Ep12 – How to Win Clients from a Niche, Demanding Audience – Crossing the Desert – Fortis
Episode Details
Transcript
If you’ve ever been served a drink adorned with a beautiful flower, there’s a good chance it came from Greeneration’s vertical farm. This farm specializes in growing microgreens and edible flowers for high-end restaurants. In this episode, we’re joined by its founder, Roman, and Daria, the Vice President of Growth & Product. They share insights on finding the ideal location for a farm, the risks of choosing the wrong landlord, how a single flower can multiply revenue, and how to attract high-quality clients by breaking all the rules.
Their clients are high-end restaurant chefs—a very narrow audience with demanding schedules and exacting standards, competing with hundreds of other suppliers for their attention. Roman and Daria explain how, within just a few months, they managed to win an impressive roster of clients.
On Greeneration’s Instagram, you’ll find the farm itself, its edible flowers and microgreens, and the stunning dishes created with them.
This podcast is presented by Fortis
We offer you POS and CRM solutions that we made specially for small business needs. It’s easy to start with, it combines everything you need in a small device so you save precious space, and it helps to work with clients personally – the way only small businesses can.
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Production by Hatch Up Podcasts
Showrunners&editors — Alexandra Volkova, Elena Volkova
Host — Isaac Dalonin
Fortis Consultant — Jean-Philippe Serhal
Producer — Darya Sannikova
History consultant — Alyona Podnebennaya
Sound designer&composer – Ksenia Kazantseva
Cover Illustrator — Dina Sami
Speaker 0
Hello. You're listening to Crossing the Desert. This podcast is a reality series about how I build my small business in the Emirates. I'm Isaac. In each episode, I share how my own business is going. But most importantly, I learn from other entrepreneurs who came to Dubai from India, Egypt, Palestine, Caribbean Islands, UK, Russia, from all over the world. Stories of their success and challenges will help me on my way. The podcast is brought to you by Fortis, the omnichannel platform integrates POS, CRM, orders, payments, and loyalty programs for small and medium sized businesses. Today is a special episode. I'll talk to the team who managed to build a vertical farm in the middle of the desert. We have a lot to talk about: how to find the right place and a landlord you can trust, how to renovate a huge space in just three months and most importantly how to sell a delicate and very niche product to a very demanding target audience and to do it quickly before the flowers fade. So meet Roman and Daria. Roman is the founder and Daria is the vice president of growth and product. They grow greens and edible flowers on vertical farms for chiefs of high end restaurants. If you serve the mocktail in Dubai garnished with a bright flower, well, it was probably grown on their farm, greeneration. Speaker 1
I am a serial entrepreneur born and raised in Russia, moved to Dubai in twenty twenty two. Currently founder and a group CEO of Green Eurasian, high end vertical farm in Dubai. So idea initially came to my mind in twenty twenty when there was, like, a rush in this industry. Lots of companies raised funds, like AeroFarms, InFarm, and many, many others. And I was looking for the new ventures, for the new business opportunities. I have some spare cash, some spare time, and, I found it in vertical farming. I found a garage where I invited a team, like a typical startup, you know, to test and try to build something with our own hands, the little hydroponic station with the artificial light to see what we could grow. The first crop was basil. So that was a lot of fun. Back then, I was in a position of, like, active investor rather than an entrepreneur in this project. In a few months later, I realized that this thing become very interesting to me personally. I was very engaged into the development, so I decided to step in as a CEO, took over the control of the business, and run it in Russia for a couple years. Lately, I started to think, is it the right market to be? Can I build something serious in this country, or shall I test it and implement the idea in some other places? This is how I came up with an idea to discover other markets. So I checked Europe. As you know, prices for electricity are quite high there. I checked Asia. Not really my culture. And, obviously, I checked Middle East. That was the moment when I realized that the market of food and beverage industry grows in the region, in general, quite high. But UAE, specifically, the CAGR, the cumulative annual gross freight, is more than ten percent for the last couple years. And it's anticipated to reach, like, fifteen percent in upcoming years. So this is a huge market where I would able to leverage the technology. Our garnish type of fancy things is not the biggest segment, but compared to other locations, let's say, like Istanbul or Moscow or London, it's relatively big, maybe one of the biggest in the world given the amount of fancy chefs that came over the last three to four years to open a restaurant, run a restaurant, run-in a restaurant chain or whatever. There are more than twenty thousand food venues just in Dubai, and more than one thousand of them are one hundred percent client of us. I mean, potential client. Right? We came with a very simple idea, create, like, farm to kitchen experience for the best chefs in town, offering them microgreens, edible flowers, and specialty leaves. These ingredients are quite popular in European gastrocene, but here, they are still not discovered by lots of chefs. Speaker 0
