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Executive Summary
Lauren Barrera, Sales Strategy and Marketing Business Development Director at Aramark Workplace Hospitality, traces how one client relationship grew from a single coffee bar into a five site workplace hospitality account. The growth was driven by consistently showing up for the client, from a building renovation to new locations in other cities.
One of the first accounts I worked on as an operator in New York City was a single coffee bar. A few years later, that same client asked us to help design an entirely new floor cafe during a building renovation, then brought us into additional locations in other cities. This happened because every time that client had a challenge, we were already there to help solve it.
I was the person running that account day to day, so I got to watch this up close. What I learned had very little to do with growing an account and a lot to do with what it means to be useful to a client over time.
The Coffee Bar Converted into a Full Floor Program
For a while, that coffee bar was the entire relationship. One site, one small team, and conversations about what was working that week and what needed fixing. Nobody was talking about expanding anywhere else. We were just trying to run a good coffee bar, one that fit into the workday that looked completely different from the corporate offices I had worked in before.
When the client started renovating one of their floors, they came to us and said they wanted a new cafe built into the space, and they wanted us to help design it, not just staff it. That request came out of a challenge they had, a floor under construction with no plan yet for what the new food service should look like. We were the team they trusted to help figure that out, so I spent close to a year at the table while that floor came together, working through layout, service flow, and what the offerings should be.
What Drove Account Growth Over Time
As the client opened new locations in other cities, they brought us in again, not because we were pushing to expand, but because each time they needed something new, calling us was the clear next step. We knew their culture and we knew what their employees wanted day to day, because we had already been doing that work for years in their first location.
If I look back at how that account grew, it never felt like account growth while it was happening. It felt like showing up for what came next, for a client who kept bringing us into the next conversation because they already knew we would handle it well. It is the kind of relationship you earn by showing up with reliability every time.
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Lauren Barrera is Sales Strategy and Marketing Business Development Director for Aramark Workplace Hospitality. She spent her early career as an operator, running the New York City coffee bar account at the center of this story before moving into sales strategy and client solution design.
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