Off-Road: The story of Night Fix

Using only social media and word of mouth, business partners and friends Steve Taylor and Shane Leighton have seen their mobile business quadruple in size since it hit the road last October.

Night Fix is a portable coffee business with a very specific clientele: shift workers at hospitals. With internal cafes closing their doors in the evening and most night-shift workers clocking on hours later, our health-care workers had to rely on instant coffee to keep them awake and ‘on’ during their shifts. When seasoned coffee pros Steve and Shane identified this gap in the market, it didn’t take them long to fill it.

Each night they start work at 10.30pm, pulling up outside a hospital’s emergency department for half an hour at a time. They send out a blast on social media, and workers come out and get a little fresh air with their coffee, without having to be away from their literally lifesaving work for too long. By the time the Night Fix crew head home at around 4am, they’ve covered a total of 12 hospitals.

We had a chat with Steve about how Night Fix operates, and where it all started.

I’ve worked with roadside coffee for about seven years. In 2016, I did an event in Dandenong [a suburb south-east of Melbourne] called the Festival of Lights. I was selling coffee at night for seven weeks and I said to the universe, Let’s get something out of this. Then I had a nurse come up to me and say, “Forget everything you’re doing. If you’re really interested in doing something new with coffee, come around to the hospitals at night-time.”

I’d known Shane and Sharna for eight or nine years, ever since I worked for their Coffee Club franchise. We stayed in touch after that, and when we thought about this idea, we looked at how many hospitals were in Melbourne, how many beds they had and nurse-to-bed ratios. When we saw the numbers, we couldn’t figure out why no-one had done it!

I had a van I was already using. Shane went out on the road with it, and from day one we really started kicking goals.

The demand was there immediately, from everywhere. Within six weeks we’d bought another van and started the fit-out so we could cover more hospitals. That van was running by Christmas time.

There’s me and Shane. Our wives take care of the back end – paperwork, ordering, that kind of stuff. I’ve just had two weeks off and used it fitting out another two vans. And we’ve got another two guys, Lee and Nick, coming on board.

I’ve owned businesses in the past and worked for other small businesses. The biggest challenge with the coffee market is saturation: every third shop is a cafe, whether you’re walking down the street or in a mall. It’s not an overly competitive market usually, but in mobile businesses it’s cutthroat. There are hundreds of vans and only a handful of events they can work at.

Driving to and from our customers works best for us. My wife says we’re like a snail – we can pack up and go on whenever we need to. The set-up of a mobile business is quite expensive, but your daily running costs are cheaper than rent, gas and electricity [at a brick-and-mortar cafe]. We don’t have staffing issues; there’s no food, no staffing, no table service. It’s a one-man operation.

It’s challenging. I’ve got three daughters, and Shane’s a dad as well. At the start, we were more nervous about it than we needed to be. I deal with it well now that I’m in the swing of it: I take the kids to school, have my eight hours of sleep, and then get to see the kids when they get home. I was worried about how it would affect the family but, to be honest, Shane and I both really love working nights. I get to spend more time with my family than I would in a 9-to-5 job. It’s fantastic. And the faces on the nurses and doctors when we roll up – it makes it all absolutely worth it.

One hundred per cent. When you work days in hospitality, people take you for granted. They order and never get off their phone or talk to you. With so many choices [for cafes], if people don’t like your place, they go to the next one.

But serving people who feel grateful for you – you never get tired of that. Our wives keep saying we’ll need to get bigger vans to fit our heads in! I hear people say they love me. And they’re keeping people alive and dealing with sick kids. I couldn’t do what they do, but I get to make their life a little bit nicer – how awesome’s that?!

I recently saw the nurse who first told me to do this. Her name’s Alex, and she saw me in a news story and recognised me. She was stoked that she had a part in it; she’d mentioned it to quite a few coffee people in the past and they didn’t take her up on it. She works at St Vincent’s [in Melbourne], and when I pulled up it was like one of those movie moments – us seeing each other again, in slow motion.

For more info on the Night Fix, you can follow them on Facebook.