I remember that Roman preferred the local market to the European one, not least because of the prices for electricity. So I asked him to clarify this point a bit. Speaker 1
Electricity is one of the main costs in growing. It could be thirty, thirty five percent of your total cost. You have to factor this, from the day one. And, in Dubai, there is a flat price for electricity, which is about forty fields, plus VAT, plus full surcharge. So in results, it's less than half of DHAM in average, which is, quite good, way better than in Europe, way better than, let's say, in Singapore. Speaker 0
Okay. A large and rapidly growing market, low electricity prices. From the outside, it looks like a good place to start. Speaker 1
That's why I decided to check everything with my own eyes and came for the first visit in twenty twenty two. And I immediately realized that, yes, this is definitely the right place. When I checked the Museum of Future, you know, the full floor was dedicated for the food technology and food security. And when I realized that for the government, food security is not just words. It's a real strategy. They create infrastructure, proper government bodies that could support and accelerate your landing in the region. And in general, the business environment is healthy, and everybody is willing to support you. That was the moment when I realized that, yeah, we need to land in Dubai and basically move the operations here due to the exceptional market, exceptional business environment. And, you know, I just like this place at the end of the day. Speaker 0
Roman had a lot of hopes for this market. All he had to do was find his place in it. Speaker 1
I think the biggest challenge was to find the right place. Main difficulties were related to finding the right place, right landlord, and make sure that everything what we need for the farm could be accommodated. It's not the same like you open a restaurant. Right? When you need just a great location, great spot, and the rest is, you know, quite simple. You just need some water, some electricity. No. You need, like, a place where nearby there are no, like, aluminum plants or something like this, other toxic productions or whatever. You need plenty of electricity. Right? Because we are producing all the product in the workshop with artificial light, lots of ACs. So you need plenty of electricity, a lot of load to make it happen. The place should be not very distant from the market. I mean, main restaurant hubs. Otherwise, logistic could become a nightmare. Right? So if you have a farm in a lane, you can't afford to make these everyday deliveries, sometimes even two or three deliveries per day to the restaurant, because chef could forget something or bartender needs some more extra flowers. You have to be around. And, ultimately, we wanted the day one work with the whole country, like, on the national wide scale. That's why we wanted to choose a place somewhere between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, because most of the restaurants are less concentrated still in Dubai, but Abu Dhabi is catching up. Considering all these criteria, we looked for the plots in special zones like NIP, DIP, all d d d d, many d. So Dubai Industrial, whatever. Right? Or investment, whatever. Parks, zones. And eventually, we settled in, Dubai Industrial City, which I think is a great zone. Lots of, food businesses located there. Some other farms, by the way, are smaller than ours, but still. Chocolatiers and many, many others. And I think that was, like, a blessing because, our landlord is amazing. It's a very old company, older than UAE, by the way. That was the company formed before the nation of, the Emirates. Right? Emirates was united in nineteen seventy one. This company was formed in sixty seven. Okay? Like, oil and gas, you couldn't mention company. For them, it was like, we were, like, from the moon. So they were doing for the last fifty years this oil and gas stuff, oil and gas services, and then we say, hey. Hey, guys. We want to produce food in one of your workshops. And we were the first external tenant. So we basically educated them in some ways how to work with external tenants on that specific, area, because this company is quite big, and we are not the first tenant in their whole history, but in that area, we were. And, when we signed an agreement with them, I understood that everything should be fine. Because before that, we tested, I think, more than a few hundreds of potential plots. So we checked lots of places. Some of them, we even tried to design. We started the design processes, but, eventually, then lease was refused by the landlord or some other obstacles. So when we decided on this place in DIC, we started to progress really fine. Speaker 0
