then we basically said to our team, Mod is what you make it. Mod is what we make it. We want to, our North Star is to use this business as a platform. Now let's together figure out what that means”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a lot of ways to interpret mod. We intentionally Tell people it's not literally meant to be made on demand, and we love that inclusivity and that flexibility around how mod comes to life. But mod is what you make it, and mod can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's something written about the Maud movement, which is a movement that was all about speed and style in challenging convention and innocent rebellion, all in pursuit of a better future. And we were like, that's it. That's what we want to build with Maud is. A brand and a business that has that essence”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit. The mod name was inspired by the mod era of the 50s and 60s in the UK. Allie and I grew up as big fans of the who and the music and vibe of that era.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the production process of being able to get the throughput, particularly at the peak hour, in our ovens, we can at peak have 15 to 20 pizzas in the oven at one time, but it's still going to take three to four minutes for that product to cook. And would people come and have pizza at lunch? Because pizza historically has been a dinner occasion. Yeah. And this concept wouldn't work if we couldn't crack the lunch occasion, just given the economics of paying for a piece of real estate and the people and so forth.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put it together by the time you get to the end of line, it's done. You put the top on it and you take it away. At mod, that creation of the pizza was the first step. The second step was then to cook it. And that takes three or four minutes. So in exchange for a freshly cooked product, that is going to take a little bit longer. Now you're preoccupied because you go at the end of the line and you go grab a drink and you pay for it. And while you're doing all of that, we're cooking your product. There was a question both in terms of customer acceptance of that slightly longer experience.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just described it, we were confident that people would be attracted to the idea of walking into a restaurant where they could walk down the line like they do at a Chipotle and co-create their own pizza using 30 fresh beautiful toppings. And that's a, you know, the fast casual concept. That idea of being able to walk down the line and have the ability to personalize was very attractive, but to be able to do so quickly and efficiently was also important. So we knew that would be appealing. Now, if you're at Chipotle, the food has been prepped before and it's simmering. So it's sitting there. And as you...”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To test this idea of how we could formulate the dough and how we would press it and the different techniques for cooking it and how quickly could we do it. And so there was multiple streams of work that were going into convince us that if we actually did lease a space and build it out and start to construct this concept that the key components would all come to life in a way that we could at least run one restaurant and have it operate. We had lots of questions though about would people would we be able to deliver a product that people liked enough to actually come back? We were able to answer enough of them to convince ourselves that, hey, taking a lease and trying this once might not be a bad idea. And by the way, at the time in particular, guy, we weren't thinking that if we did this and it started to build momentum into a business that Allie and I would be the ones in the driver's seat.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a combination of all of that. We had an office for the Sienna group, and we used that as kind of our main hub. There was a lot of work that was done on whiteboards and so forth. We then collaborated with some equipment suppliers to get into kitchens.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In all honesty, it was a little bit like our time with Seattle Coffee Company where Years into the future. It was this is a really intriguing question about can you modernize the pizza experience to deliver a more personalized, customized, quick experience? And can we do that in one location?”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there were a couple of people who approached us, one in particular who the general idea was pizza is slow, it's expensive, it takes time, and it's a sit-down occasion, or you go into these places where you have pizza by the slice, but the pizza was made hours ago and it's reheating it. And is there a way to combine all of these the attributes of fast casual with pizza, which is the second largest food category in restaurants behind hamburgers? It's a loved product. There's so much innovation you can do because you have this great platform of dough that you can put any combination of wonderful toppings on. And so maybe we can try to make the experience more personalized.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We loved our experiences. You overlay that with somebody approached us during that time that we were back in Seattle and thinking about how we were going to be investing our professional time. And they came to us with the idea of doing something different in pizza. And I'll be honest, I kind of poo-pooed it and then Allie kept coming back to it saying, you know, I really think we need to look more closely at this.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what ended up happening is we had been approached many times by people who were interested in getting us involved with a coffee business or a restaurant retail business. And we had always politely declined. But one of the elements of our time in Europe was we had an intense love affair with Italy and all things Italian. When we had a chance to travel, Most of the time, we ended up going to Italy because there was just something about the country and the people and the culture and the food and everything about it, the architecture that just drew us in.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Carluccios was one of the businesses that we had participated in. And then we ended up making a very large investment in a wealth and asset management company here in Seattle with the idea of kind of using this as a platform to start to dabble in combining profit and purpose.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you're right, we decided to set up a company called the Siena Group, which was intended to be a platform from which we could bring the experiences we'd had with Seattle Coffee Company and Carl Luccios and support and back other private companies that were growing. But to do so more as an investor and coach, less as a full-time executive.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so one little thing that happened in between is as we were leaving Starbucks, we got involved with helping to back an incredible couple and concept called Carluccios, which is an Italian delic ⁇ concept. Incredible people, Antonio and Priscilla Carluccios, were in the process of bringing to life in the UK and we helped them build a really fun, successful business called Carluccios. And that was something that we did while we were still in the UK and then we were very involved with when we got back to Seattle. But that was another chapter for us of helping a really great team bring to life a concept based on what we had learned from our experiences with Seattle Coffee Company. And that's a company that eventually went public in the UK and then we eventually sold it. But that was all happening while we moved back to Seattle.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cut and paste everything that we've done in the US into the UK because that will be a hairball. And so what we found was he was right. There was a lot of momentum organizationally to simply replicate in a new market what they had success doing elsewhere. And so that was a very, very interesting experience for me. And I loved it, but ultimately decided Allie and I that what we loved even more was building things. And I talked to Allie about it and we came back and I sat with Howard Schultz and said, I love this place. I love this brand. But I think Allie and I are going to go and think about what to do next in terms of building our next business as opposed to coming in and managing your great business. And so we ended up deciding to leave Starbucks.