Contents
Introduction
My Cafés
First Things First: Get A Job
The Building
Choosing A Location
What Are You Looking For?
Great Business Idea vs. Great Business Model
Go Big Or Go Small
Footfall
The Little Things
The Premises
What Should You Ask The Experts About?
Building And Contracting
The Final Decision
The Café
The Basics
Building Trade
The Bleeding Bunny Rule: Workflow, Efficiency & Perception
Be Two-Faced
Selling Retail Coffee Bags
Loyalty Cards
The Delivery Drivers
50¢ Security
Tables & Chairs
Toilets
The Plated Napkin & Other Continuous Struggles
Coffee
Coffee, Briefly
Milk Slows You Down
The Importance Of Water
A Drink By Any Other Name
Knowledge : Coffee : Equipment
Extra Hot
Make The Worst Cup Better
Staff
How to Hire People
Continuity Is The Cheapest Staffing Strategy
Culture
Culture Trumps Quality Control
The Correlation Of Nice
Respect
Don’t Speak Ill Of Your Competitors
Assertive vs. Aggressive
Don’t Boast About The Long Hours
An Email Never Solved An Argument
Family & Friends
Social Media
We Are All Marketing Scum
Two Guys & A Bottle Of Milk
Have Fun
Numbers
Coffee As A High Margin Product
Understanding Margins
The Staff Cost Equilibrium
Keeping Track
Acknowledgements
For Oisín, the boulder roller.
What I Know About Running Coffee Shops
First published 2017
32 Grand Canal Street Lower, Dublin 2, Ireland
Copyright © 2017 Colin Harmon
All rights reserved. No part of this production may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form, or
by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the written consent of the
Publisher.
Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup
ISBN
978-0-9957699-0-8
Typeset throughout in Spinoza by Max Phillips and Nimbus Sans Extended Bold by URW++.
whatiknowaboutrunningcoffeeshops.com
Introduction
I’VE WRITTEN THIS BOOK NOT ONLY FOR PEOPLE
who want to run their own coffee shop but also for those that
already do. It’s a lonely place running a business and I know from experience that the hardest time to
ask for advice is often the time you need it most. I’m hopeful that regardless of what stage you’re at in
your journey, you will find something of value in all the triumphs, disasters and lessons in the chapters
that follow.
I’m also hopeful that this book finds its way into the hands of those who have absolutely no intention
of running a coffee shop but are merely interested in the processes that it entails. I’ve long been
fascinated with books on people’s professions whether they are climbers, bankers, chefs or footballers.
The details of how they do their daily work are something I draw inspiration and motivation from on a
regular basis, regardless of how different my own job may be. Throughout the writing of this book I’ve
had a broader audience in mind and if this book can hold the attention of people inside and outside the
coffee community then, to me, it will have been a success, regardless of the numbers it sells.
I tend to meet three or four people a week who are looking to open a coffee shop and it’s quite a
strange conversation to have. Many of these people I’ve met have never run a business before and
have no experience in cafés but have become determined to leave their existing careers behind and
open their own coffee business. It’s very difficult to be successful in the hospitality industry – and doing it
without any experience is next to impossible – but there’s something about coffee that draws people in.
I have seen the reality of running a coffee shop turn from a dream to a nightmare on many occasions,
and it can leave a person broke, exhausted and without any options. It’s a fickle industry where it’s a
constant struggle to stay relevant and there are always more people lined up to have a crack at it if it
doesn’t work out for you.
The original title for this book was “How to Run a Coffee Shop”, but it never sat right with me so I
changed it to the title you see on the front cover. I wanted instead to write about my own subjective
opinions and experiences and the criteria that I use at work, coupled with what I feel are the more
objective standards that most of us can agree on. It’s a job that teaches me something new every day,
so I feel more at home telling you not how to do your job, but instead what I know about doing mine.
At times it has felt like something of a confessional and when I’ve gone back through old accounts,
emails and blog posts to recall my train of thought, it has often been a very sad experience for me.
Although my business, 3fe Coffee, has now grown into a world-renowned coffee brand, looking back at
the early days and how hard they were for me, my family and my friends has been a difficult and painful
exercise that involved admitting a lot of home truths.
Despite all of this, however, it is a wonderful way to make a living. The social aspect of the job is
incredible and getting to meet such a wide variety of people on a daily basis is something I’m really
grateful for. We often say that we’re only one customer away from fixing any kind of problem because
there’s always at least one professional in any discipline that drinks coffee at our shop.
I feel very fortunate to have made it this far and try never to take it for granted. In retrospect, I can
see how I often sidestepped disaster unknowingly, so if even a handful of people can benefit from my
advice I am more than happy to have shared it.
The last thing I’d like to do with this book is warn people off running a coffee shop, but I would
definitely encourage people to get a realistic insight into what doing that entails. Personally, I wouldn’t
swap my job for any other, however I’m also fully aware that my own experience of running a café could
easily have gone down a very different route.
“Failing” has become very trendy these days amongst business gurus as the best way to learn about
running a business. Failing in business has come to be seen as a rite of passage and something to be
worn as a badge of honour, and to a large extent I can understand the benefits of learning from
mistakes. I can tell you right now, however, that the only thing that’s better for a business owner to do
than failing is succeeding. If you can succeed first time round and skip the life lesson that failing
provides then do that 100% of the time.
The coffee business is an incredibly engaging one and I’m thankful that I managed to end up in it. It
has a vibrant, progressive and inclusive nature that a lot of industries could learn from and at its core
lies one simple goal: hospitality.
Colin Harmon
08/12/16
My Cafés
Café Number 1: The Twisted Pepper’s Lobby
This is the first café that we opened on December 5th 2009 in the lobby of a nightclub called the Twisted
Pepper on Middle Abbey Street in Dublin. The space was no more than 20m2 and, at best, had seating
for about 12 people, though my ability to serve any more than three customers at a time was
questionable.
The counters were all on wheels and this allowed us to pack the whole thing away at night. The
espresso machine itself rolled into a cupboard and all the tables and chairs were moved elsewhere to
make way for 600 young clubbers four nights a week. We’d often come in in the morning to find broken
glass, spilt drinks, cigarette butts and the odd pair of underwear scattered around the place.
This café was operated usually just by me, but I had a couple of part-time staff to help out. At the
height of its powers, this café served about 150 cups a day but was never a viable business or even
capable of sustaining more than one employee at a time. People would often remark that the shop was
never going to work and, although I agreed with them I knew I was doing the right thing. Making a profit
here wasn’t my primary goal (not that I had any choice in that matter), instead I was testing the market in
Dublin which, until that point, had had very limited exposure to specialty coffee. I was also determined to
build a reputation for high standards of cup quality, great service and build a strong, if tiny, brand on that
reputation.
Café Number 2: The Twisted Pepper
In May 2010 we took the decision to move the café through the lobby doors into the larger bar at the
Twisted Pepper. It was a much bigger space with big comfy booths, a dishwasher and access to much
better facilities (including a bathroom!). The space initially felt quite empty, like we suddenly had too
much space, but in time it began to attract more people and the business and staff base began to grow.
It was from here that we finally started to become a viable business and soon began to start doing
wholesale through my partnership with Steve Leighton at Has Bean. We also started running classes,
holding events and building a community around 3fe.
The space was not without its challenges and I’ll never forget the day our “€3,000 kettle” was kicked
over and danced around during an infamous student night that the Twisted Pepper hosted that went by
the name of “Mr. Jones”.
My favourite days in this back bar were definitely Saturdays when there was often a bookshop,
hairdressers, a clothes shop and poetry readings running all at the same time. With the sound system
available to us we’d crank up the tunes and belt out coffees to the long queues of shoppers. There was
nothing really like it anywhere else in Dublin.
We closed this café in January of 2013 after our next place really began to take off and we knew a
roasting facility was on the horizon. I sold all the equipment on to Tom Stafford who was managing it for
me at the time and he’s since gone on to grow the business to bigger and better things as Vice Coffee.
It’s still one of my favourite places to go for coffee.
Café Number 3: Grand Canal Street Lower
In September 2011 we opened our doors on Grand Canal Street Lower in what was at the time a pretty
odd part of the city. Everyone knew where Pearse Street was and everyone knew where Mount Street
was, but this street that ran parallel in between them was a something of a ghost town.
The building is an odd shape and my fascination with corner units lead me to just about the only one I
could afford, which just about met the criteria for a corner building. It has an impressive frontage but
tapers awkwardly at the back and has two pillars interrupting the flow of the place. The kitchen in the
basement is the same size as the café and is, in truth, probably too big, but not useful for anything else.
The office upstairs is where we grew our training and wholesale businesses and today is occupied by
my desk and swivel chair.
Although we started slowly, I always felt the street was an important thoroughfare for people heading
to the city and there was a critical mass of small offices and local residents. It also occupied an
accessible meeting point for people in the city with plenty of parking nearby.
Over the next few years business grew and the street became more popular and well known. Within
a block or two of the shop we now have major headquarters for companies such as Facebook, Stripe,
Google, Twitter and LinkedIn to name but a few and the area has since attracted many more cafés, bars
and restaurants.
In the early years, two people could easily run the café on most days, but a busy day nowadays
could have up to ten people working between the kitchen and the café. We serve just shy of 500 cups of
coffee on most busy days and it has been growing year-on-year since we’ve started.
Grand Canal Street Lower has become a busy street and we think of it as home now. I hope we’ll
always have a presence on this street and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved out of an awkward little
corner by the Grand Canal.
Café Number 4: Sussex Terrace
Inspired by the espresso bars that I found in Italy and Australia, I went searching for a small retail coffee
bar that would focus on take-away sales. Although I first started looking towards the busy city centre, I
finally happened upon an old car garage in a leafy spot on the fringes of the city centre, a few bridges up
the canal from our other shop.
The space now contains an espresso bar, a retail space for beans, brewers and other coffee
paraphernalia, as well as a showroom for the many espresso machines and grinders that we now sell.
It’s developed a loyal following and although it will never turnover as much as the other shop, it may
in fact yield just as much profit because of how simple it is to run. It also acts as a space for us to play,
tinker and test so we can continue to improve the quality of what we do.
All the cafés are called 3fe so for ease of reference they’re often referred to throughout by their
addresses, “Grand Canal Street”, and so on.
First Things First: Get A Job
degree in university I began working in financial services sector.
Specifically, I worked in investment funds. As secure and stable a job as it was, I knew from pretty early
on that it wasn’t for me. Whilst the rest of my colleagues got stuck into spreadsheets, FT reports and
Bloomberg Terminals, I struggled to commit myself to a job that I didn’t have any passion for.
It was 2007 and Ireland was still in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom and the financial
services sector was very much at the heart of this. Unlike previous generations, for many Irish people of
my age group – particularly those from middle class backgrounds – taking a “year out” to travel in
Australia, South East Asia or South America became a very viable option, and even quite a common
occurrence. When those who had gone abroad eventually returned home to Ireland, they were quite
often welcomed back with open arms by their employers, sometimes on even better terms with the firm
that let them leave in the first place, such was the demand for a skilled workforce.
Although the opportunity to travel seemed tempting at the time, I was reluctant to leave a job I didn’t
like very much for a year abroad as I knew I would have to return to the same place a year later.
However, I did decide to take a year out, but instead of going to Australia or Asia for a year, I used that
year to find something that I loved doing.
I knew at the time it involved something to do with food or drink, but that was all I knew. I’d often
dreamed of running my own restaurant or café but had never done anything solid to pursue that dream.
When my wife and I would go on a holiday, we’d often end up sharing a bottle of wine or a coffee
somewhere down a side street in an old European town, and without fail I would end up fantasising
about “having my own place one day”.
I took the decision to really immerse myself in the hospitality industry, and the realities of my new
situation became very apparent very quickly. I was suddenly faced with a wage that was less than half of
what I had been earning previously. Whatever passion, ability or drive I had in me to transform my
dream into a reality had to come to the fore right then or, I felt, I would never get the chance to open my
own place.
It took two years to get a grip of what part of that industry I wanted to work in, and it took four more
years before I began to earn a wage that was even approaching what I’d left behind. However, as soon
as I began doing what I wanted to do – running a café – I was happy. Sure, I had to work a lot more
hours, earn a lot less money and suffer some pretty crushing defeats along the way, but generally I was
much more content.
These days, when I get approached by people who are interested in opening their own coffee shop
but have little to no experience working in hospitality, the first thing I advise them to do is to go and get a
job in a café or a restaurant before they take the plunge. Unfortunately, this advice is sometimes met
with bemused looks from those who feel they are above working in a coffee shop.
If you plan on running a coffee shop you need to get used to the fact that the reality is a lot different
to – and a lot less glamorous than – the perception. Every day you will be asked to undertake a wide
range of tasks that can include anything from cleaning toilets to fixing sockets to plumbing sinks and
everything in between.
If you don’t have any experience in food and drink, don’t be disheartened. I was lucky enough to
have worked in a number of cafés and restaurants in Dublin when I was younger but you may take heart
from the fact that I never made coffee in any of them.
I look back on the decision I made to get a job in that industry as the most crucial of all the decisions
that I’ve made in starting a business in coffee. I’ve heard a lot of excuses as to why potential café
owners would not seek a job in the industry, so I’m going to list and dismiss them one by one:
AS SOON AS I FINISHED MY UNDERGRADUATE
I can’t afford to take a pay cut
If you do eventually open your own place, you’ll more than likely not be earning at all whilst facing the
learning curve of running a business. It makes much more sense to learn what you can from someone
else without all the pressures associated with running your own business – and also have them pay you
for the privilege.
I’ll hire people that know the industry
This can be done successfully, however, if you have a small budget to work with, it’s a lot more difficult
than it seems. Paying yourself is a chore and finding people who will be as passionate about your
business as you are will be incredibly difficult. I’ve also seen occasions where business owners are held
to ransom by “keystone staff” that know the business could not run without them. Sometimes people are
forced to give up equity shares in their business early on because they can’t afford to pay the skilled
people they need and that is, at best, a messy process. If you have the experience and skill set yourself,
it’s easier to train, motivate and work with your prospective staff.
I’m too old to get a job in a café
Many of the people who come to me looking for advice on how to open a coffee shop are in their midthirties and have been successful in another field. They typically dismiss the notion that they should get
a job in a coffee shop to earn some experience because they see that work as something students and
younger people do. The strange thing is that they fully intend to work in their own café if and when it
launches, but see that work as a far more glamorous pursuit, when in reality it’s quite literally the same
kind of work as working in someone else’s café. It’s also important to bear in mind that you’ll actually be
even older than you are now by the time your business gets off the ground, should you be successful.
I don’t want to work in the industry
Yes, I have heard this. It probably seems more ridiculous when it’s written down, but I’ve had many
conversations with people who refuse to get a job in hospitality because, well, they simply don’t want to.
If you don’t like the idea of working in that industry, then why are you opening a coffee shop? This may
seem a little trite, but it’s a very serious question. I’ve seen many people fall in love with the idea of
owning their own café, but once it got down to the everyday running of the place, they realised that they
hated it. Is that person you?
How hard can it be?
It can be very hard unfortunately. There are lots of people who have had more money, more experience,
more talent and more skill than you or I do and their businesses have failed. You need to give yourself
every chance you can to succeed and getting some experience will ensure that you know what you’re
doing by the time you meet your first customer. People don’t take too long to decide whether they’re
going to come back or not.
What can you actually learn?
Well, a lot actually. My first job was in McDonald’s on Grafton Street in Dublin, which makes some
people snigger. At the time, it was the busiest restaurant in the country by a distance and it was an
incredible machine to be a tiny cog in. In truth, I learned more working there than I did in any other place
and it rammed home the importance to me of being organised and of planning for every eventuality. The
small tricks, techniques and methods I picked up in each of the bars, cafés and restaurants I’ve worked
in over the years have all made their way into the way I run my business today.
If none of those questions make you feel like you should take the plunge, then I want you to consider the
role of procrastination in all of this. Taking the step of working in a café will force you to start taking
action in all the positive ways that you need to.
My own business partner at 3fe, Steve Leighton, is the world-renowned coffee roaster behind Has
Bean Coffee in the UK. Has Bean was one of the driving forces of the specialty coffee movement in
Britain and all over Europe, and also runs an incredible coffee subscription service that’s called In My
Mug. Steve has roasted coffee for barista champions all over the world, sourced some of the best
coffees ever brewed from the most dedicated producers around, and is an industry authority on almost
any aspect of coffee you can think of.
What most people don’t realise about Steve, however, is that his first venture into coffee was with a
small coffee shop in a lane off a backstreet in the sleepy West Midlands town of Stafford. Steve learned
quite early on that running a coffee shop was not for him, but that experience was the first step in him
opening Has Bean Coffee and becoming one of the world’s most successful specialty coffee roasters.