Okay. So I knew that finding the right location was a big step, but why was it so important? From what Rowan just said, it sounds like finding the right landlord was the key to a successful business. I asked him why it is such a big deal, and he told me the story of an entrepreneur who had less luck with his lease. Speaker 1
There was a guy recently who was looking for the cottage cheese production plant, and he found, like, a great place, potentially, and almost signed a lease. For some reason, you know, like, he had to go and he said he will come tomorrow. So when he came on the next day, he realized that the civil defense, these fire alarms, sprinkles that were installed yesterday, now they're gone. So I understand that maybe some people just install it as a fake to demonstrate that they are around, and, thought that maybe he signed with this. I don't know. And the next day, there are gun. There are a lot of things like that, and some of lenders are just telling you, you should trust me. Let's do it. It's very hard to make a proper due diligence. It's a very important step. A lot of obstacles. Right? You have to know local norms, local behavior of players. Everything is quite slow, so you have to factor all of it into the process when it comes to the, finding the risk. And eventually, the landlords, they are not in the competition. Right? It's not a very competitive market. If you need a very specific place, there are not many lots available on the market. So you can't dictate anything. You could come up with the requests, but they have all the power to refuse all of them. So you have to build relationships. And this is something what we've done, I think, quite successfully, is a vet company, and, it took us a few months, definitely a few visits, teas, all these, you know, conversations, just to make sure they also tested us because we were new in Dubai. Right? Just newly formed company. It's also high risk for the landlord, for the good one. They want to make sure that you have, like, money. You really want to build something. Your concept is great. You could deliver, seven months. Speaker 0
After seven months of searching for the right location and the right landlord, the new stage has begun, the renovation. And to me, it seems to be the most unpredictable. I mean, you know, even a small renovation in a personal apartment, it can become an endless process, like, with an uncontrollable budget. But what can we say about the renovation of an industrial premises? Speaker 1
Another big challenge was, finding the right constructors who could, again, accommodate our special fit out request. Right? Like, I expected that it would be quite simple and, quite straightforward like it was, before in Europe in my domestic market. But, unfortunately or fortunately, that was absolutely different experience, and I had an impression that I'm building a bush helle fa or something like that. Those are the process amount of permits we have to obtain, the stage gate processes. I don't want to say that it's overcomplicated or something. I'd rather say that this process was so developed and the permits and everything one after another, so it's very tough to shortcut. It's, move faster than you want. Right? So my anticipations in terms of duration of construction, right, were slightly lower than eventually we construct. Then when I understood how long would it take even to open a sixty square meter restaurant, I understood that we did a really great job with the team. We started the construction in November last year, and we opened our doors in February this year. So it's less than three and a half months, for even less than three months until the first mass seating. So I think this is a exceptional result. The biggest problem here and, what was different, again, from my expectations, project speed was slower than anticipated, but cost of running business was already here. And this is usually what the newcomers, underestimate. When you come with the team, you know, you think, like, bam, two months, we will start. Yeah. We will start selling from the bills. We'll do everything quickly, rapidly, blah, blah, blah. That's it. And then nothing. Then in two months, just one guy decided to reply to you that inshallah, we will speak tomorrow, maybe, maybe not. And, that was something that was killing energy of, my team. And, some of the team members, like, the lady who was responsible for the operations day to day business over the first year, she was so embarrassed with these, local, norms. And we even had to hire an adviser from Sheikh, real Sheikh, who gave us a few workshops to explain what's okay, what's not okay, what's not okay even in Dubai. Because some of the relationships and conversations were really odd and weird. And we had to learn how to navigate in this environment if we want to do business with the companies that are well