We love to begin off with a definition of strategy, to ensure that when we talk about strategy, we are all on the same page.
Ortega Group defines strategy as a deliberate/intentional set of integrated and mutually reinforcing choices that results in a repeatable and sustainable competitive advantage over the long-term based on one’s unique set of capabilities, resulting in a creation of superior value that others can’t or won’t be in a position to copy or replicate.
Thus, strategy is an orchestration or coordination of the whole. Strategy is the understanding of the industry position, understanding both the external and internal forces, making sense of one’s uniqueness, one’s value, making the necessary trade-offs and finding that activity fit. It is about the two questions; where we should compete and how should we compete. Strategy is about competing to be unique and not competing to be the best. With that background to strategy, we can get down to answering the question: What is Café Javas’ Strategy?
Background to Café Javas
Prior to 2005, customers would go to service their cars at the City Oil Fuel Station at Bombo and yearn for refreshments and a snack as they waited for their cars. To respond to these queries, City Oil established a small snack centre offering just coffee/tea and juices and some simple snacks. By 2005, this snack point had scaled and thus resulted in what came to be known as Café Javas. In 2005, Café Javas was officially launched as a restaurant at City Oil Bombo road branch.
The visionary behind Café Javas was Omar Ahmed Mandela, a chairman and one of the founders of the Mandela Group. Today, Café Javas boasts of 9 branches (8 in Kampala and 1 in Entebbe). Market intelligence has it that the number will soon grow to 10 in Uganda. Café Javas has also expanded to Nairobi, Kenya thus bolstering the position of the family-restaurant chain. Café Javas also known as CJs, is part of the Mandela Group. The businesses under the Mandela Group of Companies are:
- Cranes Africa Trucking (CATU), a road transport, freight and courier company
- City Oil, a fuel and auto-related services one stop shop
- City Retread, the leading tyre-retreading company in Uganda
- City Tyres, for tyre sales and replacement
- CJs, the home of exceptional dining
- Mandela Autospares, an automobile spares distributor
- Mandela Millers, for wheat and maize flour, with ongoing expansion for animal and fish feeds
- OntheGo, Food-truck and supermarket chain
- TheFoodHub, fast-food chain
- TopMix, Ready mix concrete supplier
Thus, CJs belongs to a strong family of supporting brands that further enhance its competitiveness. CJs describes itself as a full-service, quick-casual restaurant specializing in delivering a relaxed and memorable dining experience. CJs opens from 6:30am to 11pm on Sundays to Thursdays, and 6:30am to 12am on Friday to Saturday.
What is Café Javas’ Strategy?
Now onto CJs’ strategy. CJs has positioned itself as a family-restaurant in the quick-casual segment. Thus, one of the trade-offs CJs made is to not promise a fine-dining experience. It’s not competing in that category. It chose a unique position on the quadrant of quick-casual.
There are about 6 ways to classify dining-oriented restaurants. This is based on the speed of service and the environment of service. The first category is that of fast-casual, you get dining here but it’s really fast (usually below 15 minutes), sometimes this borders on fast-food dining. The next category is that of Quick-Casual, this is where Café Javas belongs.
It combines the best of both worlds, that means it brings an element of great dining experience and couples it with speed of service to create quick-casual. There’s Fine dining experience, think of most 5-star hotel restaurants such as Seven Seas at Sheraton Hotel, Mediterranno to mention but a few. There’s also a segment of premium-casual, sandwiched somewhere between quick casual and fine-dining, finally, there’s the family-styled restaurants.
By defining itself as a quick-casual restaurant, it’s also a subtle promise by CJs to deliver on customer service response. Thus, Café Javas’s strategy is anchored on response, how to consistently deliver a memorable customer experience in a quick fashion.
CJ’s Activity Fit
Here’s part of the activity fit that Café Javas has embedded, all these choices link and mutually reinforce each other.
- If you notice in Kampala, all the Café Javas’ restaurants are located within a radius of 5 kilometres to the next branch
- Most Café Javas’ restaurants are located next to the City Oil fuel station. This enhances foot traffic but also enables customers do more than just fuel, one can also change tyres, one can also get a meal
- In spaces of high traffic, valets are also present to support customers with parking. Café Javas ensures that anything that distracts or worries a customer is handled.
- They were the fast to introduce the phone charging stations. But also, the goal here was to remove sockets from most tables. Sockets only exist on high tables. The lower tables are geared towards dining. Electronics kill a dining experience
- Café Javas celebrates all family-oriented gathering. At all times, families must be given a superior experience. Most Café Javas promotions will run on Mother’s Day, or Ramadan season, again, family-oriented days
- The Birthday experience with the drums is another top one for Café Javas. It’s to ensure that the spirit of family is celebrated
- All wheat at Café Javas is supplied from Mandela Millers thus ensuring consistency with all its pastries and wheat products
- There’s a cross-sharing among menu items. Thus, you will find certain common items such as the Mexican rice, the salad, the mashed potatoes. Thus, it’s rare to find an item on one meal that doesn’t feature on some other meal
- Café Javas is about customer obsession. Everything is about controlling that customer experience, to ensure it is quick and consistent. Everything from the cutlery to the packaging is chosen for this purpose. The tea pots are in such a way that tea should almost never pour even for the clumsy people. The serviettes are big enough to enable customer wipe out any large spillage.