The shop that he ran had a short lease and a small capital investment. Once the lease ran out, he
shut up shop, started his roasting business and never looked back. Taking the plunge doesn’t need to
be reckless, it doesn’t even have to be successful, but it will give you an excellent grounding in where to
build your own coffee business.
If you end up hating it then you’ve actually saved yourself a lot of time, money and problems. One
person that comes to mind got six months into running a coffee shop and realised that they hated it as
the realities of the daily slog began to get them down. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. If you
can learn that lesson and walk away from the industry without having spent a fortune and irreparably
changing your life, then that is a very positive thing to have happened.
The Building
Choosing A Location
of opening a café is probably the one that stops most people from ever opening
a place, and it’s definitely the one that I get asked about the most. As much as I’ve learned about this
over the years, it’s still the problem that I find the hardest to advise on. There are definitely some
guidelines that I’ll go through below but there’s always an element of luck involved in opening a café in a
given location and you’ll never truly understand all the ins and outs of a site until you open its doors.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to build a spec sheet for what it is that you’re looking for.
This will crystallise things in your mind. Is it a big place or a small place? Do you need an office area?
Do you need a kitchen? Answering these kinds of questions is an incredibly important part of the
process of finding a location, because you can’t start looking for something until you know what it is that
you’re looking for.
My first café was a nightclub space that I used during the daytime. When I was looking for a second
premises, I could imagine myself in a variety of different kinds of places depending on what was
available. If I found a large restaurant with a massive kitchen, I felt I could handle that. If I found a
standing-room-only retail unit in a busy district, I felt I could run a great take-away espresso bar. I felt
equipped and prepared to run many types of business, so I drew up three different spec sheets and
gave them three different names.
THIS PART OF THE PROCESS
There was an espresso bar, a small café and a large café. They were all businesses I felt I could run but
separating them into separate specs and drawing up separate business plans helped to make things
much clearer in my mind.
If you do the same you might find that you don’t actually like the idea of running one of these three
businesses, or maybe even discover that you don’t have the funds or resources to do so. What it will do
is make your vision for your business infinitely less cluttered and make you much better prepared when
a location does become available.
What Are You Looking For?
what exactly it is you are looking for. This depends on many factors, but it
can usually be boiled down to:
THE FIRST THING TO ESTABLISH IS
1.
2.
3.
4.
Skill set
Experience
Funds available
Business idea
The first two criteria are not just confined to you but should include the wider team that you have lined
up, or even that you have access to. If you don’t know a lot about kitchens and don’t have any great
links to the profession then you’re probably not going to be looking for a café with a large kitchen
because the cost to set up and rent the space will be higher and you won’t have the skill sets available
to utilise it.
Although I had a number of years experience when I was opening my first café, I still wasn’t confident
enough to run a team of staff, operate a kitchen, or drive the business side of things so I decided a small
shop was the best option for me. At the time I found it very frustrating because the ceiling of what I could
achieve was quite low. In hindsight, I believe it was the best thing for me and that shop effectively
became a small sandbox for me to build my skill set and solidify exactly what I wanted to do in the
market.
The specifics of your skill set and your experience can be largely put to one side if you have a lot of
the third criteria, but be mindful of what you’re getting into. I’ve seen people with huge funds available to
them burn massive amounts of money on the steep learning curve that comes with running a large
space before eventually getting it right. If that idea sits well with you, go for it, but otherwise it might be
prudent to only dip your toe in the market with a smaller unit that gives you time to get an understanding
of what you’re doing.
The final criteria, the fundamental business idea, should have a massive influence on what you
choose but it’s amazing how many times I’ve seen people who are starting cafés ignore this. One
instance I can recall involved a friend of a friend who had come to me on a few occasions for advice on
a bakery that he wanted to open. He was adamant that it would have a café at the front and a wholesale
bakery in the back. This sounds like a great idea, but when you think about the kind of location you need
for a wholesale bakery and what you need for a busy café it becomes very hard to satisfy both.
In the end he persisted with both and ended up getting a cheap industrial unit outside the city for the
wholesale business, which made a lot of sense. Unfortunately he persevered with the café idea even
though it was in completely the wrong context. He spent a lot of money building a café in the lobby of an
industrial unit in the middle of nowhere that served three cups of coffee a day at its peak. Within a
couple of months he had sold on the coffee equipment for less than half of what he had paid for it.
Great Business Idea vs. Great Business Model
WHENEVER YOU’RE PLANNING YOUR NEW BUSINESS
it’s important to look at the venture as a business model as
much as it is a business idea. The two terms interlink but they have very different meanings.
A business idea is merely the way you would sum up what it is your business does. It’s a top-level
description that gets people on board but rarely gives any guarantee about viability. These days there
are thousands of businesses that are great business ideas that everyone loves but will never make any
money.
A business model, on the other hand, is the mechanism by which your business will make and retain
money. Too many businesses starting out are so in love with their business idea that they almost refuse
to think about whether it can make money.
What makes it worse is that there are so many great business ideas with bad business models out
there being propped up by third parties that it makes people feel they too can do it without considering
the financial realities of what they’re undertaking.
Let’s look at an Irish example that I see all the time: chutney. I’m not fully sure of the reason but every
year I see a handful of startups selling chutney and, at face value, it’s a great business idea. People like
chutney, it has a long shelf-life, it’s easy to make, it has a relatively low set-up cost and there are
companies that will make it on your behalf for a very small fee replete with your own jar and branding. If
you ask people to taste it, they’ll probably like it and I’d be confident enough that they’ll buy it.
As a business model though it doesn’t stack up, and I say this as a chutney lover. The problem is that
if I buy your jar of chutney (which I would, enthusiastically) I’d stick it in my cupboard and there it would
sit for six months, at best. I reckon my annual budget for chutney sits somewhere around the €5 per
year mark, and that’s being generous because I know a guy who’s set up a chutney business and I love
his business idea.
Let’s compare that to another more mundane business idea: selling napkins. Let’s say I have
exclusive access to a napkin producing factory in the Far East who are going to give me unlimited
access to their napkins that I can sell to trade with a 90% margin. They’ll extend preferable credit terms
and pay for shipping and I’ve managed to find a drop shipper who will warehouse and distribute my
product for a nominal fee. I have a simple and effective route to market using an online portal and lots of
customers lined up.
Now, skip to the pub on a Friday night and I tell my friends that I want to import and sell napkins.
Most of my acquaintances would be pretty bored by the idea and I’d fall short of winning any innovation
awards. The sexy world of startups is drawn towards paradigm shifting business ideas but this would not
be one of them.
It would however be an incredibly robust business model and one that would be profitable from the
beginning (given a few other variables lining up!).
The lesson here is not to focus on what is revolutionary or unique about your business idea, but more
so how your business will grow in a sustainable way. There are many excellent business model tools out
there that will help you get a fuller picture of your business’ viability but my go-to is the Business Model
Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. There are lots of videos online that explain the value of this
application and it’s something I constantly go back to as both a planning tool and a diagnostic tool.
In terms of your coffee shop opening, it’s very easy to get drawn into the soft attractions that entice
thousands of people into opening great cafés with awful business models. If you find yourself focusing
more on what’s attractive about the business rather than what will make it work financially, then I
strongly urge you to consider using a business model tool to bring substance to your offering.
When people refer constantly to things like hanging local artists’ work, jazz brunches, soft comfy
couches and singer-songwriter nights, I always start to get anxious about what they’re hoping to
achieve. These are all fine concepts for a café but they tend not to be the things on which you build a
sustainable business.
Instead, try to focus on the things that you can tangibly measure and plan such as:
Set-up costs
Exclusive suppliers
Expected revenue streams
Suppliers
Core activities
All of these will help you to build a very clinical but realistic view of your business and although it may
not be the most romantic of pursuits, this focus will give you a strong foundation on which you can build
your dream business.
Go Big Or Go Small
ONE BIT OF ADVICE THAT I’VE LEARNED
about cafés over the years is to go big or go small, because what is inbetween is a harder business model to manage. Our main café on Grand Canal Street seats about 35
people when it’s full and takes a team of about nine people to run it between the kitchen and the floor
staff.
The café is busy and is profitable but our limiting factor is always going to be the amount of people it
can fit. What’s occurred to me over the years is that the same team of nine people could probably run a
café that seats 60 people without needing any more help, but if we dropped the team to eight in the
current café they wouldn’t be able to cope.
Equally enlightening is our other café at Sussex Terrace which is essentially a take-away espresso
bar. It turns over a third of the amount, but does so with only two people working there. It will never turn
over as much as the other café, but it will probably net more profit over the next few years because the
workload is ultimately more efficient. In the coming years, as we look to open more cafés, our
preference will tend towards taking cafés with 50 seats plus or less than 10.
Footfall
that most people think of but it is by no means a guarantee of a café’s
success. I often see people standing near vacant retail units with clickers in their hands, counting
passers-by to gauge how busy their proposed business is going to be. It’s a dangerous thing to base
your value proposition on the presumption of yielding trade from a busy local footfall because you’ll have
many other businesses relying on the same thing.
If you find a location that has a really high footfall then chances are there are a lot of businesses in
the area already serving these people. If there isn’t, then by all means go for it but do ask yourself why
that might be. Does the area have issues with anti-social behaviour? Are there restrictive planning laws
in place? Does the place empty out either side of rush hour?
If none of these issues raise their head then it sounds like you’re onto a winner, but it’s important then
to tailor your business to suit the needs of the particular kind of customer that is actually walking past
your shop. People rushing to work want fast-take away coffee and perhaps something small and
convenient, so opening a bistro with table service may not be the best thing to offer them.
Running a business with this type of focus can be very profitable but do be aware that it may impact
the tone of your establishment. If you’ve always dreamt of running a chilled-out café with a focus on
small plates and a warm atmosphere, be very aware that it will be next to impossible to crow-bar that
vision into a high footfall thoroughfare.
Running busy take-away bars is a different challenge, but it can still be a lot of fun if that’s what you
want to do. I see too many people ending up with a premises that conflicts with their vision and that
FOOTFALL IS OFTEN THE FIRST THING
ends up being the biggest barrier to their success because they can never grow their business the way
they want to.
If there isn’t high footfall in your location that isn’t the end of the world. People will seek out your
business if the quality and service is good. You also have the added bonus of having lower rent, less
competition and it becomes a lot easier to get noticed because you stand out like a sore thumb. Parking
is likely to be easier, rates are lower and you’ll get more space for your rent.
There are a lot of benefits to a quieter location, but be 100% sure of one thing: that you are good at
what you do. A bad café can make money in a busy location but a bad café will die a painful death in a
quiet location so make sure the quality is there to lure people away from the high street and off the
beaten path.
In Ireland, the pub was always seen as the place you went to do business or meet old friends, but
these days the focus – during the daytime – has shifted somewhat to cafés, and the days of people
spending all their spare time in a pub are long gone. Cafés serve a purpose beyond making money.
They become a social hub for friends, families, businesses and strangers to meet and interact in a safe,
friendly environment.
A neighborhood café does so much to bring communities together. You just have to make sure that
when you open in a new neighbourhood, you engage with the local community because they can
provide the base you need to run a business which is not only profitable but also a nice place to work.
The Little Things
PARKING, AS I MENTIONED, IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS
that people often forget to consider for a café but it can
have a massive impact on success. A lot of our take-away trade at Grand Canal Street is from people
pulling up in cars and grabbing a coffee to go.
Parking dictates whether families with young children can get near to you or whether your place is
going to be a convenient meeting spot. If you find a location with a large car park nearby your place
could live off the car park itself and anyone else that finds you is an extra bonus.
The sunlight that a building gets is also worth considering because it has such a massive impact not
just on how your café looks and feels, but also on the mental health of your staff. A bright airy café is a
great place to work but I can tell you from experience that a dark space can bring you down when you
have to face it day after day. We’ve worked with a few cafés with no real window frontage and they’re
always a hard sell. A café with floor-to-ceiling windows like the famous Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks will
always have a distinct advantage at attracting customers.
If you can find somewhere that takes the morning sun and holds it all day that will have a huge
impact on how your business feels and make sure the windows and doors you choose enhance it even
more. If you can find a unit with floor-to-ceiling windows then you’re halfway there already.
Crossroads or pedestrian crossings are always nice locations simply because people are forced to
stop and look at your building. A couple of seconds is all it takes for someone to consider making a visit
to your establishment, so every little bit of extra exposure helps.
The area of a town or city that you move into should be reflected in your business, so it’s important to
spend some time finding out what sort of people live there. Talking to local businesses, friends that live
in the area, or the local police can give you a headstart on any issues you might need to be aware of.
Think about who the people are that live in the area and the demographic they represent: How will that
affect your offering? Does your value proposition suit the location? And, if not, are you willing to change
it?
It’s great to bring something new to an area but it can be hard to change people’s opinions and
habits. You can plan as much as you like but, when your doors open on the first day, a large part of your
business is handed over to your customers. They become a major stakeholder in how your business
grows and what kind of business it becomes. Once that door is unlocked you are no longer 100% in
control, so the area that you open in will be as influential to the coffee shop’s development as you are.
The Premises
MY FATHER IS A CIVIL ENGINEER,
a project manager, a problem solver and a very pleasant realist. He has
been an invaluable source of reality checks to me since I started looking at potential premises as an
over-eager 19-year-old and that’s continued on well into my adult years.
The curse of the café owner is that you can feel like it’s your responsibility to save old buildings from
neglect. I frequently have to dissuade myself from taking on projects that are not my problem. I find it
difficult to pass an old mill, a disused factory, an empty retail unit, or any other wasted building without
my heartstrings being tugged and my imagination going into overdrive envisaging a coffee-utopia where
ambience, taste and profitability are in a warm, harmonious balance.
What I’ve learned over the years is that ideas like these are perfect. They sit there in your mind’s eye
immune from criticism and devoid of any downsides and failings. It’s only when you start to relay these
ideas to other people – or to run the numbers in a spreadsheet – that reality begins to dawn on you.
The building is always going to have a massive impact on the success or otherwise of your business
so be sure to give this one the respect and attention it deserves. The first step is to have it assessed by
experts and this means that you will perhaps have to walk away from a building you like if one of these
experts isn’t happy. Accept this reality from the start and be prepared to move on.
What Should You Ask The Experts About?
Planning Permission
If you view a building that you’re interested in taking, the first thing you should ask for is a copy of the
planning permission that’s in place for the building and any other building requirements that apply in
your jurisdiction such as permits, fire certificates and licenses. It would also be in your interests to hire
an architect to act on your behalf and go through all the documentation to ensure you’ll be allowed do
what you want to do when you sign the lease.
A common mistake is for people to presume the previous tenant was doing things by the book in
terms of planning permission. Sometimes businesses change the use of their premises over time and
that gradual shift goes unnoticed by local authorities. A new business opening attracts a lot of attention
and often a lot of objections originate from disgruntled neighbours and businesses, so be sure to make
sure you have the correct permissions in place or walk away.
I’ve given this advice to a few people who are wary of the expense this incurs. However I’ve seen
how truly expensive it can be if you ignore the issue and just hope everything works out. Each
jurisdiction has different requirements and the age or status of the building you’re looking at may have
peculiar restrictions attached to it so check, double-check and triple-check.
Structure
Get a structural engineer to assess the building and make sure that there is nothing of note that could
hamper your day-to-day business once you open. If you’re not sure about something, get a second
opinion. If something is found that needs to be fixed, either walk away or get the landlord to fix it.
Before you sign a lease or pay to fix the issue yourself, ensure that the expense of any repairs or
alterations is reflected in the terms of your lease in the form of a rent-free period or similar agreement.
I would only consider the final option if the problem was quantifiable and very fixable. Old buildings in
particular can turn into a rabbit hole when it comes to costs. Take the wiring, for example. Many older
buildings are fitted with systems that work perfectly well but with wiring systems that no longer satisfy
safety regulations. In many jurisdictions an electrician can’t sign off on a job unless everything is up to
current regulations, so a simple rewiring of one room could soon turn into a whole building being rewired
up to a brand new, regulation-standard system. The same applies to plumbers who are also duty-bound
to bring everything up to standard and incentivised to do so by being able to hand you a bigger invoice
when the job is complete.
You can go down the route of getting an electrician or plumber to do it off the books, but that’s not
something I’ve ever been willing to compromise on and you’d be hard fixed to find a decent electrician
who would either. Businesses are hard to run anyway so taking detours outside the legal framework are
something I’d always advise against.
A friend of mine who owns a number of pubs told me how he bought two old pubs that both needed a
bit of work. He tossed a coin on which to start with and the other place would just tick along until the first
pub was finished. Two years down the line he was still fixing problems with the first pub because every
problem fixed unearthed a new problem. All the while the second, untouched pub was turning a tidy
profit and, despite its flaws, was working pretty well.