established. Right? Because in some industries, in service industries, you could just do business with the like minded people, like Indians do with Indians, Russians with Russians, Europeans, I don't know, French with French, etcetera. But in our niche, that wasn't possible. So we had to, from the day one, collaborate with the suitable to do the job, and that wasn't necessary. Russians, all these Russians were unexperienced because they also came quite recently. So that was, like, two noobs are sitting in one room trying to do something that wasn't the right thing to do the business. Yes? So getting back to the construction, when we find a place, we decided, okay. Then now we need a constructor. What we do next, We do a tender. Right? We need to find the one who could accommodate the works. For you to know that we had, like, a workshops absolutely empty. And we had to build the lots of structures, like, lots of boxes inside the box with special requirements, like water, electricity, tubes inside these growing rooms, special rooms for the germination, special rooms for the storage, seed storage, cold rooms, like food production fully designed, aligned with the HASP requirements, like food safety requirements, ISO requirements to meet the highest possible standards of the food production. And, we expected that, first, we had specific budget in our mind, and we expected that, you know, lots of companies will compete because Dubai is clearly the real estate market. Right? So constructors should be professional, responsible, rapid. They could build skyscrapers in seven months. Right? So they could do fit out in one month. Oh my god. That was so far away from the reality. And the first red flag was, when we asked a very simple tender documents, and, we even liaised with their consultants, local consultants, who knows the standards. So they said, guys, just go with these simple docs. Inshallah, everything would be fine. You will get, you know, three to five, good contractors. So we submitted, asked our landlord also to share with their network. We put it in the special places for the fit out companies. Then we started to receive, like, little piece of papers like that, like, fit out twenty million. Like, this one, five million. I said, what's that? I said, oh, it's bill of quantity. Right? This BOEQ, the way how we estimate the amount works. And so you just need to send us a fifty percent advance payment, and inshallah, we will complete in half of a year. I said, okay. That's crazy. What is this, estimation? Right? Estimate. When you do the construction in the Europe, you could receive this proposal, this estimate, you know, who is responsible for what deadlines for everything, penalties if not delivered. Nothing was here. And, eventually, eighteen companies submitted something. Only three of them were good enough just to fulfill the documents properly, and we choose one of the suppliers from that list considering their, like, documents were also quite questionable in terms of accuracy and everything, in terms of our expectations mainly. Right? Because for the local market, that was good. That was absolutely fine. So, yeah, Yalla, let's do the work. That was, like, a moment of uncertainty. Are we doing everything right? Plus, uncertainty was about the budget. The main thing there, the figures were four times higher than, again, we anticipated. And I was looking into this material into the works. I was considering just to bring guys from Moldova, Uzbekistan, and, I don't know, Russia, Ukraine, relocate all of them, rent apartment, give all of them ideas, and just complete the work with them. It would be really cheaper, as a project, but premise was something that you can't manage to deliver in such model. Right? Therefore, we eventually decided to go with one good, contractor who was, like, Indian guys and with absolutely different mentality. And I said to my team, guys, you have to now start learn Indian traditions, you know, be round, be flexible, be open minded, and, basically, let's go. Let's just do it. Indians are the kings of, this market in terms of, you know, banking, constructions, and many, many other industries. So if you want to be successful in Dubai, you have to learn how to make friends and partners with Indians. And, yeah, there was a lot of, emotions on the side, but, again, credit to my team. In three months, we managed to do it. We almost didn't exceed the budget that was finally set with a contractor. That was also exceptional. Then, like, I chatted with lots of entrepreneurs. Some of them even didn't trust me on that. And when we completed, we did a great party on the yacht because it was a real moment to celebrate. Speaker 0
Three months for renovation. Wow. I mean, that's fast. Of course, I asked Roman to describe what exactly they built. Speaker 1
