Edge Tea & Coffee is an unusually varied business for its size: wholesale, a café, an online shop, subscriptions and training, all under one roof in Sussex, with fewer than 30 staff. Stewart Cumming, the Managing Director, wanted to build real marketing capability inside the business rather than pay for an expensive senior hire he might not be able to keep busy. He’d set up apprenticeships himself at previous businesses, so he knew the model could work. He also knew, from experience, how much administration the funding and government-platform side usually carried.
The problem wasn’t whether to take on an apprentice. It was finding the time to run the process himself again.
What Vocate did
Vocate took the setup off his desk entirely: the government platform registration, the funding, and the legal paperwork he’d wrestled with on his own before. The pre-selection stood out to him in particular. Rather than leaving him to sift through CVs, Vocate advertised the role, interviewed candidates, and put forward only a shortlist worth his time.
His one hesitation going in was the off-the-job learning requirement, the hours apprentices spend on structured training away from their day-to-day tasks. It turned out to be where the value actually sits. The training is built around live projects in the business, so the practical work itself brings the qualification to life, rather than pulling the apprentice out to sit through generic content.
The result
The apprentice who joined Edge had just quit a university marketing degree after three months. Eighteen months on, she’d completed her level 3 apprenticeship with a distinction, up against graduates who’d finished the degree she walked away from, and with no student debt. Stewart promoted her into the marketing executive role.
She now runs Edge’s organic and content marketing.
The whole thing costs him about an hour a week.
“I’ve set two businesses up on the government platform myself before. Vocate pretty much did most of it for me.”
Stewart Cumming, Managing Director, Edge Tea & Coffee
What’s next
Stewart is now putting an existing member of staff through a level 4 apprenticeship, and has started looking at the higher-level and AI standards Vocate offers. For a business that runs on a genuinely wide spread of activities, from a working café to an online shop, having marketing capability that grew from inside the business, and understands how all of it fits together, has turned out to matter more than hiring in someone who’d need months to learn the business first.
If you’re weighing up whether an apprentice could do for your marketing what one did for Edge’s, get in touch and we’ll talk through what that would look like for your business.