The decision to address a structural issue always boils down to whether the problems are worth fixing
and if so, who pays for them. The very worst situation to find yourself in is when you are faced with an
expensive problem that you need to fix before you can open with the financial burden all on your own
shoulders.
One of the most common sources of problematic repairs is to do with drains. Cafés see a lot more
use of drains because of the amount of water that’s used when making coffee, running kitchens and
flushing toilets. A lot of the fats and oils used in food and drink production are really bad for drains and,
often times, expensive prevention systems like grease traps are required.
In this respect, cafés are also a lot harder to run than other businesses if there are any drainage
problems. Most businesses would get away with a small problem if they weren’t using large volumes of
water. What would be a small problem for a regular retail business is a massive issue for a busy café.
Hire a drain inspection company to come and check out all of your drains for cracks, holes and
blockages. They will investigate what’s down there, map it out for you, assess any problems and often
give you a video of what they’ve found to show you exactly what you’re sitting on. This makes it easier
to approach landlords about fixing any issues there might be.
I left this step until after I signed the lease at our second café and was left footing the bill for a couple
of thousand euro to fix a hole in an old, foul drain. The hole wasn’t that large and we might have gotten
away with it, but experience has taught me not to open coffee shops until all the drains are perfect
because it’s incredibly expensive to make repairs once you’ve opened.
Another example comes from a friend of mine who had just reached the end of a tricky first year in
their café having broken even. The very next week, however, they discovered that the major drain in
their building had collapsed and no water could leave the building. The landlord was reluctant to stump
up the cash to fix it and so they ended up spending over €20,000 digging up the floor of their café,
replacing the pipe and then replacing the floor again. What compounded the financial misery was having
to close the café for a week while it was being done.
The last thing to consider about drainage problems is the long-term damage to structures that a small
leak can do. I’ve seen interior walls suddenly start to fall away because of slow leaks that have worked
away at them over decades. Damp is also a huge concern for food safety authorities, so make sure your
business is bone dry in all the right places before you open and look past fresh coats of paint, there may
be some very serious damage lying underneath.
Property Agents and the Lease
Leases are tricky things to advise people on because they are hard to contextualise if you don’t live in
the city yourself. Retail rents especially are subject to wild variations as markets change. There was a
time not so long ago in Dublin when a landlord would expect what was known as “key money” – at least
two years rent as one-off payment up front – just to secure the lease and start paying rent.
In saying that, there are a number of things you can be mindful of when seeking leases. Whilst these
examples are generally applicable in most contexts, I have always found it advisable to talk to a property
agent in the city you’re in. I’ve heard horror stories on both the tenant’s side and the landlord’s side
when it comes to leases, so make sure you get a trusted recommendation wherever you can, and
always follow up on references.
The thing most people don’t do is think about the property agent’s own perspective. Their job relies
on closing deals, so you might need to tailor your behaviour with that in mind whether you’re their client
or whether you’re pitching for a property on their portfolio.
I only started to hire an agent to secure locations for me recently and it’s something I’m sorry that I
didn’t do before. A lot of the best properties will close and reopen as a new business before you even
knew the lease was up for renewal and that’s because agents keep a lot of these things in-house.
Typically, all the property agents will know one another, they all know what rental rates are like, and
they all want a deal done quickly. It makes far more sense for them to approach an agent they know that
represents a successful business and offer them the property before anyone else because it’s cheaper,
less hassle and faster than going through conventional markets. Concurrently, the most successful
landlords are the ones that value a reliable tenant and they’ll always push for things to be done this way
where possible.
When it comes to working with third party agents for locations that you’re interested in, always be
professional and punctual because agents are forever being messed around and let down by people.
When you have your spec sheet(s) done up for the premises you’re seeking, send them to the agents
because it will make you stand out and they’ll think of you before properties go on the market.
Too often, people that view properties are vague about their intentions, give no indication of whether
they’re interested and treat the agents with very little trust or respect. If you’re clear about what you want
and specific with your criteria you’ll become an easy option for an agent looking to lighten their portfolio.
It’s also important to let them know straight away if you’re not interested in a premises you’re viewing.
That means they can move on and not keep chasing you for an answer. There’s an awful lot tyre-kicking
and unnecessary bluffing that goes on in property, so don’t add to an already frustrating workload for the
agent.
The flip side to this is that if you do show interest in a location further down the line they’ll know
you’re being serious and it will help you move things along quickly. Agents are there to secure the most
viable offer for a premises and will often recommend a landlord accept a lower offer from a party with a
strong track record over a higher offer from someone with no track record at all. Ultimately, making sure
you come across as reliable could end up swinging things your way in a tight bidding process.
Turnover Ceiling
A good rule of thumb for any coffee shop is that your rent and rates should not surpass 10% of your net
turnover. A simple calculation will show you that a property asking €100,000 in rent needs a business in
it than can turn over €1,000,000 net. This is a good way to look at a premises when you start because it
will give you a quick indication of whether you can afford it or not.
Conversely, I once got a premises for less than the asking price by using this exact equation to show
a landlord how much I needed to turn over. I’m not sure if the numbers swayed him or because I
sounded like I knew what I was doing, but either way it worked.
The Structure of Leases
Leases aren’t all about hard cash. They often end up being decided on the smaller intricacies that come
after. There are ways to sweeten a deal, or merely find a middle ground that suits everyone, but you
need to know what to ask for.
It’s a fatal mistake to try and hammer people on a deal. This is a tactic that rarely works. Instead, try
to get an insight into what the landlord wants and see if you can fulfill those needs in exchange for them
fulfilling some your own needs. Conversely, if your prospective landlord is aggressive and
confrontational in negotiations you need to ask yourself if you want them to be your landlord in the first
place.
It’s important to see negotiations in a win-win light and try and come up with solutions rather than
ultimatums. A landlord, for example, may have had a tenant who was always complaining about the
maintenance of the building or things breaking. If you offer to take on all responsibility for those issues, it
gives the landlord more reason to drop the asking rent.
Perhaps the landlord had been burned by a business that went bust in the past. You could counter
this by offering to pay rent by the week instead of the month so they get a clear indication that your
business is going well, and this will allay their fears of the same thing happening again. If you are able to
find out what you can about their position and then do your best to empathise with them, you may find
there’s a solution there to suits all parties.
There are a number of negotiables contained in most leases, some of which are outlined below.
These negotiables usually take the longest time to finalise, long after a time period and rent has been
agreed, so be sure you investigate them all fully:
1. Duration
Once you’ve agreed a rental fee you need to agree a rental period. You want to be protected if the
business is going well but also free from being weighed down by one that isn’t. I’d advise against shortterm rentals in most cases – unless the rent is stupidly low – because if you make a success of it you’ll
more than likely be booted out in favour of someone willing to pay more rent for a location that has just
demonstrably proven its viability.
In many jurisdictions there are rights that a tenant automatically acquires after a given amount of
time, so don’t be surprised if there’s a seemingly random term on the lease. In Ireland, for example, four
years and nine months is a common lease length as it falls conveniently short of the five-year threshold
that guarantees more rights for the tenants.
2. Break-Out Clause
A break-out clause is a great way to protect you and the landlord whether business is going well or not.
Asking for a break-out clause after 18 months means that you can opt to walk away from the lease after
a year and a half. It’s not uncommon for a break-out to have a penalty associated with it, say three
months rent or for the tenant to be required to give a certain notice period if they want to avail of the
break-out. In some situations the landlord can ask for a break-out too, which is a difficult thing for a
business owner to plan for. It’s also common to be granted some months rent-free but to have to pay a
few months in advance. For example, if you get a three-month rent-free period but have to pay three
months rent in advance, then you won’t be paying rent again until month seven.
3. Rent-free Period
This is a period of time that the tenant gets after the lease is signed without having to pay rent. It’s
usually linked to how much work needs to be done on the premises and how much the landlord is or
isn’t contributing. Ask agents or other business owners in your city what the general period is in your
city. Sometimes you won’t get a rent-free period if the market is quite competitive, but you should always
ask about it.
4. Insurance
An FRI lease or “Full Repairing and Insuring” lease is one where the tenant must pay for the insurance,
maintenance and repair of the property in all circumstances and so is the most onerous kind of
agreement. It also means the tenant takes responsibility for all the external repair of the building
including roofing and so on. If you are forced to do this, it’s very prudent to get a building surveyor in and
prepare a Schedule of Condition which is attached to the lease as well as a making a video or photo log
to show what condition you inherited the building in. You then stipulate that the building is not to be
returned in better condition than it was received.
These kinds of agreements are not very common in retail. It’s more common instead – in most
countries – for the landlord to insure the building and the tenant to have their own business insurance.
The details of who pays for maintenance and upkeep vary all the time but it’s usually the norm for the
landlords to be responsible for the “outside” and the tenant responsible for the “inside” in terms of
repairs. There are many pitfalls here so it’s important to have a reputable lawyer or solicitor go through
all aspects of your lease with the help of your agent.
I’ve heard horror stories where a tenant takes an FRI lease and almost immediately the landlord
serves a Schedule of Dilapidations and they are forced to spend a fortune fixing everything that was
already in disrepair when they took the lease. It seems like a crazy thing to happen, but there are
landlords that are strapped for cash and can’t afford to fix their premises without taking such measures.
5. Transferability
You may some day decide to lease out the premises yourself to someone else, so make sure the lease
is transferable to a third party. This might not be at the forefront of your plans when you’re opening, but it
does leave your options open if circumstances change further down the line.
6. Service Charge
Some buildings are subject to a service charge which, in some cases, can amount to several thousands
of euro, especially when it’s in a larger development. There may also be bin charges, security charges
and other fees outside of the rent, so make sure they are all contained in the lease and you have a full
picture of what your outgoings will be.
7. Rent Review
A rent review essentially means that the rent being paid will be reassessed after a given period to reflect
market changes. In some cases there are “upward only” rent reviews which favour only the landlord. In
some jurisdictions reviews these can be linked to CPI (Consumer Price Index) or restricted so they don’t
go above or below certain thresholds, so make sure you know what applies where you are. The lease
should account for an arbitrator or similar in situations where agreement isn’t reached. You should make
sure you know what legal protections are afforded in law for tenants when a landlord is demanding
excessive increases.
8. Guarantee
Landlords will sometimes ask for a personal guarantee from you or someone else if you renege on a
lease. The guarantor can be asked to pay in full the rest of the rental term, or until a new tenant has
been found. Personally, I have never signed a lease with this caveat and would generally advise against
it.
In saying that, I had the distinct advantage in signing our early leases in a weak market but things
have changed dramatically since then. Although the market has recovered since, we now have a
sufficiently good reputation from how we conducted ourselves in those early days that landlords are less
likely to require a guarantee from us.
If you’re starting out now in 2017, it’s going to be harder to convince a landlord to give you a lease
without a personal guarantee. In saying that, there are a number of alternatives that may enable you to
avoid signing one and keep your landlord happy:
Rental Deposits – These can be handed back after a period of successful trading.
Limited Personal Guarantees – These can be better for your cashflow in that there is no payment
up to, e.g. €20,000, but it is limited in terms of time, or limited to one year’s rent and rental cover.
Fit-out – You can also put in your agreement a clause stating that if the business goes bust then
the tenant must leave all the fixtures and fittings to cover the cost of finding a new occupant. This
can be a complicated process at best though.
All of these items are generally negotiable so pick your battles and determine which ones you see as
essential and which ones you can budge on. Once your agent and your lawyer know what your priorities
are in this regard, you’ll find it a lot easier to get a deal done.
Trust the Landlord
My most general advice to people who are about to sign a lease is to trust the landlord, and if they can’t
do that, then don’t sign the lease. Ask for references, see if you can meet them yourself and ask about
other properties that they may be renting out.
I currently have four different landlords all of whom I treat the same way. They never hear from me
and I rarely hear from them. That, to my mind, is the best way to have it. If you’re forever pestering them
to fix small cracks or paint window frames they’ll hammer you when it comes time to renew a lease. I
pay my rent on time and leave the landlords alone. Thankfully, to this day, they’ve never bothered me.
Building And Contracting
difficult task in itself but pre-empting that with running a building site is an
incredibly stressful task. Almost all of the coffee shop build-outs that I’ve seen over the years end up
going over-budget, over-time and often end up having to be redone after completion.
It’s a job in itself to successfully project manage a coffee shop build-out and I’ve learned over the
years that it is best to hire a professional to do it for you. Many are reluctant to do this because of the
cost but, in truth, it’s probably the cheapest way to get it done. A professional project manager will do it
faster, cheaper and with a lot less stress, and allowing you to concentrate on all the details required for
getting the business side of things going.
If you do attempt to manage it yourself, be sure to make out a detailed timeline and get all of your
contractors to sign-off on the timeline beforehand and then make them stick rigidly to it. There is a
language amongst many contractors where tomorrow means next week and next week can mean next
month.
The timeline is the biggest issue with building out any shop. Knowing who needs to be working where
and when is crucial. You need to have a firm understanding of when the demolition, plastering, electrics,
plumbing and all other tasks need to be performed because they can’t be done at the same time and
some must precede others.
When it comes to hiring contractors, it’s best to have a single point of contact and allow them to
manage the subcontractors. The head contractor should sit down regularly with you, your project
manager and your architect to ensure everything is going to plan. This may seem like an expensive way
to do things but I can assure you it’s often the cheapest.
RUNNING A COFFEE SHOP IS A
When selecting contractors there are a number of things you need to do in advance of starting work:
Shop Around
Get at least three quotes for a job but don’t be drawn to the cheapest quote just for the sake of it. If one
is a lot cheaper than the others, ask why that is and find out if it’s a fixed price or one that is likely to
increase if the job runs over time.
Ask for References
Any contractor is as good as their last job, so it’s important to call any previous clients they may have
had and, if possible, to actually go see the work they did. Asking their clients about timelines, snag lists
and attention to detail will give you a good insight into what kind of contractor they are.
Question the Cost Saving
Many of the contractors I’ve worked with over the years are very conscious of costs and will try and save
you money any way they can. This isn’t always a good thing. If a contractor is quoting you well below
the others on a particular aspect of a job, it’s important to question why that is. A contractor with the best
of intentions to save you money will do a patch-up job that will need fixing again and again when the
better option is the more expensive one-off solution.
Certification and Insurance
Most tradespeople and contractors are subject to strict certification and industry standards and it’s
important that you see all necessary certification and insurance from them before they start work. If
there is an incident on site, your insurance may be null and void if they have no insurance or
accreditation, so make sure you, your insurer and your solicitor are happy with their accreditation before
they start.
Deadlines
All contractors work on deadlines and if you don’t set a deadline the job will drift and drift. It’s important
to set not just a finishing deadline but also interim deadlines and make sure everyone is aware of them.
Every day the build runs over costs you extra money, so make sure you stick to deadlines and
incentivise prompt completion.
The Final Decision
ULTIMATELY, YOU WILL NEVER TICK
all of your boxes and it’s sad to see people pass up location after location
because they can’t find something they consider perfect. Everyone has their dream café in their mind’s
eye, but when a potential premises falls short of that they’ll often walk away from what would otherwise
have been a perfectly viable business.
Another thing that crops up at this stage of the process is that people begin to get nervous about
opening a place as the proposition becomes more real. Suddenly small issues become a reason to put
the brakes on and it becomes easier to think of reasons not to sign a lease than it does to sign one.
It’s important at this stage to look at objective benchmarks and seek advice from those you trust so
that you base your decision on sound, rational criteria rather than a fear of failure.
When I am asked for my opinion on a particular premises that someone is looking at and my
considerations are always the same:
What do you estimate is the turnover ceiling?
What is the minimum you can set up and run it for?
What is the most you might lose by doing this?
Do you have the skill set and experience to make this location work?
These questions typically reveal the bigger picture. If that person’s replies are positive about all of those
considerations, then I would always tell them to give it a go. The important thing to do is not get hung up
on whether this is “the one”. People buy and sell businesses all the time, open second and third
locations, and even end up happy with ones that they only “settled for” at the start. My first café was a
counter, on wheels, in the lobby of a nightclub. To me, the most important thing is just making a start.
You never know where you’ll end up.
The Café
The Basics
Sweep the street outside.
Keep the windows clean.
Keep the door open.
Don’t stand in the doorway, and definitely don’t smoke there.
Check the toilets all the time.
Say “hello”.
Say “goodbye”.
Clear the tables as fast as you can.
Keep a comfortable temperature.
Play appropriate music, not just “good” music.
Always have music playing, always.
Buy flowers for a display.
Clean your coffee machines.
Steep your cups in detergent once a week.
Deep clean the café once a month.
Have nice drinking water available.
Get complimentary newspapers delivered.
Dress neatly.
Finish your conversations straight away when a customer appears.
Keep the shelves stocked.
Use warm cups, not hot, not cold.
Don’t serve cups with spills down the side.
Set drinks up the same way all the time.
Have a clear menu.
Make sure all the light bulbs work.
Repaint the room often.
Room temperature butter.
Opening and closing times written on the door.
Take care of your espresso machine.
Dry tables after you wipe them.
Say hello to your co-workers.
If you think someone’s not happy, ask.
Smile.
Building Trade
3FE and I have helped many people open cafés and frequently they are
alarmed at first by their morning trade, or rather, their lack of it. Most people’s experience of the coffee
shop is that morning rush: the buzz of the people, the smell of the coffee and the smell of the still-warm
pastries and bacon wafting from the kitchen. There is a real sense that a barista’s job is essentially kickstarting a whole city and making people feel great before they scoot off to their desks and day jobs. This
is typically when someone decides that they want to own a coffee shop.
I know this because it happened to me. When I think back on the underground railway station café
that I queued at every morning for coffee, I’m flooded with warm nostalgia. Fast forward to having my
own coffee shop a couple of years later and what I was faced with was a cold, empty room and a steady
stream of people walking past the door.
An empty café in the morning is not how anyone imagines their coffee business but for a long time
this could be your reality. It’s important to step back and take a long-term view on it. There are
undoubtedly cafés that will open and be busy from day one, and that’s great. But most cafés need at
least 18 months to build a steady customer base and the morning trade is, for many businesses, the
most frustrating time to build.
The real issue here is that nobody goes for a wander on their way to work and few people are in the
mood to take a risk. Most people that are on the way to work are two or three minutes late already and,
if they’re not, they’re either rushing or they’re on a tight schedule that never changes. Ask yourself how
often you decided that the way to work was time to try out a new place? I certainly didn’t make a habit of
it.
Morning commuters are not in the practice of taking risks, having a wander in a different direction or
straying away from the coffee shop that’s served them well up until now. Why would they gamble on a
new coffee shop and suffer the consequences of an undrinkable cup and leave themselves short of time
to get a better one at their usual haunt? It’s more straightforward and less stressful just to go to the
same old place they usually go to and walk on past your café, despite how convenient or appealing it
may look.
Lunchtime, however, is a different game, because that’s when people have time to play with and
they’re more open to going somewhere new. Most cafés we’ve worked with will be relatively busy
straight away at lunchtime but will freak out because their morning trade is terrible and that’s not how
they imagined it.
My advice is always to concentrate on the getting the lunch trade going well and that will build your
morning trade. You need to build trust with your customer base when they’re likely to take a risk and that
means that when they’re striding past your door at 8.55am and they’re three minutes from their desk,
they’ll be more likely to take that risk and cross your threshold.
The context in which your staff are working, be it morning or evening, slow or busy, quickly becomes
normal to them. For example, when you’re working on a weekend, you can take your time because most
people are just hanging out. Weekdays are different. At lunch-time on a weekday you’ll always be
working fast simply because you’re busy. Morning trade is an odd affair and needs to be approached
carefully though. On a weekday morning, it’s important not just to work fast in the morning, but also to
appear to be working fast. People are kind of cranky in the morning and if they’re looking at you they
probably need coffee too, which doesn’t help the situation. If you’re working the till and you’ve taken an
order, that doesn’t absolve you of all responsibility for that order, leaving it up to the barista to complete
OVER THE YEARS THE TEAM AT
the job. The morning trade demands that everyone is trying to get the order out as soon as humanly
possible, regardless of how quiet the shop may be, because you need to assume that your customer is
late and dying for caffeine.
Plating up a cup, getting milk ready for steaming, or grabbing them a lid are all little small things you
can do to assure the customer that you want them to get their coffee quickly and the appearance of
urgency is something that will make them come back every day. During the morning trade, visibly
underworked staff can play on the nerves of your as-yet-uncaffeinated customer, particularly if they are
in a rush to start their own workday.
That customer coming back every day is what ultimately will drive your business, so in the early days
of your café opening try not to worry about how many people are coming in but focus instead on who is
coming back. If people are coming back, you’re on the right road. As long as you show patience and
keep improving your offer, you’ll start to build a more substantial trade.
The morning time for us was a real slog to build. In truth, it took three years before we were doing
decent numbers. Although it was scary at the time, we kept focusing on making people come back and
tried not to be too disheartened by the hundreds of people that were walking past our door every
morning.
The difference I see in morning customers and lunch customers is definitely about frequency.
Although the morning customers are much harder to earn, once you have their trust they’ll more than
likely come every single day. Lunch customers are less likely to come by every day simply because
having the same lunch destination every day isn’t ideal, so expect them to come and go and do their
own thing. If you get someone coming in five mornings and perhaps two lunch-time visits a week, you’re
doing incredibly well.
The weekend trade however was a completely different beast and looking back I know we lost money
on the weekends for two or three years. The simple reason for this is that the Saturday crowd is different
to the Sunday crowd and they’re both different to the weekday crowd.
People’s weekends are precious and they’re largely built on routine, whether it’s your weekly jog,
visiting your granny, getting the shopping done or lying in bed with a hangover. Everyone has their
favourite weekend routine and it takes some convincing to entice them in.
The reason it took us so long to build weekend trade was down to simple numbers and, looking back,
it makes perfect sense now. There are five weekdays in a week and each of those days gives you a new
chance to build weekday trade. There is one Saturday in a week, and to get five chances to build trade
will take you five weeks. The same goes for Sunday. It took me some time to realise how different
Saturday and Sunday were too.
In ten weeks you’ll get 50 weekdays to build up your reputation and customer base, but it will take
you a whole year to do 50 Saturdays and that’s the thing I never realised at the beginning.
The good news is, however, that once people have your trust and you’re in their Saturday or Sunday
routine – or maybe even both – they’ll stay loyal to you as long as you keep fulfilling their expectations
and occasionally, even exceeding them.
Service: The Pennywise Investment
when I’m getting bad service in a restaurant I feel compelled to fill the “service
void” by, oddly, giving good service to the server. When they come to the table with bread or drinks, I’ll
clear the space, make eye contact with them and be all pleases and thank yous in an effort to coerce
them into good service. I’ll joke light-heartedly about silly things to rouse a smile, or compliment them on
pretty banal things to try and encourage them. A service without engagement is not service to me, and I
can’t stand the vacuum it leaves.
The thing about good service is that it is the cheapest and most powerful thing a coffee shop can do
for itself. It costs very little to implement by comparison, but will bring more value to your proposition
than any other factor in running a coffee shop.
It also has the power to nullify all of a business’ investment if it’s not done well. If I visit a café,
restaurant or bar where the product is fine but the service is good, I’ll go back there. If I visit an
establishment where the product is excellent but the service is bad, I never give it another chance. Ever.
If you want to improve your coffee offering, you can look to invest in grinders, beans, machines, filters
and no end of other expensive gear that can easily run into thousands of euro. This may improve the
coffee offering – if you know how to use it – but it will set you back a fortune and nobody will care if the
service is bad.
And yet service is typically the last thing people look to invest time or money in. I often sit down with
staff and talk to them about how service impacts on what we do and how important it is. Saying “hello” to
somebody as they walk through the door is a simple example of how a small thing can make people
think, “These guys give a shit”.
MY FRIENDS OFTEN JOKE THAT
In terms of service, the clincher for me is always when you leave. After I’ve paid the bill and put on
my coat at a restaurant, I’ll often take a little longer to leave than I should. I find myself looking for stuff in
my pockets or walking very slowly towards the door, taking a route by the servers. I do this because I
feel the need to hear the staff say goodbye to me. It’s super strange, but that’s what I do. It’s something I
can’t shake.
Leaving a restaurant without somebody saying “thank you” and “goodbye” is such a hollow feeling. A
café is admittedly different to a restaurant, but the opportunity to make someone feel good is still there.
The fact that it is less commonplace for everyone to say “goodbye” is actually a huge opportunity for a
café.
It’s impossible to say goodbye to 500 people a day in a busy shop, but every time that you do say it, it
has an impact on that person and also makes the people overhearing it think positive things about the
business you run. More than that, it allows you an opportunity to build relationships with your customers.
The traditional attitude to service was that it is a submissive, compliant approach where the customer
is your master and you do whatever they tell you to do. I’ve always felt that with good service that’s not
the case. It is strong, confident and has a smile on its face. I know that deferential type of service still
exists and that there are folks that still prefer it, but the service I respect and provide is one that
promotes the server as a skilled equal who has the ability to create a wonderful experience for their
guest.
I expect all of our staff to be friendly to our customers because they are our guests. It is the simplest
thing you can do to improve your business overnight. Ensure that your staff know how important it is and
lead by example. Take them to places where there is good service and bad service and make them feel
the difference. Customers are fickle creatures at the best of times but the one thing they will respond to
– the world over – is good service.
The Bleeding Bunny Rule: Workflow, Efficiency &
Perception
HAVING BUILT A ONE-MAN COFFEE SHOP
I can tell you that 150 drinks a day (circa ten hours) is about the point
where things begin to get uncomfortable for one person to manage. A quick calculation gets you to 15
drinks an hour, which is a drink every four minutes. In truth, that doesn’t sound like a lot.
However, when you consider that one person needs to clean, re-stock, serve customers, run drinks
and engage in chit-chat, it suddenly becomes something of a gargantuan task. If I were opening a small
café today, I wouldn’t open it with just one person because that would be illegal and also not the most
ethical of practices! I remember having to close the shop for four minutes while I ran to the bathroom,
but asking someone else to hold off on toilet breaks while there were customers around is not
something I would be willing to stand over.
A small café or espresso bar requires two people to work it at a very minimum because otherwise the
staff won’t feel safe at work, be able to take a lunch break or visit the bathroom, and yet you’ll be
surprised how many businesses exist with only one staff member. When you open a small café, build it
so you start with two people and if you can’t do that, don’t open it.
The question for most cafés is at what point does two people become three? And how can you know
when that point is approaching? I was always of the mind that I wanted to be busy at work because it
was more fun and the day goes faster. If you don’t feel you or your staff have a similar mindset then I
can assure you right now that the café business is not the one for you.
What makes all coffee bars tick is not how long it takes you to do a task, it’s the amount of tasks that
you can do at once and that’s the key to understanding your staff to turnover ratio. Overlapping each
individual process is what makes coffee bars work efficiently, and this all means faster service, lower
staff costs, a better working environment and, as a consequence, a more pleasant working experience.
This diagram below outlines the difference between doing one task at a time and a more efficient bar
system where you’re overlapping tasks.
What’s interesting about the diagram above is that it illustrates the time-saving available in making one
drink. However, this increases dramatically when you’re making six or seven drinks at a time, and that’s
the key to being a great barista.
The question that always arises when a bar is getting busier is whether it’s a workflow issue or an
equipment issue that’s slowing you down. In my experience, the capacity of a two group machine in an
eight-hour day is around 1,000 drinks with two baristas at a time (allowing for a third person relieving
them for breaks) which equates to about 125 drinks an hour, or just shy of 20kg a day for those that are
inclined to measure that way. Bear in mind that that was an event that required no till, serving only takeaway cups with no seating area. In a real life coffee bar, you’d be lucky to get 700 drinks out and to my
mind would max out at 800.
We learned this at a trade show where there was a full line from 9am to 5pm and we were being paid
by the cup by the client, meaning there was no time spent with customers paying for their drinks, so you
will need to allow for service staff elsewhere. I’ve had conversations with people who are doing 250 to
300 drinks a day and claim they need more baristas, more grinders, or more groups to keep up but that
are rarely what is needed.
The lesson here is to isolate the coffee-making staff and assess what is delaying them. Are they
running orders to tables? Are they re-stocking the bar? Are they taking orders at the till? All of these are
necessary tasks when you’re building a business but once you start going above 300 drinks a day, you
need those people to continue making drinks or your business will suffer. By all means engage in
multitasking, but look to floor staff before you look to baristas because their output is crucial to the
scalability of what you do.
Within that workflow there are many ways that a team of baristas can make light work of a busy shift
and when you work a machine as a team, barely talking but always communicating. There is no feeling
like it. I implemented a system at the first coffee shop I worked at that is a great example of this. We had
no docket feeder and had to remember everything off the top of our heads. We devised a code with
paper cups that allowed us to build a visual cue for every drink that was ordered.
If someone ordered an Americano we would put the paper cup on top of the machine with the open
top facing upwards. If they ordered a cappuccino we turned it upside down with the logo facing outwards
and turn the logo inwards if they ordered a latte. We used a small paper cup for espressos and put a lid
on top of any single-shot orders. The shop was take-away only so all the drinks were made in paper
cups and very soon we were taking orders from people so we had 20 drinks lined up in front of us in
paper cup code. Customers would often ask how we managed to remember each order perfectly every
time. We told them we were geniuses.
The one issue with building a strong drink-slinging team is training up a couple of baristas who are
reluctant to get stuck in with the rest of the staff on the more mundane tasks and refuse to do anything
but make coffee. The key thing here is to separate the people from the role and allow for two people to
fill the barista “role” but have a number of staff who can slot in and out of it. In essence, four staff could
share the role throughout a shift but during their allocated time they only make coffee. Once it’s
someone else’s turn to slot in, they can have a few hours of running drinks, wiping tables and serving
customers.
A three-group machine to me becomes useful at about 400 drinks a day and above, but anything
below that and a two-group machine is just as productive. In saying that, we ran an event for another
client, similar to the one I’ve described above, with a three-group machine and in eight hours we
churned out 1,200 drinks, which means the two-group is only 17% slower at capacity over eight hours
(even with 33% less groups on the machine).
What is crucial to remember is that we still had only two baristas using the machine and, in most
cases, it’s hard to get any more people on a machine before they start getting in each other’s way. I’ve
seen a few cafés where they have an eight-group machine in place – something I’ve thought of as the
monster-truck of our industry – but at peak times it still hard to get more than two people on that
machine, and the amount of groups is rarely the limiting factor in a café’s production.
If you were doing north of 600 drinks a day in a café, I’d recommend a second machine if there was a
reasonable chance that you would have more demand with the increased capacity. The issue with this is
that you’ll need to hire two more staff per shift to operate this machine and figure out how many more
drinks you’ll need them to make to justify that spend. There’s a high chance you may end up in the
same place in terms of profitability, so don’t take that step lightly.
The first step before any more expenditure on equipment or staff should be the workflow and systems
you have in place. It’s extremely difficult to take a step back and assess what you can do better and
more efficiently, especially when you’re really busy. Asking a tired and worn-out team if they can make
more coffees makes them feel like you don’t value them so make sure you frame your questions
carefully.
Try to think of systems you’ve put in place in the past that have made things easier and emphasise
how things can always be done better if enough thought is put into a process. Realistically, hiring more
staff means there’s more people to divide the pie amongst so efficiency is in their interests, but it also
needs to be backed up by rewards when it’s achieved.
Around two years ago we held a competition in the shop for the baristas which involved them being
given a list of ten drinks to make to standard, served in order and we would award a prize to the person
who did it the fastest. Our two head baristas knocked the drinks out in about 15 or 16 minutes and the
rest were lagging behind.
We had recently hired a new barista who I felt could probably show a little more “hustle” behind the
bar and seemed to be working at a snail’s pace when things got busy. When she stepped up I was a
little concerned we were about to see a car crash, and when she hadn’t produced a single drink after
three minutes I really began to worry.
Then the drinks started to be presented, at first slowly and then gradually in twos and threes, always
immaculate and completely to spec. When she handed over her final drink just shy of 11 minutes we
were all a little shocked. We’d all learned a valuable lesson. It’s very easy to appear like you’re working
fast but very often those working at a slower pace but with a more methodical approach are more
efficient, make less mistakes, less movements and are as a consequence faster at serving drinks. We
often say about working bar: don’t go as fast as you can, because you can’t.
Barista competitions are a great way to learn about double- and triple-tasking, seeing where 30
seconds can be saved. Anyone that’s competed in them will know how organising workflow in a routine
can help you appear busier, do more, reduce stress and save time. The same logic applies to coffee
bars.
When cafés become too busy, the staff and owners usually take drastic steps to alleviate the
situation. This usually comes in the form of more staff, more equipment, or both. While there are
situations where these actions are necessary – and I say this as someone who sells said equipment –
there are times to step back and assess where your time is being spent and assess where you can save
some of that time without recruiting more staff or introducing more equipment.
A very simple way of doing this is to just record one of your faster staff members (with their consent
of course) and play back the video to the other staff members so they can talk them through what they
are doing.
Little things make a huge difference on bar and a few seconds saved in instances like this add up over
the course of a shift:
Using a cradle on a grinder means you can load the portafilter and serve a customer while the
coffee is grinding or else spending that time cleaning out the portafilter from the last coffee you
made.
Filling a steaming pitcher with cold milk for the next customer while you steam another pitcher.
Setting up saucers and spoons while you steam milk.
An organised bar not only works faster but also gives you a huge advantage in terms of customer
service. Yes, the service will be better, that’s a no-brainer, but people often overlook something very
important about calm, controlled and efficient workflow and that’s the perception that your customers
develop of your business.
There’s a rule I like to call the “Bleeding Bunny Rule”, which is based on the logic that the more
distressed you appear, the more likely you are to be criticised by your customers. Bleeding bunnies will
always be preyed upon before their more able-bodied comrades. If you appear distressed, you are
opening yourself up for attack regardless of how much you deserve it.
I’ve worked shifts at both extremes. I’ve had very few orders and been in an absolutely tizzy: drinks
made badly, orders misplaced, orders made twice, customers pissed off. I’ve also worked ridiculously
busy shifts in a state of near Zen. These occasions often bring with them very little conversation
between co-workers. Everyone knows where they are, where they’re going, and how they’re getting
there. There’s a sense of flow. The system is clear and there’s no need to discuss it. Customers have
waited a long time for orders without even knowing it because everything seems effortless, purposeful
and worth it.
One simple thing that can greatly affect the perceived waiting time that a customer experiences is the
sound of your voice. We encourage staff to confirm a customer’s order with them when they’re waiting
for their coffee after ordering. At busy times there’s often five or six customers waiting, so when you
have a docket list that reads: two cappuccinos, one filter coffee, one espresso, you should look to the
first in line and ask, “Yours is two cappuccinos, right?”
Now, we’re 100% certain your order is two cappuccinos. We heard you ordering it, you get this order
every day, and you’re standing there with a cardboard two-tray in your hand. The reason we ask is
because it breaks the silence and makes your wait seem much shorter. It also alleviates the fear that
there’s been a mistake, a constant fear at rush hour.
You may have noticed over the years that elevators nearly always have mirrors on the walls, and it’s
a trick that is used to make your trip seem faster and less stressful. When people see mirrors it gives
them something to occupy their mind and time passes quicker. Breaking the silence with a confirmation
of an order does little for the actual wait but dramatically speeds up the perceived wait and generally
feels a lot friendlier.
Another thing to do is to give customers strangely specific wait times. In a busy queue, I’d often go
down the line with the first three customers telling them:
1st Customer: “I have yours here.”
2nd Customer: “Yours is a cappuccino?”
3rd Customer: “Yours is going to be about 70 seconds.”
Telling the third person in line that their drink will be 70 seconds seems random but it serves a specific
purpose. Firstly, those in front of them know their drink is due before that and those after know theirs
can’t be long behind. Secondly, it sounds like more of a promise than “a minute” or “two minutes”, both
of which are euphemisms for anything from 30 seconds to ten minutes depending on who’s making the
claim. Thirdly, you’re talking to your customers, probably making them snigger and it’s a bit of fun,
something every great coffee bar has lots of.
When you open your coffee bar it will quickly develop a culture all of its own, and it will become your
job to foster that culture as it grows. It’s very hard to change a culture but be mindful that the right tone,
good communication and a degree of confidence will help build a coffee business that your customers
see as prompt, competent and fun to be around.
Be Two-Faced
THERE’S A CUSTOMER WHO COMES TO
3FE TWICE, if not three times, each day and has been doing so for over
four years. Let’s call her Ms. A. She comes at the same time, on the same days and orders the same
drink, though at this stage she doesn’t need to place her order because everyone knows.
She pays for her coffee, sits on a bench while she waits then as soon as her order is called she’s up
and gone with no amount of fuss. She’s one of our favourite customers.
Another one of our customers comes once every two weeks, and has been doing so for almost five
years now. He has a particular propensity towards washed Ethiopian coffees, particularly Yirgacheffes,
and so over the years he’s earned the nickname Yirgacheffe Man. He has no idea we call him that.
He’s not an imposing character by any stretch of the imagination, in fact he’s quite reserved, but he
always makes time to ask questions about the coffees he’s drinking and will usually ask how they
compare to his beloved Yirgacheffe in terms of sweetness, body and acidity. He is another of our
favourite customers.
The key for us has always been to distinguish between these two customers and figure out what they
want in terms of service when they come to the café. Many of our customers are like Ms. A in that they
just want a cup of coffee and nothing else. If she orders a cappuccino and a staff member replies, “This
coffee is a washed coffee from Bolivia, grown in a region called Yungas at an altitude of 1,700 metres
above sea level…”, then she would probably turn on her heels and walk out the door. She doesn’t care,
and that’s fine. Conversely, if Yirgacheffe Man comes into the shop and asks about a coffee and the
response is simply, “Yeah, it’s nice”, then he’s going to leave disappointed too.
It can be hard to gauge which type of customer you’re dealing with. Some people are shy and might
be afraid to ask whereas others might appear interested but are just being polite. A handy tool that we
implemented at our shop was to have two menus: a drinking menu and
a tasting menu.
If a customer orders something from the drinking menu it tells us that they most likely just want a
coffee and good service, so that’s what they get. Nothing more, nothing less. The odd time we might
throw in “This one’s from Bolivia” but unless they follow up, they get no more than that.
The tasting menu is aimed at Yirgacheffe Man and involves a lot of comparative tasting and
experimenting so the customer can taste a full range of the coffees we have available. Moreover, if a
customer chooses something from the tasting menu, they’ve identified themselves as someone who’s
interested in coffee and is keen to learn more. We’ll tell them about the process, variety and farm that it’s
grown on, and even drop them down some extra info for them to read at their leisure. This often prompts
more questions and we often get to meet and chat to some really interesting people doing this.
It’s a rewarding way to help your customers learn more about coffee but it also means that it’s done
on their terms so you’re not annoying anybody. We often have customers who will routinely choose from
the drinking menu but will order something off the tasting menu every now and again which helps us to
build trust and loyalty with that customer.
That 10% base of customers who are proper coffee nerds are important but so too are the other 90%.
Finding a way to satisfy them both is an ongoing battle. The 90% will pay the bills and spend the most
money with you but the 10% are extremely influential.
Imagine if you have a friend who is really into cars, beer, cheese or anything else that you don’t know
much about. If they frequent a certain business, you will probably go there too because you value their
opinion but it doesn’t mean you’ll expect the same type of interaction that they do.
If the 10% are coming to your café, the 90% will follow based on their judgement. After that it’s things
like consistency, good service and quality of product that will keep them coming back. If, however, the
10% move on because you begin pandering to the 90% too much, then the 90% will most likely move on
as well to the next new place in town.
I talk to many baristas who are frustrated by customers who don’t want to learn about coffee and
they’ll often ask what the best way to “educate” them is. Frankly, I don’t think you should. The best
course of action is to just make their drink for them. Educating people who don’t want to be educated is
annoying, arrogant and kind of rude. It’s important to learn that lesson early on.
The 90% realise that we know a lot about coffee but that’s where it ends. They just want us to make
them something tasty and we’re fine with that. They are paying for you to entertain all those that need a
few extra minutes service because of all the questions they have. Finding the balance is key.
Some people want chat, some people don’t. The trick is to know which one is which. When I first
opened my shop I was working a one-man bar and pretty much every customer I met was new to
specialty coffee and had come to try something new and interesting. The shop had a cult following and it
was an exciting time for specialty coffee in the city.
The consequence of this was that I had a completely different split to deal with in that 90% of the
customers wanted some coffee information and had a bunch of questions while only 10% only wanted a
cup of coffee. I had next to no passing trade.
This reverse split I can assure you was incredibly exhausting. Having to answer the same questions
over and over in a friendly manner, without any respite, was by far the most exhausting work I have ever
done. I went home each evening shattered tired, mentally drained and still having the same
conversations whirling around my mind and ready to be trotted out again the next day.
Today when I hear baristas complain that not all their customers are into specialty coffee and that
they wish they could serve a more enthusiastic audience, I tell them what it was like for me in those
early days. I warn them that they should be careful what they wish for! A 90/10 split is a great balance to
have and finding a way to maintain that and nurture both audiences will become your life’s work when
you open a café.
Selling Retail Coffee Bags
has always been a key driver of our business and is a great way for a
café to build revenue and a regular customer base. It started off with us just selling a few bags a day but
quickly developed into hundreds of bags every week. Today it’s one of the first metrics that we look to
when we’re going through our weekly numbers.
In saying this, I’ve always tried to encourage our wholesale customers to try to sell more retail coffee
but it has never really caught on anywhere else as much as it has at 3fe. However, I’m just not sure that
anyone focuses on it as much as we do.
In most countries I’ve visited there is no sales tax on coffee beans, which is a great thing for a retailer
to focus on because the customer’s perception of price never takes sales tax into account. Coffee
wholesalers will always give you at least a 20% discount on retail coffee which is really great for a
product that requires no prep and little workload.
We stock everything in wholebean in the shop and grind on request for customers. It surprises fellow
café owners to know that a good 70% of bags are ground for the customer as not many people have
their own grinder. We always ask customers how they brew at home and have brew guides printed to
accompany the beans to help them make better coffee at home.
One of the hidden benefits of selling a lot of retail coffee is that people often buy a drink and maybe
some food too while they’re in. A sale of €8 or so quickly turns into €12 or so, and as long as the coffee
SELLING RETAIL COFFEE BY THE BAG
is good and the experience is good, that customer will most likely be back the next week when the bag
runs out. If you keep a bean-buying customer happy you have a customer for life.
In terms of the display itself, it’s really important to commit to a retail display. Too often I hear café
owners complain that customers don’t buy the retail coffee, but when I look around I don’t see any. One
or two bags on a counter looks like you’re simply displaying the beans you’re using to the customer, and
it makes them feel like they can’t touch them. Your display needs to be full and accessible. We routinely
display about 200 bags of coffee in the shop at any one time and will shift more than 250 bags a week.
You need to make it easy for the customers to see and touch the coffee. Don’t leave it on a shelf
behind the bar, as nobody will ever ask if they can have a look at the bag because they’ll feel awkward
or won’t want to commit to a sale. People are always more likely to buy something if they can touch and
feel the item, even smell it. Think how, given the chance, you would prefer to pick up an item in a shop
rather than buy it online.
One thing I always tell the team at 3fe is to never ask a browsing customer a question like “Can I
help?” You’ll nearly always get an instinctive reply of, “No, I’m fine thanks”, and you may even scare
them off. Instead, always offer them some information like, “We grind the coffee too, if you need it” or,
“This one is my favourite” or, “There are a few different kinds there so don’t be afraid to have a root
around”. This approach is a lot softer and often strikes up a conversation with the customer, which
means that even if they don’t buy anything, they’re still likely to come back in future. They may open up
and ask a question that would have stopped them from making a purchase had they not asked.
I’d also always give customers at least two options. Presenting them with one solid, chocolatey
tasting coffee or a zingy, complex and challenging coffee gives them options and makes it easier to
commit. More often than not, they’ll actually take both because they suddenly get excited about tasting
the difference. This might seem a bit cynical, but I’ve seen customers about to buy two coffees that are
very similar and I know that if they brought them home and tasted them side by side they’d be
disappointed with the similarity in flavour profile. I know that feeling also as I’ve done the same thing
when buying wine.
Wine is something I think about a lot in the context of selling coffee. I find it a daunting and
intimidating process and I’m always trying to see how I can learn something from that process and apply
it to coffee. In wine shops I often ask for recommendations, but frequently what happens is that the
salesperson is so focused on me not hating something that they end up recommending me something I
couldn’t possibly dislike, which is usually just nice, generic, boring wine.
These days, I tend to question this and ask them to pick something that they aren’t sure I will like.
This challenges them a bit more, and helps them realise that I’m interested in tasting rather than
drinking. Although I’ve had one or two stinkers over the years, I’ve learned a lot more about wine,
developed relationships with the retailers and had some pretty incredible taste experiences along the
way.
What I try to do now is encourage our staff to test those boundaries with customers and see if they
are interested in trying something different. There are customers who just want straight and narrow
coffee, but there are also those who want something interesting and would be disappointed with the
former.
At one time we devised a colour scheme for our bags, denoted by little stickers in the top right corner of
the bag:
Yellow: Bright, Clean, Acidic, Zesty (Washed Centrals)
Orange: Sweet, Smooth, Easy Drinking (Brazils, Pulped Naturals, Honeys)
Brown: Earthy, Viscous, Round (Indonesians, Brazilian Naturals)
Red: Zingy, Tea-like, Aromatic (Kenyans, Geishas, Washed Yirgs)
Purple: Deep, Boozy, Punchy (Ethiopian Naturals, Crazy Naturals)
Even if the coffees referenced mean nothing to you, the descriptions are approachable and let you in on
what would otherwise be a coffee pro’s secret. We used this system for about two years, but over time,
we found that it had become counterproductive. Typically, people would only drink the colours they liked
and would never deviate. We also found it sometimes difficult to decide what colour a coffee was
because they often lay between two or even three profiles.
What I do know, however, is that the exercise was extremely worthwhile. It made people think about
our coffee offering and it made them stray from the norm. It also challenged us to think more about our
offering and we learnt a lot from it and managed to increase bag sales by 50%. The challenge with any
business is to replace each element with a better idea that reflects your new market. We constantly try
and do that with every aspect of the offering.
Another big mistake shop owners make is deciding to forgo the purchase of a bag grinder until the
bag sales take off. This never works. Most people want their coffee ground for them. That is just the
truth, so if you don’t have a suitable grinder you won’t sell as much coffee. If you don’t sell much coffee,
you’ll never be convinced that the appropriate grinder is worth buying, and you’ll be really limiting your
offering.
You need to have the grinder from day one and although they’re expensive, it will be worth the
investment. A grinder like Mahlkönig’s EK43 is a great option because it can be used to grind bags,
brew filter coffee and also as an espresso grinder for guest coffees and decaf (if you’ve done your
research). This is effectively like having four grinders in one, so it’s a great way to save money and
space.
How you display your retail coffee is crucial. What you want to achieve is a feeling of abundance that
attracts customers. Imagine you wander into an orchard and you’re hungry. You see two apple trees,
one is absolutely full of apples and the other has one or two hanging off it. Which one do you approach?
We are hard-wired to instinctively approach the abundant tree and it is no different with displays.
Designers and architects, in my experience, will do everything to convince you to build a minimal, sterile
display but big and abundant is always best. When we opened our first shop we had a beautiful display
that held about five bags of coffee and three different brewers. It looked amazing, it looked like a
museum piece, but we sold very little.
In a moment of madness I called in a carpenter, tore it down and built a new one that covered a
whole wall like a bookshelf. It held 200 bags, plenty of books, brewers and other ancillaries, and the
shelf was the first thing you saw when you entered the shop. The next week our sales of beans
quadrupled in the shop and we haven’t looked back since.
Signage will always help – up to a point – so be concise and laconic with your choice of words. Let
the customers know that you grind bags of beans to order (if you’ve chosen to do so), that there are
other options available, and that they can ask questions if they needs to and won’t be looked down on.
The challenge is to do all of this without cluttering the display with noisy signs about what you do and
don’t do.
We displayed the bags face on with a slight overlap to the right so that all of the wood backing is
covered. Any price tags should therefore be displayed on the top right so that it’s in full view, but
positioned below any tear line so it doesn’t get discarded if that bag is going to be ground in the shop.
Customers would like to remember how much each bag cost to them, and they may have a number of
bags at home. Once we had a better printer we started to print the prices on the bags as it saved two
hours a week in labelling time. You should ask your roaster if they’re able to facilitate this. They may not
be able to, but it’s worth asking.
We place the second layer of bags on a small plinth that positions them in such a way that you can
see them behind the front row. Two layers of bags like this will look far more abundant than five rows of
bags at the same height and it also requires less coffee to fill the shelves.
This is important because customers will expect freshly roasted coffee on the shelves, whereas most
cafés will use coffee between seven and twenty-eight days post-roast. The longer you leave coffee on
the shelf, the less likely it is to sell, so we rotate the oldest ones to the front and when they reach three
or four weeks old we start using them in the machine.
A lot of roasters these days will sell you four 250g bags for a similar price to 1kg bag to promote retail
sales and also allow you to display the coffee or use it for brewing. This may seem like a crazy idea as
they’re almost tripling their bag costs, but if a café buys into retail as a concept they can turn themselves
from a 30kg account to a 60kg account without getting any busier.
A 30kg account customer is probably doing 1,500 drinks a week (circa 50 cups per kg). If a bag was
sold with one in fifteen of those cups (which is a very achievable number) that would result in a hundred
250g bags, or 25kg of coffee, being sold. A clever wholesale manager would spot this opportunity, but a
clever café owner could also present this statistic to their coffee supplier and use it as a bargaining chip
to reduce the costs of retail bags.
If you manage to get a 20% margin from your wholesaler, that equates to a net profit of about €200 a
week which is just over €10,000 over the course of a year. That number is probably close to half the rent
you’d probably pay in a busy city for a café capable of doing 30kgs a week. It underlines the fact that
selling retail coffee is, by comparison, a much more efficient way of upping your turnover, than making
cups of coffee.
Arguably most important part of all this is replacing bags so that it always looks full. When someone
buys a bag the sales staff should replace that gap with another bag as soon as possible. We always
have a box of coffee behind the bar that is for refilling straight away. The challenge is to bring the oldest
coffees to the front and, if there are a number of shelves, try to put them at elbow height which is the
most accessible place and thus the area that shifts the most coffee.
Finally, the positioning of the retail area is crucial and will have a massive bearing on how much
coffee you sell. There’s no point putting it at the drink collection point because the customer has already
paid at that point and is unlikely to want to go through that process again. Equally, having it at the till is
not always an ideal place for a customer to browse. If you can locate the bags alongside the queuing
area that gives people something to look at while they queue and hopefully will encourage more sales.
Retail coffee is something that needs to be done well or not done at all. If you are going to have a
crack at it, do it properly and commit to it. If you pull it off, you’ll increase your average sale, attract a
loyal customer base, and effectively create a relatively passive revenue stream with a reliable margin
and comparatively small workload.
The thing that really does it for me, however, is that it helps get people interested in coffee. When
they take it home and enjoy it with their family and friends, they sit there thinking positive things about
the service you provide them, which can only be a good thing.
Loyalty Cards
that run on the basis that you get a stamp for every coffee you buy and
when you reach ten stamps you get a free coffee. They are so commonplace now in coffee shops that
people see them as an entitlement and expect one from the start.
We’ve never had loyalty cards at 3fe and it’s something we get pulled up on quite regularly. One
customer in particular took exception to this policy and pulled me aside to give me a dressing down on
the matter. He proceeded to pull out loyalty cards from twelve local cafés, all of whom he was collecting
stamps from. As he berated me with the cards in his hand it struck me that there was a certain irony in
calling them “loyalty cards” when he wasn’t showing loyalty to any particular place.
In reality, they are discount cards and should be seen as such by any business that operates them. I
have no issue with businesses using them, but I would encourage people to know exactly what impact
they will have.
The first impact they have is on your business brand and that can be in a positive or negative sense
depending on how you roll it out. If you opt for a free coffee every six stamps, you’re portraying yourself
as a low-cost operator. This will affect how your business is perceived, the expectations people have of
what you do and will ultimately limit your capabilities as people form their opinions.
Companies like Apple, Hermés and Tesla never discount their products but people think it’s because
they have strong brands. At some point they had to make that decision and build on it so it makes me
wonder if they are in a position to do it because they have a strong brand, or if they have a strong brand
because they do it?
I was recently asked to observe presentations from some marketing Master’s students from a local
LOYALTY CARDS ARE A PHENOMENA
university. They were all given 3fe as a case study and asked to come up with a marketing campaign.
All of the groups did some impressive work but one thing that struck me was that every single one
suggested plans that involved selling our product at a price below what it usually sells at.
The best marketing campaigns present your product in the best light to those that are likely to be
interested in it. Too often businesses use discounting as the first port of call without fully thinking through
the consequences of it.
The truth is that discount cards can be damaging to your bottom line and a lot of the time it’s an
almost invisible leak on a business’ profitability. Having worked in a few places that use the cards I know
first hand of some of the small issues they pose that can turn into large issues.
The most obvious of which is the difficulty in tracking stamps. Regular customers in coffee shops and
friends of the staff will often get two, three or more stamps at a time as a goodwill gesture. That may
seem inconsequential but the figures below will outline how it will quickly make a big impact on what you
do.
Another peculiarity is the expectations of customers about what constitutes a free coffee. The
standard discount card has ten circles to be stamped and the final circle says something along the lines
of “free coffee”.
The issue is that most business owners intend you to pay for ten coffees, get ten stamps and then
have a full card that entitles you to a free coffee. Unfortunately, most customers will see it as a
requirement to get nine stamps on your card and when they’re left looking at the remaining coffee that
says “free coffee”, they expect that free coffee. It’s a small issue that creates untold tension in coffee
bars around the world.
So let’s look at some numbers and see the impact a stamp can make on the margin of a cup of
coffee.
If you’re selling coffee for €3.50 and the sales tax is 9% (to use the Irish example) your selling price is
€3.21. Each stamp, therefore, is worth 32c in revenue. If you’re running at a 75% gross margin on the
coffee you sell at €3.50, you should be hitting about €2.40 gross margin on each cup. This means each
stamp is worth 13% of your gross profit before you’ve paid for anything else.
If the discount scheme does increase your business it will decrease your gross profit and also your
net profit. You need to figure out the point at which the scheme becomes viable and the example over
the page shows how even a 10% spike in business can leave you in a worse off position, in this case by
€33.71 a day.
In this example you can see that even if the introduction of a loyalty card increased business by 10%,
you would still be worse off by €34 a day in gross profit. The net profit would be further affected by
potentially higher staff costs to deal with the extra volume of customers and there will always be quality
issues to contend with if traffic surges.
The calculations above show that in order to stand still on gross profit you’ll need to increase business
by a whopping 16%.
What’s more scary is that this doesn’t take into account people multi-stamping cards or giving free
coffees for every nine cups instead of every ten cups. Some coffee shops even offer a free coffee for
every five or six cups which would further damage your net profit.
The other side of discount cards is that they do foster relationships and encourage people to return to
your shop, but you need to have a fuller understanding of the cost of the scheme. I’ve always seen
value and price as two different things and it’s completely possible to have a product that is both
expensive and good value. If you buy an expensive jacket and it lasts you ten years that can be seen as
good value.
A good business will be able to charge an appropriate price for their product and the value the
customer receives should be equally fair. Any deviation from this principle is one that you should
carefully consider and understand the consequences of from both a marketing and financial perspective.
The Delivery Drivers
of the unsung heroes of our industry. Their performance has a massive
impact on your business in ways that are not even obvious. We’ve always tried to treat the delivery
drivers with respect at 3fe and be mindful that they have a crucial role to play in the success of our
business.
At the outset, our staff are told that they must be respectful to every person they encounter in the
course of their work and the delivery drivers are no different. Once they’ve dropped off their goods we
always shout them a cup of coffee and send them on their way.
A cup of coffee for a delivery driver is a welcome treat, especially for those who have early starts.
Even just saying hello or asking how they are can have a positive impact on their day. I’ve seen delivery
drivers that have been pretty badly treated in my time and so it’s always been important to me to make
them feel welcome and appreciated. I also think you can tell a lot about your staff by how they talk to the
delivery drivers. Their behavior will speak volumes about your business to those around them.
What surprises a lot of staff is that the delivery drivers are often the women and men who own the
business and they’re using the route to cut costs and also get to know their customer base. I delivered
about half a tonne of coffee each week until very recently in the back of a Peugeot 307, so I know what
it’s like to be well received on your rounds.
A delivery driver who’s well looked after will always look after you and make sure you get the best
goods, promptly delivered with the best service. The last point is crucial because you should never
underestimate how the conduct of a delivery driver will impact your customers.
One delivery driver that sticks out in my mind barged past a customer of ours on the way to the
kitchen. He’d been rude to a few of our staff before and this was the last straw. I followed him into the
kitchen and wouldn’t sign for the docket. I made him take his stock back and when the sales agent
called later to find out what had happened I politely explained the situation.
The delivery driver came to see me the next morning and we had a good chat, and I got a good
sense that he was very frustrated in his work. I let him know that we’d always make a cup of coffee for
him and be polite to him and after that we never had any issues. He actually turned out to be a pretty
funny guy and we’d look forward to his morning visits.
The truth about delivery drivers is that they are the gatekeepers to every supplier you have. They are
the eyes on the ground for those businesses and if you have them on your side you have a very strong
advocate. They have everyone’s contact details, they know everyone’s prices, and they know many of
the tricks that you need to start learning to run a decent business. They’re also a great source of treats
and freebies for the staff when they have goods that are about to go off or have damaged packaging,
always a nice little perk.
What’s more, there will come a day when you desperately need their help and the likelihood of you
receiving it is directly linked to how well they’ve been treated. Our delivery drivers have rescued the day
on many occasions and some have even gone into work on their day off to grab some stock we need as
a result of this healthy, two-way relationship.
The other side of this relationship is that you need to establish a firm understanding of what it is you
expect from them. My old boss was so particular about the pastries he received that he would go
through the whole box before signing the docket. If he found one later that wasn’t perfect he’d call back
and complain. One day I noticed the delivery docket had a note on the very bottom stating: “No
imperfect pastries, very picky customer”.
THE DELIVERY DRIVERS ARE SOME
We expect all of our deliveries to come outside of busy periods, so between 8.30am to 9.30am and
12pm to 2pm we don’t take deliveries. We also need to have the milk and bread deliveries first thing in
the morning so the delivery drivers are given a key to the porch so they can drop them off before we
open.
The Grand Canal Street café is quite tight as it is, so all delivery drivers are required to bring their
delivery downstairs to the goods in area, which causes some frustration. It’s something we are very
upfront about and we let them know that it needs to be done and we won’t have time to help them, but
we will appreciate it and unfortunately can’t do business with them if these requirements can’t be met.
It’s never an aggressive or heated conversation, it just is what it is and that can’t be changed. You
simply need to set out your own terms clearly – and honestly – from the start.
Deliveries need to be done promptly, always with a delivery docket and in a manner that doesn’t
bother our customers or impede the normal running of our business. We get a weekly flower delivery
and I’m always impressed by how the delivery drivers are very polite to the customers at the tables
they’re putting flowers on. The café’s customers aren’t their customers but they understand how
important it is to us that they’re not disturbed.
The delivery drivers are silent influencers and can get you out of trouble if they want to if you have
their trust. They’re also the ones to look after when things are tough because you can be assured that
you’ll need their help some day.
50¢ Security
at the shop. I say “we”, but I actually wasn’t there at the time. The
feeling that everyone felt that day – and for a good time afterwards too – was pretty shitty. Three men
came into the shop, two made a half-assed attempt at being assertive until the third became extremely
aggressive and pulled out a knife before threatening a number of staff and making off with the contents
of the till. It happened in broad daylight, on a busy day with a shop full of customers. I was devastated.
Everyone asked how much money was taken, but the real cost of this is the impact it has on the
people who work in the business. The cash is insured, but it’s hard to get back the confidence of the
staff when they’re always watching the door. There’s no price you can put on the people you work with
feeling safe.
I felt guilty for not being there, I felt responsible for what happened and, for a reason I can’t quite
explain, I felt I had let them down. After the incident we closed early and pulled the shutters down, but
heard a knock shortly after. I pulled up the shutter to find the technician I’d hired to install new cameras,
he was about two hours too late and it only served to rub salt in the wound.
We took some preventative measures over the following weeks including new cameras, panic
buttons, security monitors in the new office and a new safe drop procedure, as well as putting in place a
few other new protocols. We had a staff meeting and I let everyone know that safety was the priority and
if someone came to rob the place they were expected to hand over the money without arguing because
that was the safest thing to do. We organised daily cash pickups from the cash-in-transit firm that we
used so that there was a minimum amount onsite at any time.
A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK WE GOT HELD UP
When the Gardaí (Police) came back to take statements though, they left me with a bit of a
bombshell when they remarked, “That’s great you did all that, but it probably won’t stop them coming
back”.
Our shop wasn’t located in a bad part of town but it was within the city limits so is always going to be
a target. The Gardaí let me know that there had been spate of robberies in the area over the last few
months and that a few places had been hit on a number of occasions. They had a good idea who was
carrying out the raids and knew that they weren’t going to be deterred by cameras and would keep
going until they were caught.
My heart sank and all of a sudden I was back to worrying about the safety of the staff and customers.
I took a long jog that evening and tried to think of ways to deter the raiders. Security guards? Earlier
closing times? Security doors? I tried to think of the times when we felt most safe but kept coming back
to the times when the Gardaí were there. Then it hit me, I needed them there all the time.
The next day we sent emails to the local Garda Stations and let them know that from that day on, all
coffee was 50¢ if they were in uniform or showed a badge. Within a few days word had spread
throughout the station and further afield and today there’s a Garda car parked outside every 20 minutes
or so. The staff feel more secure, the Gardaí get cheap, excellent coffee, and I can feel a lot more at
ease about the safety of everyone involved in the business.
Tables & Chairs
for your café is both more important than it seems and has
a lot more to it than you might imagine. The furniture has a big impact on how you’re perceived by the
public, which makes it imperative not to scrimp on it or to make a rash decision about it. I’ve done this
before and regretted it for a long time afterwards. Both the visual appearance of the seats and how they
feel will say a lot about what you do and what people expect you to do.
The materials should be reflective of the identity you want to create in look and feel but also be
capable of enduring thousands of bums a month in customer traffic. Bespoke furniture is very
fashionable but you have to make sure the designers will stand over the durability of what they’re
creating, because they’re unlikely to have passed any quality standards if they’re one-off pieces that are
hand-made.
Getting bums on seats is a huge part of running a business but it’s not something you can be too
aggressive with. If a café is stuffed with tables and chairs that increases the workload your staff have to
deal with, so it’s a good idea to start with less than your capacity in terms of tables and chairs, and then
add more of them as you get more accustomed to the tempo of your business. A café that squeezes a
lot of people in also changes the tone and vibe of the business, often in a very passive way.
Wide tables feel luxurious and generous and this feels like a treat to many customers. It’s true that
you’ll fit more smaller tables in than large ones, but finding the right balance between comfort and
numbers is very difficult. If the tables are too narrow it makes you feel uncomfortable and unwelcome,
like they don’t want you to stay too long. Maybe that is the goal? It also dictates what food you can
serve, because a narrow table may not be able to comfortably hold two plates, two glasses and two
cups without falling over the edge, although I’ve been to a few places where they combine massive
plates with tiny tables and think little of it.
Too many narrow tables squeezed into a small space also means that the person sitting next to you
will be able to hear everything you hear and it can really stifle conversation. I’d like to think my coffee
shop is all about great coffee, but experience has taught me that it’s really about meetings, interviews,
catch-ups, telling secrets, and Tinder dates.
A strange quirk that we’ve discovered over the years is that people are very slow to share a table if
it’s a standard height table. They feel like they’re intruding on the incumbent customer. However,
whenever we have installed high tables, people would just sit at them without asking, regardless of who
was there and the other customer wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I don’t know why high tables say “share with
me” more than low tables, but it’s an unwritten rule that all customers seem to adhere to.
The other thing about high tables is that they make the place feel more relaxed and casual and this
has a huge affect on the ambiance of the café as well as the expectations of the customers. It also
affects the acoustics of the room and buffers some of the reverberation that may occur. If there are high
tables for people to share, have a think about what sort of service and offering your customers will now
expect. It suddenly seems a lot more chilled out.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT STYLE OF TABLES AND SEATING
Example Floorplan
If you visit a café that has a bunch of two-top tables between you and the bar, that instantly
communicates that this is a sit-in, table-service café, regardless of whether or not the proprietor
intended that. If you want to run a business with a healthy take-away offering you need to have the bar
as close or accessible to the door as possible or it creates a barrier for the public that you will never
overcome.
The number of seats in a café can be increased in a few ways without you seeming like you’re
squeezing people in. The best way to do this is with bench seating around the edges and this also has a
wonderful effect of filling out the space really well. Think how a room with just tables and chairs can
seem quite sterile but a bench running around the walls suddenly softens the whole place up. It’s easy
to join tables when you have benches on the perimeters and the number of people you can fit in
comfortably is greatly increased because you don’t need room behind the seat to pull a chair in and out.
One consideration you need to remember for tables and chairs is the footprint they take up. It’s not
simply the width of the table plus the width of two chairs, it’s also the extra space behind the chair that
you need to pull it forward and backward. This can easily run to three metres, depending on the size of
the furniture. When you factor in the metre you need for a walkway behind the pull-out space you very
quickly start to eat up your floorspace. A decent architect should foresee all of these problems but I’ve
been in many cafés where this hasn’t been considered and the result is a space that feels very cluttered
and uncomfortable.
If you’re thinking of making changes, or planning a layout but don’t have the budget for an architect,
I’d recommend cutting out pieces of cardboard that are the same area as the total area needed for your
table and chairs and lay them on the floor to see how it will feel. An even better method that is almost as
thrifty is to download a 3D modeling software package and have a go at designing it yourself. I taught
myself how to use these tools in less than a day and they’re surprisingly intuitive and useful for anyone
running a café. The space you have to play with at the start is very soon eaten up by the dead space
necessitated around walkways, fire exits, and clearance areas around steps and pillars, so it’s very
important to get a handle on just how many people are going to comfortably sit in your café.
When people come to cafés, bars or restaurants, they very rarely face the wall when they sit down,
they always want to look in at the bar or out the window. You should bear this in mind when planning out
how the space in the café will be used and realise that people-watching is a huge part of a café’s brief.
Imagine coming to a café where the baristas were hidden behind a wall and you collected your coffee
through a slot in a wall. Would that be an engaging experience? Would you come back? Even if people
don’t realise it, a large part of coming to a café is about human connection and observing the other
people in the space, so you should facilitate that.
What haunts every coffee shop owner are wobbly tables, so if you have an opportunity to get tables
that won’t wobble then spend whatever money you can to make that a reality. We have a very uneven
floor inside and outside our café and every day I cringe as I see random pieces of card shoved under
legs of tables and chairs in a vain effort to stop the wobble.
There really is no harder sell than an empty café so give careful consideration to your window seating
because it makes your café look busy and inviting to passers by. In the early days I used to do all my
admin work in these seats and encourage the staff to take lunch there because it made the place look
busier.
Ultimately, the thing about the layout of your tables, chairs and fixtures is that they will always only
serve their purpose for a given period of time. Very often, they’ll make the place work so well that they
bring your café to another level which might mean that they no longer work. Our café on Grand Canal
Street has had 30 or 40 arrangements over the years but each time we find a problem we remain
mindful that we’re progressing.
Toilets
EVERY WEEK, SOMEWHERE IN THE
region of 4,000 people visit our café on Grand Canal Street and I’d imagine
somewhere close to 40% of people that visit the café use the toilet. Our restroom is about 8m2 and has
only one toilet, so 1,600 people a week is a lot of traffic for one bowl to take.
People tend to judge restaurants, bars and cafés by the condition of their toilets. I’m no different
myself. You can tell a lot about how a business is run by how clean the toilets are. We spend a lot of
time cleaning our toilets and checking the toilets and still it’s the one part of the business that we get
complaints about.
At times this book has been painful to write and there’s been occasions when owning up to past
mistakes has been little short of embarrassing. Although we’ve always tried to keep the toilets as clean
as possible, it’s still one area where I feel we can improve.
Our problem right now is that the materials in the build just can’t deal with the foot traffic the toilets
see. We’ve refurbished the toilet many times but it always gets run down in a matter of weeks. The
grouting in the floor looks grubby no matter how hard we scrub it and, despite hours of cleaning every
day, it always feels like it could be cleaner.
Recently I met an architect and had a four-hour meeting about toilets. We spoke at length about the
problems we were facing and she introduced us to the term “fecal mist”, a phrase I’ll never be able to
shake from my consciousness.
We met later to carefully choose materials and, as I write this, we’re awaiting confirmation of a date
for contractors to come and again refurbish the toilet in our café. It has cost us a small fortune to do but
I’m determined to get it right this time.
The next step is ensuring the toilets are being cleaned and maintained and, with that in mind, we
recently set up a group email (toilets@3fe.com) with the aim of creating a system for cleaning the toilets
that’s both fair and that is monitorable.
Nobody likes cleaning toilets, but it has to be done. I still do it in our office – and sometimes the café
when it’s busy – so I expect the same from the staff. A problem arises when some people are cleaning
more than others because even if people don’t mind cleaning it they feel hard done by when their
colleagues aren’t cleaning it too.
There are occasions when the café gets really busy and they forget to clean it but, of course, a busy
period is the time when you need to clean it most. Also, as a business owner, I want to know if they’re
too busy to clean the toilet so I can make steps to fix that problem.
Most cafés use a sign in sheet for bathrooms and when you clean it you sign it and put the date/time
in. The problem with this system is that people don’t want to get in trouble so they will fill out all the time
slots and sign them accordingly. On foot of this, I’ll get a complaint about the toilets but when I take a
look to see if they’re being cleaned it will say they are. This system doesn’t work.
Instead we recently came up with this system and it works a lot better:
Staff member cleans the toilet.
Staff member takes a photo of the toilets on their phone and emails it to toilets@3fe.com.
We now have a date/time log of that person cleaning the toilet.
At the end of the week, we have a log of how often the toilets were cleaned and by whom. If
someone isn’t cleaning the toilets we also have a record of that.
A sign is put on the back of the toilet door reading: “Are these toilets up to scratch? Email us and
let us know toilets@3fe.com”.
We now have a steady stream of feedback from customers about the toilet and the condition of it.
It’s a difficult thing to ask staff to clean toilets but it’s 100% necessary for a coffee shop. Let your team
know it’s important and keep coming back to it. One inconsiderate customer can lose you a really
important customer just by leaving a mess behind so you have to constantly check. I’m hopeful that by
the time you’re reading this chapter in print, we’ll have our sparkling new toilet in situ with a steady
stream of happy toilet patrons.
The Plated Napkin & Other Continuous Struggles
hand in hand with coffee so we’ve always served up a great selection at
3fe over the years. Brownies, scones, apple slices, donuts and all kinds of other sweet and savoury
treats are a huge part of our business and it’s fun to mix them up and change them as you go.
A couple of years back I remember sitting down to a sticky pastry and coffee when something hit me.
The pastry was sitting on a folded napkin, which in turn was served on a plate with a knife. It looked
nice, was well presented but it didn’t work for one simple reason, the pastry was stuck to the napkin.
I called over one of the staff and asked why the pastries were being plated on top of napkins but she
couldn’t really give me an answer. We couldn’t find the source of the decision. Everyone seemed to be
doing it because everyone else was, and we all agreed that bits of tissue in your pastry were not a good
thing, so we collectively agreed to stop doing it without any complaints.
Skip forward a couple of months and I’m walking through the café and I see a member of staff walk
past with a plated pastry sitting on top of a napkin. I couldn’t believe it. I sat down and watched the
morning rush and grew incredulous at the sight of pastry after pastry going out to customers with
napkins underneath them.
I ordered a pastry and when it came to my table – sitting on a napkin – I asked the staff member why
it was there. He looked at me and responded, “I don’t know. Personally, I hate the way it sticks to the
pastry so I don’t think we should serve it this way”.
Again I chatted to all of the staff about why we were doing this, who’s idea it was and who had taken
the decision to start doing it again but nobody could provide any answers. What made it even more
ridiculous was that everyone felt that they were the only person who hated getting their pastry on a
napkin but they had continued doing it because that’s what everyone else did.
BAKED GOODS HAVE ALWAYS GONE
This small snippet of life in a café is indicative of the day-to-day reality of what it’s really like. These
speed bumps are compounded by having a constant stream of people to remind you about all the little
things that aren’t perfect. As frustrating as little things like these are, you can’t let them grind you down
because every day you’ll encounter many more instances. If you start to let them stick, the small things
will really add up very quickly.
What’s important to realise though is that this will keep happening. In the last year alone I’ve probably
talked to staff about pastries on napkins about 20 to 30 times and always had the same confusing
response. Coffee shops are about routine and consistency and constantly (constantly!) pushing things
back into order.
This is a frustrating aspect of what I do as a café owner, but I don’t let it get to me. In truth, I can’t. I
talk to business owners who are pulling their hair out over equally tedious and monotonous tasks but my
response is always the same. It’s never going to be any different so you need to accept this and get on
with or accept that this business is not for you.
Coffee
Coffee, Briefly
is made difficult by its simplicity. Essentially what you’re doing is
maintaining the contact time of hot water with an appropriately ground coffee. It’s that simple.
BREWING COFFEE IS A PROCESS THAT
What complicates this simplicity is the grinding process which affects each of the variables we deal
with and which in turn causes wildly different extractions in every brew. No two extractions are ever the
same and any barista worth their salt is in a constant battle with their grinder. If you taste an excellent
shot of espresso there is no guarantee that the next one will be as good. The way grinders work means
that your next espresso will be in the same ballpark, but unfortunately not the same seat. Brewing filter
coffee is a similarly erratic process and although your strength is generally ten times less than an
espresso, the clarity of flavour tends to expose imperfections that bit more.
Coffee has always been this way, and although there are improvements being made in the industry
all the time, it’s the variable nature of its outcome that frustrates and fascinates baristas the world over.
In a cruel twist of fate, however, this element of chance often is the reason they become so infatuated
with this most precocious of culinary pursuits.
In a perfect world we would just brew coffee whole bean. Grinding coffee is not just expensive and
noisy, it’s also inefficient and hugely inconsistent. Coffee particles that are the same size will extract at
the same rate. Unfortunately grinders create particles of many different sizes which extract at different
rates to one another. The small ones over-extract and the large ones under-extract. Sometimes grounds
are the same size (in terms of surface area) but different shapes and it is not uncommon for grinders to
produce similar amounts of round grounds as they do elongated thin grounds.
If you have access to specific grade sieves and you manage to brew coffee with an extremely
singular grind profile, you’ll see what a “perfect” brew tastes like. It’s like drinking a whole different
substance. There is clarity where there once was complexity, but it becomes something else and tastes
little like the coffee you or I know.
Confusingly, it’s when you’re working with those grounds of different sizes together that you end up
with a balanced drink, of sorts. Its complexity tastes whole and complete, but there are a multitude of
brewing idiosyncrasies in each coffee. That complexity is something that I’ve spent years trying to
understand. It’s inherently imperfect, but for some reason it works.
At times I’m drawn to the delicate and uniformly extracted coffees, but I soon miss the bitterness that
I get with a standard coffee. Honestly, I’m periodically drawn to one or the other. There is a growing
trend in our industry towards a coffee brew of a uniform size particle that extracts in a clean way but the
time it takes to separate and the waste involved mean it is – for now – an unviable process for most
coffee businesses.
The biggest problem with brewing espresso is that once you’ve set the coarseness of the grind to
ensure the correct flow of water through the coffee bed, it will then go and change itself without giving
any notice. A few variables come into play that will result in your espresso flowing faster or slower and
further tweaking will be required.
Espresso grinders have always ground inconsistently and what they produce is often shown for the
most part to be two different sized particles. This bi-modal grind profile produces an effect that is similar
to an old stone wall in Connemara. From a distance, the stones look to be the same size, but on closer
inspection there are big ones and small ones that together bring strength, rigidity and resistance.
In terms of a grind profile, that resistance ensures the water slows to a certain speed so that the
contact time creates sufficient extraction. If the water flows too quickly it will under-extract. If the water
flows too slowly, it will over-extract.
Considering this, it soon becomes clear that everything has been designed backwards from this
uneven grinding. Espresso machines are and brew recipes are designed around it, and every espresso
drink you encounter has been built on top of this unsteady foundation.
Excellent filter coffee is far more achievable for the average coffee enthusiast but it introduces new
variables that tend to be less of an issue with espresso. Turbulence will greatly affect your flow rate and
extraction, while heat loss will have a bearing on your potential to extract efficiently.
The technology in espresso grinders has been the same since 1950s and is progressing very slowly
even today. The science of coffee is becoming the focus of the new generation of specialty coffee
baristas, but the artistry of mastering a grinder is still the backbone of every great shop’s product.
The best baristas don’t necessarily use the best equipment but they do have an inherent
understanding of flow, resistance and the resulting extraction. Although frustrating, there is nothing quite
like the zone you find yourself in mid-service when you’re nudging, pressing, shifting and tweaking the
variables to ensure that each last drop that you pour is – while necessarily imperfect – definitively in the
right ballpark.
My personal hope is that in the coming years we learn more about an optimum grind profile rather
than focusing on a uniform one, although bearing in mind that they may be one and the same. Only then
can we have grinders and espresso machines designed and built around that profile, rather than having
the cart before the horse. Until then, though, we’re stuck with a process that’s inherently flawed but at
the same time tastes incredibly good. I’m as confused as I am fascinated by it.
Milk Slows You Down
markets, the majority of coffee drinks are milk-based. In Ireland, they
tend to hover around the 55% mark and although Scandinavia is slightly lower and US slightly higher,
that’s a good ballpark figure to start with. My visits to Australia and New Zealand have shown me that, in
some markets, it’s closer to 95% milk-based drinks.
What most coffee bars experience after they begin to show early signs of success is that they very
soon can’t make drinks fast enough. The gut reaction, usually encouraged by salesmen, is to buy a
machine with extra groups or to even buy another machine altogether.
The problem with this is that every machine requires two people to run it efficiently and you will eat up
bar space, over-staff your café and only marginally increase speed. Adding extra groups does have a
marginal impact but only at peak capacity and even then only to a limited extent.
I’ve visited cafés with eight-group machines but always find that there are still only two people
working it. Two people on a machine are about as many as you can fit, so it’s rarely possible to squeeze
more people onto it without chaos ensuing.
In the vast majority of cases the issue is not space, machines or staff but just workflow and how tasks
are being performed. The biggest stumbling block amongst these is milk, and how it is being steamed
and poured.
In the time that it takes to steam enough milk for four cappuccinos I can make enough espresso for
12 cappuccinos and this is the key issue. Pulling shots is never going to be your bottleneck, unless you
live in an environment that’s as espresso-thirsty as downtown Naples at 3pm. This means that the most
IN MOST SPECIALTY COFFEE DRINKING
important task to keep performing is, without doubt, the steaming of milk. During a busy period this is a
process that should never stop. It’s also important to differentiate the tasks of steaming the milk from
pouring the milk.
Once you’ve finished steaming a jug of milk it feels completely natural to then pour that milk into the
drink, but this is a mistake that kills coffee bars the world over. When it’s busy you should always have
one person devoted to pouring drinks which allows the person on the steam wand to keep steaming
milk. During the busy periods you should have one person constantly steaming milk. That means never
pouring, never pulling shots, just steaming jug after jug of milk until all the orders have been fulfilled.
There will be gaps in the workflow for whoever is allocated to pour the drinks, but they can use this
extra time to re-stock, plate up and do all the other little tasks necessary to keep going. If this person
largely has nothing to do, the chances are that you probably don’t need them in the first place and you
could get by with someone steaming and pouring as the orders come in. Another way to keep pouring
going constantly is to teach floor-staff how to pour drinks, so that the person steaming milk can just do
that. You can really only do one thing when you’re pouring drinks so having a few people capable of
doing it is important.
Alternatively, if the person pulling shots has made enough espressos, they can slide over to steaming
while the steamer slides to pouring and then they can both revert once the drinks are done. It’s very
important that staff on an espresso machine don’t criss-cross tasks or it will get very messy very quickly,
so moving back and forth along the production line in unison is key.
The backlog of milk drinks in a café is a familiar scenario that I see in coffee bars and one that is
usually addressed by the café owner investing in another machine or even swapping their machine for
one with extra groups. The first solution will instantly drive up staff costs, which in turn means you have
to generate a lot more income. Meanwhile, the second scenario just creates more espresso and doesn’t
solve the milk problem.
The worst thing to do when you have a lot of drinks to make is to panic and stop thinking about the
process as you’ll find it very hard to recover.
The Importance Of Water
in brewing excellent coffee, it’s the main component of what you’re
drinking. Without excellent water you can’t brew excellent coffee yet sadly it’s an afterthought for most
people, both at home and on the high street.
The industry standard for filter coffee lies at about 1.2% to 1.45% strength. That means that over
98% of a well-brewed filter coffee is actually water. An espresso, meanwhile, is usually somewhere
between 10% and 13% strength which is again a beverage comprised mostly of water.
Water purity is measured in terms of its Total Dissolved Solids or TDS. The scale measures the water
by its “parts per million” or ppm. The ideal TDS for coffee brewing water is about 80ppm to 150ppm
depending on who you listen to. There’s a very complicated science behind it, but essentially having the
right type of components in soft water means the coffee will extract better and taste better.
It’s difficult to imagine that water has components in it, but if we were to boil off water with a TDS of
100ppm it equates to having dissolved solids about the size of a headache table in every litre. You may
have noticed in some parts of the world that a kettle, faucet, or shower has a scaly build-up around its
edges. That’s a sign that the water coming through it is quite hard and thus full of chemicals and
sediment. If water is too hard it is difficult to brew coffee with. If it’s too soft, it can become acidic and
sometimes corrode the metal in machines and kettles.
Dublin is lucky in that most water in the city sits around the 95ppm mark which is pretty good for
brewing coffee. However, this level changes quite a lot around the country, with the west coast having
much harder water in comparison. What we use at 3fe is a simple taste and odour filter as we don’t want
to change the water too much.
Many of the best coffee shops in London, for example, are faced with local water that sits somewhere
around the 450ppm mark. This water is very difficult to brew coffee with and also tastes metallic and
sometimes soapy.