Imagine the warehouse in the middle of the industrial zone in a desert. From the outside, it's just a workshop. Right? But when you come inside, you immediately feel the different air. Right? Because our air is full of oxygen because it's, this is the farm and the grow boxes. Plants, when they grow, they produce, oxygens. I believe this is the best place in Dubai to breathe, generally. If you stay in Dubai during the summer, yeah, you could just put a chair on the farm and breathe, breathe, and breathe. But number wise, this is, one southern four hundred square meter plot where we have the area for growing of more than one southern square meter because this is like a multilayer racks. So the farm, imagine like a library shelf, and on these shelves, the plants are sitting. And, like a seven to eight layers with these plants, on each layer you could see the lamps that giving them sunlight, imitate, like, Italian sunrise. For each layer, there is, like, a tray where the plants are located full of water. We use, like, different hydroponic methods, NFT, ebb and flow. But generally speaking, imagine, like, a tray, whereas there are some water, it could go ups, could go down, could just, flow. And plants are sitting in a special medium, not in the soil, where in this medium, roots are developing under this light. So we connect the irrigation system to this trace, to this shelves on this racks, and create in these rooms that we call a grow boxes, a special climate, climate that allows plants develop in due course and produce the highest possible yields. I love to say that, we are creating the best possible conditions, and these are, like, for season or bushel erupts, but for plants. Speaker 0
This is incredibly cool even from an engineering point of view. You know that the task of building an oasis in the middle of the desert has been sold by many people since the nine sixth century BC, since the construction of the Hanging Gardens in Babylon. Since then, the engineers have experimented a lot. They brought in soil, built complex irrigation system, tried to adapt different plants like tamaris trees, almond trees, bougainvillea. And I like to think that Roman is just of the same kind. I mean, he built a real oasis with soft Italian sun and colorful flowers in the middle of Dubai industrial city. Isn't that cool? But Roman does not celebrate the achievement for too long. You know why? Because he's already organizing the next steps. Speaker 1
Well, obviously, I was pleased and, happy, but it wasn't my first completed construction project. Right? So we had, like, five farms before. I had other construction projects, other businesses, like in furniture and some other industries. So I was excited that that was done that was done in Dubai, like a new market, like achievement, like tick box. But I was already thinking about, okay, what's next step? So now we need to do this mass seeding. We need to bring these lots of customers, because we can't allow ourselves to produce very little, right, by little, put everything on stock because our shelf life is five to seven days. On the planet Earth, only restaurants have a product with a less shelf life, the dish itself, right, with the shelf life for five minutes. Then we go with our flowers that could last for, like, four to twenty eight or, no, forty eight hours. That was, like, already thinking about it, and I was fully concentrated on that, how we could bring customers, how we could, scale the operations, build the farm's capacity as fast as we can. Speaker 0
At the beginning of the episode, I said that we have two guests. And now it's time to hand the mic over to the second guest. Daria is the VP of growth and product, so she was the one responsible for scaling the operation. Let's ask her about it. For me, it's interesting, you know, when it comes to especially Dubai market, it's kinda saturated, overly saturated market. And I'm really curious about how do you build that b two b marketing strategy, you know, that all about quality leads and it's not just about some expenses that could be. Speaker 2
That's actually a great question because if you look at the competition in that space, so many other vertical farms have very similar and, dull b to b marketing. I don't want to offend anyone, but if you look at the b to b marketing overall, you rarely see bold ideas and bold solutions because the b to b product is more difficult to market and more difficult to sell. For us, that was a big challenge because we are in a very small niche, and we work only with a handful of restaurants and hotels. We work only with Michelin star, fine dining, nice hotels, and that is a handful of people. When you think marketing and when you think, for example, paid ads, you understand that the audience is really limited. And when you bid certain money for your paid ad and it works like an auction, the price goes up and up and up depending on how many people are left in the pool. So the less people you have left to see your ad, the higher the price will be, obviously. And in our niche, we started off with very small circle of people because we only target a certain percentage of chefs and establishments in Horeca. So that was one of the challenges. And to my pride, I can say that we have nailed it because currently, the social media marketing, the content marketing that is virtually free, and then the paid ads that are run every week produce anywhere between thirty to fifty warm leads every week. And for us, that is a huge number considering how niche the market actually is. Speaker 0
