Di Bella coffee founder guest speaks to Gympie Chamber of Commerce

A blistering comment from his GP was the reason Phillip Di Bella sold the $60m coffee empire he built from the ground up, the business guru telling a packed house at the Gympie Chamber of Commerce meeting on Wednesday he was once 167kg.

Coffee empire founder Phillip Di Bella said his decison to sell the multimillion-dollar business he built from the ground up was driven by one blistering piece of medical advice from his doctor:

“He said ‘you’re the fittest fat f--- I know’,” he told a packed meeting of the Gympie business community on Wednesday morning.

At the time he weighed about 167kg, the result of his trying to achieve a healthy work-life balance while building and running his coffee business.

Speaking at the Gympie RSL, Mr Di Bella said it marked a turning point in his decision to sell the company to Retail Food Group for $47 million.

“I’d gotten fat trying to be super fit, have four kids and wanting to run an amazing business,” he said.

In the three years after the sale he dropped 77kg, a change he used to reinforce one of the key points as the guest speaker at the Gympie Chamber of Commerce’s breakfast: “what needs your focus right now?”

“You can’t have it all.”

Phillip Di Bella says business owners need to realise “you can’t have it all”.

The need to ditch work-life balance for “work-life harmony”, where the focus is not on an equally splitting time but honing in on what was most important right now, was among several points highlighted by Mr Di Bella as central to how he himself turned a $5000 company into a $60 million empire.

Perception was also important.

Mr Di Bella said perception was important in the world of coffee where you were in competition with 3000 other companies.

“There are three categories of coffee: ‘this is s---’, ‘this is okay,’, and ‘this is great’,” he said.

Consistency is key to companies keeping their customers coming back, Mr Di Bella says.

With 94 per cent of his clientele owner operated businesses, he said it was crucial to focus on them and their experience not just with coffee, but in the business realm.

He pointed to McDonald’s as an example; the food was not good, he said, but people continued to return because it was selling consistency, not quality.

Domino’s Pizza was another example.

While the food was 100 per cent preservative free and the lava cakes were imported from Belgium, Mr Di Bella said, these were not widely known because it was not what would keep bringing customers back.

‘(The owner) is not going to make millions of dollars telling a story people will think is bulls---,” Mr Di Bella said.

And word of mouth was crucial for driving business.

“If you get in a position where people are telling your story for you, it is a matter of one tells one, then two tells two, then four tells four,” he said.