I first started running this café as my own small business three and half years ago. I suppose I've had a good background for running my business because my family had a pub before I launched the café, and my dad has always been a salesman. My mum's a cook and that's definitely been handy for our kitchen too. I'm looking at making the café business grow higher and higher.
Cakes for everyone
All sorts of people come into the café, so we like to have cakes for everyone – we've got everything from Victoria sponge to vegan cakes. Some of the cakes are made by us, but we can't make enough cakes every day for all our customers, so we get some from another local business who bake locally themselves. We think the café works well for local businesses and the community.
Even when we've had heavy snowfall, we've still had a good number of customers. The winter daily average is 300, and in summer it can get up to 1,300 so we're doing really well.
We make ourselves known through marketing and we've been on the radio and things like that. We don't have a website yet because that's quite an expensive thing, but I've started growing my social media over the last six months.
It's a great community
The best thing about my café business has definitely got to be the people. It might sound a bit clichéd, but I say that because of all the different people we see coming inside the café. It's a great community. Some local people go into town to do their shopping and pop in for a coffee on their way back. The canal brings everyone from the boats, people from countries like the USA, we've had the floating market, the floating cinema and even hotel boats that come through. They always seem to stop here and come into our café which is great because we get to meet so many different people and they get to experience something different. There aren't many places like this.
George, Devizes Wharf, Kennet & Avon Canal