What helped you to overcome that? I mean, was it the design behind it? What is the slogan, the tone of voice? Like, how do you think what helps you to stand out because it is a very specific niche in terms of that? Speaker 2
Our approach is to work with many marketing channels simultaneously. So we obviously have the social media. And if you look at our Instagram, which I really encourage you to do, you'll see a lot of behind the scenes content. So we try to let people into our farm through our Instagram account and show them how everything works, like, what the farm actually looks like, how the growers work inside, how the plants are growing, what are the colors, etcetera. And everything in the farm is quite colorful and bright, and it's eye catching. Speaking of this marketing channel, the social media and content strategy, for us, we try to leverage the farm itself and to show people behind it as well. So to take interviews, to show faces of the growers, to make sure that our business has a face and has an identity for the market and for the client. This is when people start trusting us, especially when you work with chefs. Chefs know what they want. They are very determined. They're not the people to play around with. It's very important to build trust with them because a chef is an artist. He or she, they create a dish. And with artists, you really need to build trust because, otherwise, they are very easy to choose someone else. They're not there for the price. They're not there because you have a discount. They're there because they believe in your product. They love your quality, and they have a relationship with you. That brings me to another point. In this market, in the MENA region and in GCC in general, you know that relationships play a big role. So for us, hosting live events and go into conferences, go into big events like or golf food, and these are one of the biggest platforms in Dubai that bring together a lot of professionals from Horica and Gastronomy overall. And us being there physically and meeting those chefs and giving them something to try, that also fosters a lot of the relationships. And then third, I'd say, is our brilliant sales team. We not only rely on marketing, on social media, paid ads, website, all of this, but also on the salespeople that hit the ground every single day and go physically to meet those chefs, to speak to them, to bring them the sample. And once the chef tries the sample, once the chef actually tries our microgreens or edible flowers, they are one that single second. Because in this market, we don't really have a lot of competitors in terms of the quality. Our quality is one of the best, and our range is one of the biggest because you just simply cannot find some of the things we grow locally anywhere else in the UAE. You just have to import them. And we obviously when it comes to if you compare the imported flower or the flower grown in your backyard, meaning in our Dubai industrial city farm. Speaker 0
Okay. To gain trust, they make backstage content, and they also go to gastronomic events and literally to restaurants to let chefs try samples. And as always, behind high sales are consistent relationship with clients. So I went to discuss this with JP, marketing director of Fortis, and it turned out that they themselves are in the same position at Fortis. They make a product for demanding b to b clients, and for this, they build relationships with them. And these relationships need to be constantly maintained. They have to be kept consistent. Speaker 3
I'm gonna give you an example of a case that we had at Fortis. We are working with this partner, and we recently had an event with this partner. And we thought about sending one big newsletter to them, and we said that we would repeat this once every month. What we ended up doing was that we decided to take that big newsletter and then divide it into four small newsletters so that we can send once a week a very small amount of information. Now the point of this newsletter is twofold. The first is it gives us an excuse to get in touch with those partners in order to keep Fortis top of mind in their mind. That's the first thing. And then if they read the newsletter, then they get a bit of information if they want. But as long as they see in their email Fortis and then the title of the newsletter, even if they don't open it, it's a win for us because we are top of mind, and they'll think about us on a regular basis. The same sort of strategy applies to Fortis, which is you don't necessarily need to have something huge to talk about in order to stay close to your customers. You just want to stay top of mind so that you sort of micro inject awareness within the minds of your customers on a regular basis. Speaker 0
And as JP explained, if the Fortis needed to constantly stay in touch with the client, then the small businesses have the same task. Right? So they came up with the idea of a new product that will help small businesses always stay in touch with their core audience. Speaker 3
