Cano, Michele

Douglas, Alexander

Douglas, Jacqueline

Moyes, David

English

PurposeThe main purposes of this paper were to identify the business success factors as perceived by independent cafes/coffee shop owners who have been in business for longer than two years and to identify the latent constructs of the various success factors affecting them.MethodologyA literature review identified 24 (manifest) variables frequently reported as success factors for SMEs Then an empirical survey of 81 independent coffee shop owners was conducted using a questionnaire structured around these variables. The responses were analysed using SPSS v25 to determine descriptive statistics and to conduct Exploratory Factor Analysis in order to structure the factors.FindingsResults indicated that the top 3 critical success factors were: friendly staff, high standards of hygiene and good quality food. The Exploratory Factor Analysis resulted in a framework of 8 success factor constructs. The study therefore proposes 8 constructs for success, namely; “Support aspects”, “Staff aspects”, “Product/service aspects”, “Operations aspects”, “Business skills aspects”, “Financial aspects”, “Image aspects” and “Location aspects”. These constructs account for nearly 73% of the total variance in the data.Practical implicationsThe factorial structure of the success factors presents themes for classifying success factors and can provide guidance to owners of coffee shops and researchers in that field who need to recognise and control them. Furthermore, the conceptual model developed from the exploratory factor analysis in this study can be further tested in order to validate the framework of construct and manifest variables.LimitationThe main limitation is the small sample size. A larger sample may provide more valid and reliable results.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to investigate the success factors for independent coffee shops and cafes and to develop a model of their factorial structure

Research Repository and Portal - University of the West of Scotland

Factorial structure for independent coffee shops and cafes’ success factors:a UK study

https://myresearchspace.uws.ac.uk/ws/files/14380397/2019_09_01_Douglas_et_al_Factorial_accepted.pdf

Factorial structure for independent coffee shops and cafes’ success factors:a UK study

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Research Repository and Portal - University of the West of Scotland