I can’t help it. I notice the shelf sets, the signage, and the way a product is faced or buried. I look at the displays and think about who built them, whether they came back to check on them, and whether the product is moving. It’s a habit from years of being the person who showed up every week to make sure my products looked great, or the espresso machine was dialled in. Once you’ve spent that much time in the field, you never really leave it.

I joined the Salt Spring Coffee sales team in June 2011. The company was just starting a brand strategy and repositioning toward a higher-quality standard across everything it did. New packaging. A clearer story. A more rigorous approach to the coffee itself, from the farms in Nicaragua and Peru through to the cup at the customer’s counter. Director of Marketing Aron Bjornson and the team at Exhibit A: Design Group were rebuilding the brand’s look and feel in the world. My job, as the Territory Manager covering Vancouver and, later, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, was to take that work into the field and execute it at the store level.

What I learned in those three years is that brand strategy is invisible until it’s everywhere. And when it’s everywhere, it changes what a team and a sales rep can do.

The Sales Manager Who Gave Us Permission to Put Service First

I’d worked in field sales for nearly a decade before this, in coffee and other premium products, and I had spent a lot of time asking questions that nobody could answer. What’s our strategy? Who sets the quotas? What’s the actual goal here? Most often, the questions floated away unanswered, or I was told to focus on my numbers.

Kevin Burk, Director of Sales at Salt Spring Coffee at the time, was different. Kevin had answers. He also knew how to teach, which is rarer than people think—most great salespeople get promoted to sales manager and discover the skills are almost entirely different. Kevin understood that his job was to develop his team, not just manage their numbers. He pushed when we needed it.

What Kevin gave us was permission to put service ahead of short-term growth. He knew that growth follows service, not the other way around. It was something I’d started developing years earlier, selling premium travel, where the work was never about the transaction. It was about understanding what the client actually needed and delivering it. Kevin reinforced that this was the right way to work in field sales, too. Not chasing anyone. Looking for partners who valued the work and wanted to build something together.

The measure of a good account isn’t the size of the opening order. It’s velocity, margins, and whether the staff in that store can talk about your product when you’re not there. It’s helping a team understand the brand deeply enough that when a customer asks why this coffee costs more or is otherwise different from the one next to it, they have a valuable answer. It’s not samples left on desks with price lists. It’s finding the right fit, the right SKU set for the store, and paying attention to what the customer is actually telling you.

My first task in the Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands territory was to rebuild the grocery channel, which had been in steady decline. I came in with the new brand look and feel, a reduced SKU count, and a clear sense of which accounts had the most traffic and the most opportunity. I worked with grocery managers to reset shelf sets, increase space, and make our section the best-maintained in the category.

This is what brand strategy looks like in practice. It’s not a document. It’s the rep who shows up every week and presents the product to the quality standard. It’s the new packaging and the clearer story that give customers something to respond to. It’s the staff who can answer questions about where the coffee comes from, because the rep invested the time to tell them. Strategy creates the conditions. The work in the field is where it either lands or it doesn’t.

We started to grow in a territory that had been in decline. Not because the previous rep had failed—he was well-loved and had been there a long time—but because the brand strategy had caught up to the current climate, and we had a more compelling story to sell.

Friday Night Espresso Reminds Us About Customer Loyalty

Matt Rissling had been the Head Chef at the Marina Restaurant in Oak Bay, a well-regarded spot with a high-calibre kitchen. When he and his family bought Rock Salt Cafe in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island, I was genuinely excited for them. It was actually the original Salt Spring Coffee location, where they used to roast.

I got to know Matt during the months I was going back and forth between territories, training the incoming Vancouver rep while covering the island. One Friday evening during dinner service, he sent me an email. His espresso machine was having issues, and he didn’t know what to do.

I was able to help him troubleshoot enough to get through service and arranged for a technician to come out as soon as possible. It was a fully automatic machine and needed more than my toolkit, but I could get him what he needed that night.

When I saw him next, he told me he wasn’t planning to make any changes as the new owner. He’d be a customer of mine as long as I was there; he really appreciated my help.

A Friday night email during service. A few minutes of my time. That’s often all it takes. In a world where people are increasingly hard to reach, answering your phone is a competitive advantage. If you can help a customer with the knowledge or resources you have, you do it. It connects in a way that no sales call or samples drop ever will.

After I left Salt Spring Coffee, I went into craft beer and wine. Matt was one of my first customers in my new self-employed chapter. All these years later, we’re still in touch, and we always visit or eat there when we're on the island.

Paul Large ran Country Grocer, a family-owned chain with a location on Salt Spring Island. By every account, he was a deal guy. He knew his store, his customers, and what sold. In the spring, I walked into his store and spotted a Starbucks single-serve display taking up prime real estate at the entrance. I walked straight upstairs into Paul’s office.