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it over time it creates this hairball that if you're not careful, it'll stifle. So he talked a lot to us at the time about that, and his basic message to us was we love what you have done in the UK and how entrepreneurial you've been and dynamic. And please build a wall across the Atlantic and don't let, I think the word he used was the bastards, but don't let those in from Starbucks who are going to try to take that away from you. And they will do it in my name and with all of the right intentions, but they don't understand that what I really want is for you to continue to be entrepreneurial and dynamic and creative, not just to”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we found was all of the challenges and the imperfections and the dysfunction that we had in our small little company were just amplified on a bigger scale at Starbucks. And it was funny because Howard Schultz took us to dinner right after the transaction closed in London. And he had had a little bit of a campaign going on internally at the time around how do you get big and stay small. And there was a book that he was handing out to all of his senior executives called Orbiting the Giant Hairball And he gave us a copy of it, and it's a lot of pictures and graphics. And the whole premise is when you start a company like Starbucks, you have to put processes in place and systems and controls. And each one of those is like a little piece of hair.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. At the time the transaction happened, I made a commitment, Allie and I made a commitment, that we would work as hard as possible to make sure that the transaction was as successful for them and their shareholders as it had been for our shareholders. And that was an informal handshake. And I stuck around for almost two years to help manage the transition from Seattle Coffee Company to Starbucks. And it was a fascinating experience, very eye-opening in that we assume that this big, successful business would come over and everything would be buttoned down and polished.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to be successful in three markets New York, Tokyo, and London, and we are in New York City in Tokyo, and you're in London. And that's a problem. And so we want to solve that problem by working with you as opposed to against you. And so we ended up having this very positive conversation because, again, we very much looked up to them as our inspiration. So we started by having a conversation with Oren Smith, who was the president of the company at the time. And that led to Howard Schultz coming to do a visit and entered a negotiation to see if we could make this work. And it all led very quickly to us deciding to work with Starbucks as opposed to competing with them.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Pepsi to their coke, and at the time we sold the Starbucks, we had 68 locations, but we had 50 locations in our UK pipeline for the next year, and we had a whole bunch of stores we were going to be opening internationally. And that's when Starbucks approached us and said, we have an aspiration of building the world's most inspiring brand or something. There was a context for it. And they said that we know that to do that”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's an interesting how that came about is interesting. We had been raising capital to grow. We had a strategy to turn this into a brand that was, like you said, outside of the UK, and we had global aspirations. We had signed up with partners in the Middle East and South Africa and Southeast Asia and had plans to go to Northern Europe. And actually, it had conversations with several brands in the US, well-known brands, about us acquiring them to create an entree into the US so that we would become the global alternative to Starbucks. At the time, Starbucks was very established in the US, and they had gone to Japan as part of their first step to becoming an international brand. Well, we were far ahead of them internationally. And so the hypothesis was we could become”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we had an appropriate amount of humility and a little bit of an inferiority complex that if they came over, they would bring the full capacities of the organization to try to dislodge us. And so we knew that it was a market share game. We knew that we had to get out and secure the right real estate and build the brand in our market. talk about the first mover advantage and we had to secure that first mover advantage so that if they did come we could defend ourselves”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of it was this was at a time when Andy Groves' book, Only The Paranoid Survive had come out, I believe We respected Starbucks so much they had been our inspiration and they were our role model and there was no animosity between us and them. We truly were inspired by them and we knew that if they decided to come to London that they would probably just take over and their size and scale and sophistication we really felt like we were outmatched.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extensive food offering, more extensive than Starbucks at the time, to put it in context, Starbucks food sales at the time were 8 to 10% of sales and ours were 25%.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, and the format and profile of the first store was very different from the second, different from the third. It felt a little bit at that time like we were kind of continuing to create the concept while we were opening those first few stores.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through that and realized, wow, there is a lot of demand for this. Then we started to say okay, what's next? The next step was, well, we should probably open two other locations in very different venues because listen, opening a store in Covent Garden, it's Covent Garden. And there are a lot of people. So let's try one in a business district and let's try one in a location outside of London. And it was a bit haphazard, but that was the way we thought at the time let's expand this one step at a time.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this was the thought. We had always talked about wanting to bring to London two things. The Starbucks-style coffee experience and a bit of home, a bit of Seattle. And that meant the customer service ethic, the positivity, the energy that we associated with home that didn't exist on the high street at London at the time. And we said when we opened our first door, if the worst thing that happens is we open this one store in Covent Garden and we bring those two things together and introduce to Linden, that would be a success. But we had in the back of our mind, well, gosh, if this works, then maybe it will lead to something bigger and more exciting. But at the time, our planning was like one step at a time. And the initial planning was, well, let's see if we can get one location open and we can figure out how to put all these pieces together and let's see if people even want this. Once we'd gotten...”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Month when we opened the store and we realized I was driving Allie to drop her at the store early, early in the morning before it opened. I would then go to the healthcare company to work during the day and then I would drive back to Covent Garden to help her close. And we would then drive home at nine o'clock at night and pick up a pizza or something. And then wake up the next morning and do the same thing. And while that was exciting and entrepreneurial, it also felt incredibly constraining because we're like, oh my gosh, we've opened this thing and now we own it. And how are we going to get out from under this? Because otherwise This is just going to be a burden. And we knew that the only way was to refine the concept, figure it out, and start growing it so that it wasn't just this one location that we needed to babysit.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was over 90% instant, and the balance was real. They drank a lot of tea and hot drinks But coffee was just not the thing. And so he just couldn't imagine the Brits rallying around, you know, coming in often enough to buy expensive cups of coffee to make this work.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was very, very different like you said around the world at that time about ninety two percent of all coffee consumed was real coffee and eight percent was instant. In the UK it was the inverse of that.”
2023-07-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT