When I began my coffee career, I had a seemingly limitless fascination with the world I had stumbled into. I spent countless hours on threads of the old community forums like alt.coffee and Coffeed.com as well as CoffeeGeek.com. I drank coffee with a mind that was both sensitive to the rush of the caffeine and the story and world …
We all want to give a good experience to the customer with each interaction we have. A great service experience is really what drives people to be your loyal fans and is therefore the most important thing you can provide. Trouble is that when things really get moving, standards often slip. I think there are two reasons behind this. Priorities …
It’s early. You sleepily approach the door and fumble for the keys to the shop knowing that you have 30 seconds to run across the place and turn off the alarm before it goes off. That weird mix of fogginess and urgency is the first thing every opener feels going in and last thing every closer feels leaving. In these …
It happens all too often… Baristas become disillusioned with their work. The shift starts and ends before you know it and even though you were physically there making drinks, cleaning creamer spouts, and sweeping cigarette butts off the patio you were not mentally present at all. In the day to day of the cafe the work can become rote and …
We serve two Customers: The community to whom you are serving coffee (the cafe’s customers) The community that brought you that coffee (farmer, importers, roasters, et al) What a barista is and does daily is quite possibly one of the most important roles in the whole supply chain of specialty coffee. The heart of the role’s meaning is …
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 …