So the way that this works with Fortis is within each customer, you will have in the upcoming product a date at which you last spoke to a customer. This product is not live yet, but this is what we're building. You will have alerts that will tell you, hey. You last spoke to this customer two or three weeks ago, and that's what they purchased. Maybe you could recommend that product because we see that a lot of people bundle those products together when they purchase one or the other from your store. So maybe that customer could be interested in that. You could also have notifications that say, hey. Elena, for example, has not purchased a coffee from your place in the last three weeks. Why don't you give her a discount and ask her to come back? Speaker 0
Daria told what helped them quickly gain their first client base, which approaches worked, but I'm often more interested in what didn't work. Not because I love drama, although who am I kidding? Of course, I do. But because mistakes often teach us faster than successes. So I asked Daria about fails. Speaker 2
We certainly did not have any content that backlash or was received negatively. However, we did have some content that underperformed. And I think that is quite usual in the b to b space again. In the b to b space, you don't really produce a lot of viral content. You're not really positioned to reach a wide audience of millions of people because no one cares about your flowers. Come on. Like, people don't really eat them in their daily lives. They don't put them in the soups. They don't go to retail shop to stock on the edible flowers for the next several months. Like, no one does it. And we only work, again, with chefs, and those are a limited audience. So for us, content expectedly sometimes underperforms. That is okay, and we understand that we just need to keep trying different hypothesis and keep testing. That is why within our marketing team, we work on the hypothesis basis. So every week, we ideate, and we try to come up with new ideas and hypothesis to test throughout the week. And that could be different kinds of content or different kinds of interviews or incorporating something new into our reels or photos or even in terms of PR experimentation or events, etcetera, etcetera. And that helps us to find those sweet spots and find something new that will work out. For instance, once we tried to distribute a guide on how to improve the revenue of a restaurant for chefs with a twist of using edible flowers and microgreens with certain dishes. For example, it's wide knowledge that women like aesthetic things. And when you put a flower into your mocktail, that means the mocktail will be ordered more frequently than without the flower. So based on this, you can predict that your revenue of the restaurant will grow if you use certain aesthetic flowers in the dishes. And that was the PDF that we prepared with some insights, with some research that we did, and we tried to distribute that to chefs as the first point of contact, right, to get them speak to us and to get them discuss the product. However, in our first try, when we designed the PDF, when we started trying to market it and run paid ads with it, there was zero response, like, absolutely zero. No one wanted it. No one engaged with it. No one downloaded the PDF. Absolutely zero response. And we thought, oh, well, okay. That wouldn't work for us. That's not a b to b tool that might work for b to c, but for some reason, evidently, that wouldn't work for us. And we stopped this hypothesis. We put it on pause. Then in a couple of months, when we were going through the list of hypothesis again to ideate and to brainstorm, we stumbled upon this one and we thought, okay, let's give it a second shot. Let's try again with the same PDF, but let's try to position it a bit differently and to market it differently and maybe create another ad that will target it in a different way. And that's what we did, and the response was overwhelming. We received dozens and dozens, and I think now into hundreds, of excited chefs who downloaded the PDF and who wanted to get samples from us, and we received some paying clients already from that ad. And that really taught us that the hypothesis are ever changing, and we really need to revisit them from time to time and try again even if something doesn't work. We don't just, you know, give it up. We try to revisit it and maybe give it another thought and that will work out. Speaker 0
And Roman share a case when he managed to get a really cool valuable and demanding client bypassing all the rules. I mean, just listen. Speaker 1
