The brand
Lumina is a specialty cafe brand based in Sydney's North-West, running on a deliberately simple promise: good coffee, good food, good people. Three venues operating — Macquarie Park, Castle Hill, Rouse Hill — with Broadway Shopping Centre newly joined as the first CBD-adjacent location. Warm golds, soft creams, latte art that gets photographed every morning.
Beneath the warmth is a discipline. The menu is short and seasonal. The team is trained the same way at every site. The brand was built to be replicable from the start — Benny just didn't have the franchise architecture to take it further on his own.
Where Benny came to us
When ABC came in, Lumina had two operating venues with demand outpacing capacity. Locals were asking when Rouse Hill would open; property agents were calling about Eastwood, Chatswood, Parramatta, and Broadway. Benny had a choice: open the next stores himself, or build the system that allowed others to. With our help, Rouse Hill and Broadway Shopping Centre have since opened — proving the model can travel outside the North-West.
He chose the second.
The engagement
Lumina is inside the Strategic Consulting phase of the four-stage growth journey. The work, briefly:
- A unit economics deep-dive across the two operating venues
- The franchise model design — single-unit, NSW-first, with area developer rights reserved for scale partners
- A five-year financial architecture taking Lumina from three units to sixteen
- A brand-system audit ahead of the operations manual build
What's next
Once Strategic Consulting closes (six weeks in), we move into System Architecture (operations manual, training, supply, technology stack), then Legal & Compliance (the Disclosure Document, the Franchise Agreement), and then Recruitment — the first three to five franchisees, chosen deliberately rather than quickly.
If everything holds, the first Lumina franchisee signs in mid-2026.