In this week’s episode we talk to Lester Philander, a property investor and the founder of Corp Cafe based in Muizenberg, South Africa.

He started his property journey by making an offer on a property in Mitchell’s Plain, but ended up quitting his job to start his business after getting the initial approval but not the final approval, so the process fell through. A few years later, he and his wife bought their first property to live in Muizenberg and later bought a second property with 3 units on the premises to help family members by renting it out to them. They are now planning to rent that property out to other tenants.

During Covid, he announced that a lot of coffee shops were closing down. So he developed a concept called “rent my restaurant.”

He invested R80,000 into a restaurant, signed a lease and confirmed a lease and then rented out the property to a restaurant owner. The idea was that as a restaurant owner, you would then lease the restaurant with everything in it and you just focus on managing the restaurant and paying them a set fee of R10,000 a month.

The result was great, but he realized that he wanted to make more than R10,000 a month and that Cape Town had more coffee shops per capita than New York City, which means that for a coffee shop to succeed they need to offer a bit more than other coffee shops on the market.

They then started a franchise model (Corp Cafe) where their franchisees can become a hands off restaurant owner (they manage the coffee shops for you), where they buy the franchise for R450,000 and in return Corp Cafe will manage the restaurant and pay the franchisee R10,000 a month (a 24% yield per annum) and reinvest the extra R20,000 profit and leave it in the business bank account for the franchisee to use at a later date.

They currently have 10 stores open and they plan to set up two stores every single month from now on.

This is a really incredible episode.