Looking back on the years spent honing my skills related to coffee service, leadership, and management, I am struck by how much I have changed as a person. You would think it would be the knowledge and accumulation of tricks and skill that are the reward of all the effort. But as it turns out, self development is the ultimate …

You may have noticed that there is always an account on Instagram that seems to represent something you wish you had in your cafe. They look like they are having fun, their machines are nicer, the drinks are prettier, the space is designed beautifully etc. We will scroll through all these accounts to absorb the aesthetic of it all and …

In our industry, losing staff is part of what we can expect. Even though turnover is a fact of running a cafe, how we lose people is largely up to us. The fact is we lose staff needlessly because of behaviors, and subsequently environments, that push them away. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have staff that love working for us …

When we talk with customers in the shop and communicate to with them through our messaging and marketing, we are creating the customer of tomorrow. We create the demand we seek to satisfy in the daily small interactions multiplied a million times over. The compound effect is what we call consumer demand. Trouble is that we act as though consumer …

We have this tendency in the coffee shop to either not have much of any system or structure, or have incredibly complex of convoluted systems and structures. In both cases we are guilty of shallow thinking because the purpose of a system is to equip the user with clarity and to make the job, be it a small or large …

Spiders get a bad rap. It’s true that they are generally creepy. Also true that some could even kill you…BUT!…forgetting the fact that the usual visiter to a spider’s web is usually not there FOR dinner but AS dinner, there is still something we can learn from spiders when it comes to hospitality. In The coffee shop, when guest enters …

When we think about accountability we tend to think about holding others accountable for the work and ideas that we want them to practice. After all, we are paying them money to do a particular job and as the boss we want to make certain that the job gets done accordingly. Interestingly, as much as we worry about this, and …

When it snows in Kentucky we have to take advantage of it! I am from upstate NY and snow is just a part of life there. Even though we got excited about the snow when it first falls, we hardly think of it as an urgent matter. That’s because it is reliable. It sticks.  In Louisville, where I live now, …

Most barista training is ineffective. The major reason for this is not because employees aren’t up to the challenge but because we who are doing the training are operating within a framework that makes mediocrity, miscommunication, and confusion an inevitability. Let dive into this just a bit. Most cafes set up their training to be done in intensely in the …

You go where you look. This is something they told me in driving school when I was 16. If you are going off the road and you look at a tree, you’ll tend to steer the car into the tree. If you look at the grass it is more likely you will steer onto the grass. This is true because …