That's usually like a snowball. So you first show for a few very good clients what you could do, what you could deliver, what are the range. Plus, we came up with, some crops that are not available with anyone else on the market that, again, make us quite special and, like with, Emaar, for instance, or with Emirates five catering. Emaar is not working with anyone who is, younger than three years as a company in this market. And they don't care if you used to work in other markets, right? They want you to be here for at least three years. But given that we proposing some very unique crops, we were entitled to shortcut this requirement and, finally, ship to places like address, etcetera. Obviously, they care a lot about finest and highest food security standards, and we adhere to them. Like, again, HAASP, ISO, we passed all the audits. We passed surprise audits. And, aviation, and, I will give them a credit, like, Emirates by catering. They have the toughest audit we had in our history at the company, plus my previous experience. There was, like, multiple checks, surprise checks. Sometimes they just came up and said, hey. We are here. So open all the doors. They check everything, so you can be prepared for that. Right? And they do it multiple times to ensure that during these processes, you really follow what you're saying to them on the audit. Right? All procedures are in place in place, and growers are following all the rules or the protocols. And, eventually, the end product is safe with the quality that you declare. And exact that quality would be in DXB, in the first class of Emirates or business class of Emirates or on, any other airlines that served by Emirates flight catering in DXV. And there are more than, if I'm not mistaken, more than one hundred eighty airlines like that. Speaker 2
I am incredibly proud with our numbers in terms of clients and our traction in the market overall. We obviously opened just this year, and we opened in the end of February. Now we are in October with over one hundred clients and big names like Amarr, Jumeirah, Four Seasons, a lot of Michelin style places, Burj Al Arab even. And we already supply the incredible establishments in Dubai. That means chefs trust us. So that means in under a year, we managed to win hearts of the most talented and celebrated chefs in the region and maybe even globally in the world because, obviously, Dubai is this big magnet for people from all over the globe. Speaker 1
So as Dasha mentioned, we are on a good track with the number of outlets. I also quite excited about that because we started in March. March means, almost a beginning of Ramadan. During the Ramadan, the business is quite quiet. After the Ramadan, there are holidays, then almost the end of the school year, right, and then summer. So we were bumped into the desert in the really dry season. Currently, we focus a lot on the average revenue per outlet, and, like, we have an estimate what should be ideal during the year, but still not a lot of data to finalize it. Because some people say that during this summer, the demand is decreasing five times, and other people saying twenty times. We observe just only three times. Right? But we are working still at a relatively small scale. We follow the average revenue per outlet and target an amount of four thousand dirham per outlet per month. Like, average revenue per, per outlet is our so called North Star metric. So it's around fifty grands per year per restaurant, just, supplying with the flowers, leaves, and microgreens. Right? So you could easily do the math, multiply it by one thousand clients, and we're out of product. That's why we need more farms, at least three to five farms just in this country. And we're taking aside all these new ventures with Doha, Eriyat, and other places. I would say that now we are on a track to hit a number of seven hundred outlets somewhere in the end of the first quarter next year. Again, thanks to our choices with the logistics suppliers, how we now deliver the orders in cooperation with the one distributing company. Plus, we receive lots of orders from abroad, and that was a bit surprising to me. But at the same time, it makes sense. Hopefully, it will make sense also to you. Let's say, the great resort in the Maldives, they don't have gardens or, like, not a lot of gardens or place where they could grow ingredients like that. Plus, soil is not really suitable to grow lots of these things, so they have to import. And, obviously, import from act like, imports from Dubai should be better than from Netherlands just, you know, logistic wise. Right? Like, a few thousand kilometers compared a bit less. And we are considering to do these export operations at least until we build something in the Maldives, somewhere in Malaya, So use this, spot there to distribute to the islands nearby. Speaker 0
You're listening to Crossing the Desert, podcast by Fortis. Fortis helps seamlessly connect businesses and their customers and run the business. It assists in attracting and retaining customers, selling products and services, accepting payments both online and in stores, and managing finances and personnel. Join Fortis social media. Links are in the episode description. Follow our podcast or add it to your favorites. Give us five stars or hard and leave us a comment. This will help other listeners find out more about us, and we'll love to read and answer Yelena Volkova. Producer, Daria Sanikova. Sound designer, Ksenia Kazantzva. History consultant Alona Podnibena, Fortis consultant JP Serhull, and I'm your host Isaac Delonin. 