- The restaurant layout is in such a way that a customer must be noticed within 5 minutes. In case one needs a refill or anything, you should be able to spot a wait staff within one minute.
- All walls are marble coated to enhance the relaxation feeling, the tables too are designed to give this instant feeling of relaxation.
- When a customer arrives, they are seated in such a way that they will never be asked to leave their table. You only leave when it’s time to go home.
- Café Javas indirectly limits laptops in the restaurant. Again, electronics dilute the dining experience.
- Hot meals should be always served hot and cold meals will always be served cold. This is CJ’s promise of service
- Café Javas delisted from offering its meals on food delivery apps. It took the long route of designing its own food delivery platform again to ensure there’s consistency on the customer experience. A CJs meal at home should taste just as a meal in the CJs restaurant.
There’s more to CJs that has also happened in the back-end operations to enable this front-looking operations. In fact, the bigger work has been around the back-operations, from how the kitchens are designed, how the teams are positioned in the different restaurant sections, how the food order goes from the front-desk to the kitchen and how that comes out. The use of pagers to deal with the queuing system and why it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes to get a pick-and carry order at CJs. There’s attention to every detail, even the type of motorcycles CJs uses to make its deliveries, they’re of a specific brand, and certain specifications. CJs has also invested in a zero-accidents policy to ensure safe delivery and drive a culture of safety among its riders. It goes down also to the quality of the suppliers and the standards expected of them. CJs is constantly innovating around the customer. This set of integrated choices is what delivers customer-obsession through quick service-response.
Competition-focused?
CJs largely ignores any competition. They believe that when companies focus on their competition and beating competition, they lose vision on what’s important. The important thing is to always focus on that value for the customer. They are a customer-obsessed company, how do you innovate around the customer, how do you meet both their functional and psychological needs. How do you deliver on that environment of care?
For Café Javas, it’s about the dignity of their customer. Every customer does matter to CJs, even the angry customer, even when that customer is wrong. Case in point was when one customer alleged that she’d found a rat in her milkshake. And CJs focused on simply proving that they have a tight process, with all milkshakes made at the front-facing side of the restaurant. But they also deliberately positioned their communication in such a way that it didn’t look like they were getting back at the customer. Fortunately, CJs has also built a strong community of loyal customers, they did the work of defending their brand. It was such a rarity that customers would put their neck down for a brand. That week, the sales of milkshakes soared as customers made fun of this incident.
For Café Javas, their promise is that if the front-end is good, the back end should be twice better. It’s about quality at source. When they say it’s fresh juice, it must be fresh juice. When it’s about the avocado, the quality of that avocado must be the best you can find in Kampala. The meals should be consistent. The Caribbean-jerk chicken you taste at Bombo Road should be the same you taste at Boulevard.
Of course, Café Javas cannot take its position for granted. And it never does. The current culture is that of continuous improvement. The most challenging moments are when the menu is changed, and Café Javas must be gearing for its next menu change. That’s a moment when all details must be managed. But for CJs, it’s always about details, every detail. Every small detail can alter the customer experience, even the fork design, the knife design. All those are always being revisited, even the ergonomics of the chairs. For Café Javas, it’s about the butterfly effect, the small details matter just as much as the big ones. Nothing should be left to chance.
The Trade-offs
Café Javas has had to make certain trade-offs. For example, it will probably never serve local food as part of the meal. And great strategy is also about making the necessary trade-offs. Without trade-offs, you will never achieve strategic fit. If we look at strategy as an attempt to create a unique shape, and the ability to keep the integrity of the shape through all conditions, we can say that Café Javas has done well on creating this unique shape of quick-casual dining in Uganda.
Will the mushrooming restaurants in this category threaten Café Javas’ position? Many have worked around the aesthetics just like CJs, from how the restaurants are designed, the service of the wait-staff. Does this in a way threaten CJs? Well, it’s only when CJs ever stops doing the thing that made them CJs, that insane customer-obsession, and constantly innovating around it. Of course, CJs has also achieved certain moats over the years, these sources of competitive advantage come from their position on the learning curve. You can miss this advantage that comes from the experience curve. They’ve been at it since 2005. There are network effects, from the chain of branches, the other companies in the Mandela Group, and all the economies of scope and scale that accrue from this. The brand name is also not to be wished away. It takes time to build this in the hearts and minds of the customers.
CJs has often disrupted itself and not waited on competition to do this. What will be the next move from CJs? Is it to move into the suburbs? Is it to open at Entebbe Airport? Many have also talked about what CJs would look like long after Ahmed Mandela is no longer at the helm. Yet, the transition already happened with Mandela spending less and less time at the restaurant and more time at the Factory overseeing another great transformation in Uganda’s economy. As Mandela has hinted before; ‘CJs doesn’t need the next Mandela. It needs someone of these times, someone with an eye for the future. I am from a different context, and from a different time, the next stage of CJs will need a different kind of person. That’s how you invent the future.’