“Excuse me, Paul. What on earth is that, and I would like that spot, please.”

“You can’t afford it.”

“Yes, I can.”

We talked it through, negotiated on price, and booked the spot within a few days. I had the relationship. Paul knew I showed up, knew the product, and knew his store. We locked in June as the start, peak tourism season, the best possible timing, for a two-month run.

When the display came together, I knew it would be the largest in the company’s history (and likely still is to this day). I called in support from Aron and Cory Ripley at Exhibit A: Design Group. Cory designed custom signage that worked with the new packaging and shippers. We mapped everything out in advance. I drove a Sprinter van loaded with pallets of coffee to the island myself.

I was on the floor taping up the base when Paul walked in and looked at what I’d unloaded.

“This isn’t enough.”

Gears turning. “I can bring a refill order next week.“

“Let’s just double the order. Can you go back and get it?”

I stepped outside and called Kevin. He was not immediately enthusiastic. But I trusted Paul. Paul knew his store the way only an owner can. I trusted my read on the relationship. Kevin trusted me.

That’s How The Company’s Largest Retailer Order Doubled

Because I asked. Because I showed up. Because Paul knew I’d keep showing up.

We started with 780 cases, built from the floor up, surrounded by 96 linear feet of shelving on the opposing wall. Within four weeks, we were refilling some SKUs. We held the space for two months, then moved to an end cap through the fall, keeping it stocked with fresh coffee right through the season.

I was still on the floor taping the base together when a sales manager from Kicking Horse Coffee’s distributor came over without introducing herself and asked what I was doing. When I told her, she said her rep “just couldn’t get it together in time”.

I stood up and said, “I’m not here because you turned this down.”

I was there because I asked for the sale, prepared for it, and showed up to do the work. That's it.

The Salt Spring Coffee relationship with the University of Victoria and Finnerty Express Cafe had been in place since 2005. When the contract was put out to RFP (Request For Proposal), we had to compete. There had been changes in the decision-making office, and we had no prior relationship with some of the new contacts. Being the incumbent helped, but it was not a given.

UVic runs one of the most rigorous RFP processes I’ve encountered, with more than a dozen pages of detailed questions on supply chain, sustainability, company operations, and social impact. A plain-text response wouldn’t reflect the brand we were becoming or earn us the contract.

Together with Cory Ripley, I prepared a beautifully designed 42 page response that approached the document like a valuable brand communication. I wrote all the copy, dove deep into the supply chain, interviewed team members, and built the most thorough resource the company had ever had to answer questions from potential customers and partners. We included our food safety standards, origin and supply chain certifications for buying coffee and more. The work Cory, Aron, and the team had done on the brand strategy came to full fruition in a sales context for the first time, and it was powerful to see it all working together.

We Won The Contract

The document became the foundation for training materials, marketing materials, and internal documents that the company hadn’t had before. Kevin used the framework to renew the Grouse Mountain Resort contract, which was not guaranteed either. In total, the work helped to secure more than $250,000 in annual business. It was the first time we put the brand strategy to work in a sales proposal, and it proved what was possible when the whole company was pointed in the same direction.

That’s what brand strategy in action looks like. It shows up in a proposal. In a display. In the way a rep can walk into a room, tell the story, and earn the sale.

There had been a shift in operational leadership, and the grocery channel moved to distributors in both regions. A natural evolution for a brand at that stage, but it also changed the field rep roles. I was laid off in the spring of 2014.

Kevin drove me home after our meeting. I walked into the backyard, and my partner asked if it was what I thought (Kevin never came to a meeting without sharing an agenda ahead of time) and if I was okay.

I laughed. “Yeah. (Laughing) But would you give me a ride to the phone store? Kevin took my car and my phone.” My partner had had the same employer (BC Ambulance) for 25 years, so he couldn’t really fathom my response at first. I knew that’s the way sales goes! I also knew it was time to make good on my own dreams, and with my first trip to Europe coming up later that Spring, things were just how they were meant to be.

Ever Since, I’ve Been Self-Employed

Kevin went on to lead sales at Hardbite Chips and has since retired. He was there during one of the biggest and most complex team projects of my career at Bucha Brew through the pandemic, picking up the phone when I needed him. Salt Spring Coffee was later acquired. The original founders, Mickey and Robbyn McLeod, now own the cafe of the same name on Salt Spring Island. Paul Large retired from Country Grocer. Matt Rissling is still on the island, growing from Rock Salt into owning the shop across the street, Salt Spring Mercantile. Finnerty Express Cafe at UVic has since closed.

I still keep in touch with so many of my customers and former colleagues.