Once coffee is brewed with hard water the resulting cup is always heavy and lacking clarity. The best
shops in hard water areas will use expensive reverse osmosis (RO) filter units that strip the water down
to its purest form, and then rebuild the water recipe using various mineral cartridges.
Unfortunately, many shops stop there when it comes to water treatment and feel safe in the
presumption that if they have spent a lot of money on the filtration system then it must be perfect. In
reality, even an RO system that costs a few thousand euro is still susceptible to huge variability due to
flow rates, pump pressure, spent cartridges, water temperature, and many other variables. The reality is
that, even though all that money has been spent on the system, you’ll often end up with brewing water
that is hugely variable in terms of mineral content and hardness, even if it is better quality.
Bottled water is usually filtered but is frequently too hard to use for brewing coffee. Any water that is
described as “volcanic” is usually hard water with a high TDS. Many waters theses days will have the
TDS listed on the side of the bottle which will help you to decide if it’s suitable for brewing coffee with.
Water is such a big part of making excellent coffee, and if your local water is too hard or soft then the
best way to treat water is just with a simple filter jug that will take any taint out of it. If your water at home
isn’t suitable, then look for a low-TDS alternative in the supermarket. One high street brand of water that
I’ve had reasonable success with is Volvic, a brand that’s usually available in most places I might travel
to.
Designing your own water profile is something many specialty cafés think they are doing but the
water they produce is often as inconsistent as the testing they’re doing on it.
WATER IS NOT JUST VITALLY IMPORTANT
Another tack that I’ve seen taken is for cafés to design their own water by taking distilled water
(0ppm) and adding the required mineral content to that base with the aim of making perfect brewing
water. In theory this sounds great but in reality it’s almost impossible to dose accurately in small batches
when the mineral doses are in fractions of milligrams. One drop too many and you’ve got a completely
skewed batch.
If you try to increase the batch size and produce, say, 500 litres of water – taking into consideration
that a reasonably busy café will use about 75 litres a day in brew water – the accuracy will probably
improve. Unfortunately, you then have a huge issue with cleaning that vessel, keeping the water fresh
and oxygenated and, most importantly, avoiding mildew or mould build-up in the tank it’s kept in. Anyone
that’s ever kept fish will be familiar with that.
In truth, the most accurate way to “make” water is to do it in cubic litres (1,000 litres) at a time in a
factory. The larger the batch size, the less variance there will be and also the facilities available will be of
a higher standard than those found at your common or garden coffee shop.
If I ran a café in a region with incredibly hard or soft water I would simply buy the water in bulk, which
at first seems like a crazy idea. When you consider, however, that most offices in most cities have a
water tower that requires delivery of sterile, manufactured, consistent water you realise that this isn’t
such a wild proposition after all.
A water company could deliver purpose specific, consistent water at a very reasonable price and
save a specialty café a lot of money in cartridges, machine maintenance, filtration systems and man
hours in a process that really is no different to how we get milk delivered. You could probably be assured
that your water delivery every day would be cheaper than your milk delivery.
The main downside to this is the carbon footprint associated with driving something that could be
tapped and, I suppose, I don’t have an immediate answer to this.
Boiling water is also bad for coffee but not for the reasons most people think. There is a perception
that boiling water will burn your coffee but this isn’t true. Coffee is usually roasted at a temperature of
over 220ºC, so boiling water at 100ºC isn’t going to do any harm to it. If your brew tastes burnt it is either
due to over-extraction (the grind is too fine or the contact time is too long) or else the roast profile itself
is too dark and has made the coffee taste ashy and burnt.
Water is deoxygenated by boiling and that makes it quite flat and dull for coffee brewing. Using fresh
water and knocking your kettle off just before it boils will ensure the water is at its best. A simple test you
can do at home is to boil a kettle and then leave it a few hours to cool down. Once it’s back to room
temperature, re-boil it and make a cup of tea or coffee. Then, very quickly, dump the water from the
kettle, replace it with fresh water, boil again and make another cup of tea/coffee for comparative tasting.
You should now have two cups, one made with fresh water and another made with re-boiled water,
and the results should be quite stark. The fresh water will have more vibrancy, better flavour and should
generally be a lot more delicious. The previously boiled water brew by comparison will be flat, dull and
lacking flavour.
A Drink By Any Other Name
about the coffee industry, it would be the conundrum surrounding milk drinks.
Most people these days are familiar with the basic milk drink names: cappuccinos, lattes, flat whites,
macchiatos, piccolos, cortados, magics and gibraltars, to name but a few. Each of these have their own
definitions that unfortunately change from place to place, and therein lies the problem.
The “magic” is probably one of the least known of these drinks but the story behind it is a great
example of how ridiculous the milk drink definition game has gotten. The story goes that two baristas at
a prominent Melbourne café jokingly referred to a flat white as a new drink called a “magic” and the next
day customers started ordering it and never stopped. This drink soon became more popular than the flat
white in some places, even though it was the same thing.
The cappuccino was the first of these iconic drinks that emerged from the Viennese coffee houses in
the 19th century, long before the espresso machine was ever invented. It involved coffee in a pot and
then adding milk to bring sweetness and balance the bitterness. This made the drink turn from black to
dark brown to off-tan. The name wasn’t a reference to the Capuchin monks’ hairline, as the legend
goes, but merely a colour reference for the coffee and milk mixture against the cloth that the monks
wore.
Once this drink was adopted by the Italians and incorporated into their new espresso culture, it began
to take a life of its own and the cappuccino to this day is seen as a quintessential Italian drink. When
steam wands became available on espresso machines in the early 20th century, milk began to be
steamed into the thick froth that we know today.
However even in Italy, the “recipe” for a traditional cappuccino is far from clear-cut. Anyone that’s
IF I COULD CHANGE ONE THING
ever spent time in Italy will understand that it really is a nation made up of many small countries. Even
the simplest recipes are fiercely contested between regions with something as basic as a pesto or
Arrabiata sauce having a multitude of different combinations of ingredients varying from place to place,
and a long standing battle to establish which is the best.
The idea that there is a “recipe” for a cappuccino, or indeed any milk/coffee combination, is wishful
thinking unfortunately. Even the World Barista Championship definition of a cappuccino was vague and
open to so much interpretation that there was very little consensus on the subject. They recently
abandoned the drink altogether and competitors are now required to prepare an unnamed milk
beverage of their choice.
A latte traditionally can be taken to mean more milk than a cappuccino in terms of ratio, but that all
gets blown out of the water by the “double shot” latte which again brings the ratio back down. The
“thinner milk” description probably came as a result of using a bigger cup that had a wider mouth. I’ve
often heard that a latte is called as such if it’s served in a glass. It’s an argument that is hard to argue
with because of the frustration it entails.
The more modern flat white is essentially a small strong milk drink which also has little or no
standardisation. It first came to prominence in Australia or New Zealand, depending on whom you
believe, and by the time it hit London in the early part of this century it became more of a buzzword for
quality than an actual recipe. The truth is that the best purveyors of the heralded flat white have a
myriad of different recipes amongst themselves that often approach what others would call a macchiato,
a cappuccino or a latte.
Take-away cups tend only to come in a limited number of sizes so most places serve the same thing
when they’re asked for a combination of milk drinks to go.
This confusion about what a <insert drink name here> is exactly complicates the barista’s job. People
often base their interpretation of a milk drink on what they’ve been served in their favourite café, and
then expect the same recipe from a new place they visit.
I’ve had some pretty angry customers blow their top at me for serving them a “cappuccino” that was
actually a latte/flat white/macchiato/etc. in their book. It’s a discussion you can’t commit to without a 20minute conversation.
People already have a preconceived idea of what constitutes their favourite drink, so when they enter
a coffee shop they expect the shop to deliver on those terms. That is their expectation. When you
consider that most busy cafés will serve around 300 drinks in a day, you begin to understand how
difficult it is to meet people’s expectations.
At our shop we took the unusual step of abandoning milk names altogether for our beverages. Our
menu didn’t mention the words cappuccino, latte, flat white or macchiato anywhere but people still
ordered them anyway and it became a bit messy. We served espresso with or without steamed milk.
The milk was steamed one particular way and one way only but people still ordered lattes, cappuccinos
and flat whites, and they still expected to be served that drink by name once it was made regardless of
the fact that they were all the same.
The compromise became that we just called everything “cappuccino” because we needed to call
them something. Then people started sending them back because they preferred when we served
lattes. It’s an impossible situation to remedy.
If there was one thing I could standardise in coffee it would be the recipes for milk-based drinks in
terms of their size, foam depth, ratio and weight. Unfortunately, until then it’s a battle we face every day
to ensure people get what they want. One piece of advice I’d give consumers is don’t ever be afraid to
engage baristas. Most of them would like you to enjoy your coffee and would be grateful of any help you
can provide to achieve that.
Knowledge : Coffee : Equipment
and have been fortunate enough to have visited some of the most
incredible cities on the planet. Regardless of where I go though, I am always pre-occupied about where I
am going to get my first cup of coffee.
I’m a firm believer that you are always a good coffee and a decent meal away from loving a city. Part
of the success of 3fe has been down to the fact that people land at Dublin Airport, log onto an online
resource like Yelp or TripAdvisor and very soon they’re wheeling themselves and their luggage through
our doors.
As in many coffee shops around the world, our staff tend to know the best restaurants, cafés and
bars in the city and so names, numbers and maps are scribbled on the backs of menus and off these
visitors go to fall in love with our city. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of and I love sparking off their
relationship with our hometown.
When I travel to a new city, I start to behave more like a “regular” coffee drinker in that I will settle for
something that’s just plain tasty and if it’s any better than that it’s a bonus. My bar is set considerably
lower when I travel because my need for coffee is greater.
What surprises people about my criteria for choosing a café though is the ranking of priorities I have.
The truth is something I wished more café owners would consider.
I TRAVEL QUITE A LOT WITH MY WORK
I always seek out a café with these three factors, in order of merit:
Knowledge
Coffee
Equipment
If I find someone who knows what they’re doing, has decent coffee but not the best equipment, they are
my best bet.
Unfortunately what most people prioritise when they open a café is usually the following:
Equipment
Coffee
Knowledge
In this scenario, we usually end up with what’s often phrased as “all the gear and no idea”. It’s an all too
common scenario. Business owners in fear of their staff “stealing” their knowledge instead try to woo
customers with expensive coffee machines and recognisable but over-priced coffee brands but forego
any sort of extensive staff training.
I will always prefer to visit a café where the person making my coffee is passionate about what they
do, regardless of what equipment or coffee they’re using. A knowledgeable barista on bog standard
equipment with an average coffee can make something I can drink but an untrained barista even with
the best equipment and beans hasn’t a hope, and I’m not coming to their shop.
There’s a lesson in this for café owners too about how they should treat their staff. Business owners
in our industry are often afraid to invest in their staff’s education because of the transient nature of the
job. They feel that if they spend money training staff then the staff will just leave and take that
knowledge with them.
In my experience, the opposite is true. I’ve always found that the more you invest in your staff, the
more loyal they are. In turn, I’ve always encouraged my staff to share the knowledge invested in them
with their co-workers, and try to actively learn more together. If and when members of your team do
eventually leave, you’ll know if that sharing of information is happening by the amount of people that are
able to fill the gap left behind by a staff member leaving.
When you visit a business as a customer, it’s always incredibly obvious how well educated the staff
are, even if you’re not an expert in that field. It’s a huge leap of faith for business owners to invest in
their staff’s education but, in my experience, it’s one that reflects highly in your performance as a team
and will have an incredible impact on your success.
Extra Hot
requesting extra hot coffee on a daily basis. Unfortunately, many
will treat these customers with contempt or, at best, a thin tolerance. There is a belief amongst coffee
people in general that extra hot coffees, especially the milk-based drinks, is something of a faux pas and
shouldn’t be encouraged.
To compound matters, I know from experience that people who want extra hot drinks are usually
quite aggressive about how they request it and, a lot of the time, this is completely understandable
because they’ve probably been mistreated by a swathe of surly baristas in previous cafés they’ve
visited.
In truth I’d actually prefer a coffee that’s too hot to one that was too cold because at least the former
allows you to wait until it drops into your preferred temperature range. A coffee that’s too cold, however,
is not getting any hotter. It can’t be fixed.
Your ability to taste coffee is dictated by the temperature and when the beverage is too hot or too
cold all your brain is telling you is “too hot”, or “too cold”. As the drinks approach less extreme
temperatures your taste buds and your brain start to work better together and you can taste a lot more.
People often say that the drink changes as it cools but actually the drink stays the same, just your ability
to taste it changes.
If you’ve ever tasted white wine at room temperature you’ll know it doesn’t taste great and is often
overpoweringly sweet and pungent. Cooling white wine takes away your ability to taste all of that and it
becomes more pleasant. Red wine is usually quite flavourless at cold temperatures and so we warm it
up so we can taste more.
There isn’t really an ideal temperature range for coffee because, ultimately, it’s a subjective thing. My
own preference is somewhere between 55ºC to 60ºC, but I also enjoy drinking espressos and filter
coffees as they cool down to room temperature and seeing how they change. The problem remains
though that anyone asking for drinks above 60ºC is seen as a heathen by a lot of baristas.
I’ve always tried to engage these customers as much as possible because if you get their order right
then you’ve got them for life. In a lot of cases it’s a lot harder to change the temperature of their
espresso or hot water than it may seem, but there are other ways to make sure their drinks are hot
enough.
A lot of people are obsessed with the thickness of cup walls but while that is important it’s not near as
important as density. A dense and thick cup wall will hold heat longer and that will have a huge impact
on the drink temperature. Using a warm cup and getting it to the table in a timely manner will also make
the drink hotter for the customer but there’s an extra trick that you can do to help the customer get the
drink they want.
Just before you make the drink, take the handle of the cup and run it under piping hot water. The
handle is usually one of the densest parts of a cup and it holds that heat well. Once the drink is made
and delivered to the customer the first message you’re sending them as soon as they touch the cup is
that this one’s piping hot. You won’t get many complaints after that.
The thing about keeping picky customers happy is that most shops don’t bother, so if you fulfill their
needs you have them forever. I’ve also found over the years that if you look after the ratty, narky
customer with the very particular request they can often end up being the most interesting customer and
often the most loyal too, because you’re the only one who wants to make them happy.
MOST BARISTAS WILL ENCOUNTER CUSTOMERS
Make The Worst Cup Better
back of making excellent cups of coffee but, strangely, that’s never been my
number one focus. I’ve always spent more time worrying about the “worst” cup of coffee, because it’s
easier to get a greater return on quality with the least amount of effort.
If you serve excellent cappuccinos at your shop but your filter coffee is only average, which of the two
is easier to improve? Asking a barista to take an excellent cup of coffee and make it 10% or 20% better
is almost impossible, but when you take something that’s easy to improve the gains become infinitely
more achievable.
In a coffee bar that generally serves excellent coffee, you should ask yourself what the bad cups look
like, look at those characteristics, and decide that they are no longer going to be served.
I HAVE BUILT MY CAREER ON THE
These can be any criteria, but will likely include:
Cups with a chip in them.
Crooked latte art.
Cups with dribbles down the side.
Narrow your field of your brew’s extraction.
Cups with the wrong spoon.
Drinks that aren’t filled to the optimum point.
Filter coffees that have been sitting longer than X amount of time.
Coffee roasted within X amount of days.
Grinders not cleaned in the last X days.
Espresso from machines not cleaned in the last X minutes.
What you will find is that all of these steps will have very little impact on the quality of your favourite cups
of coffee, but they will have a massive impact on the worst cups you serve and they will make the
general standard rise substantially. Think about how an underperforming student can bring down the
average grade in a class of great students. Focusing on the whizz-kids will do little for the class’
average, but focusing on the kid who needs a hand will bring the average up quite noticeably.
When you run or work in a coffee shop though, you’re always focusing on the best cups. You
compare yourself to other shops based on your best cup and whatever random cup you get when you
visit their place. That’s not how everyone thinks though. It’s usually quite the opposite.
Think how you might have a meal, or a hotel stay, or visit a cocktail bar. If it’s poor quality, do you give
them another shot? Generally you would not. People are obsessed with making exceptional coffee and
will do very strange things to their product and service to attain that but I will always pick consistently
good coffee over occasionally-great-but-sometimes-poor coffee. The latter is the most frustrating kind of
coffee shop.
That is not to say that you should stop trying to make huge leaps in quality, but your focus should
always be on the low bar, the average and the worst cups that go out because that is always what you’ll
be judged on. Those drinks are the easiest to improve and the most achievable today. Focusing on them
will help you build a coffee business that is consistent, progressive and delicious.
Staff
How to Hire People
we’ve learned that hiring well is the best way to improve your business and
investing time in the hiring stage will save you a lot of time, heartache and money in the long run.
There was a time, in the early years, when every new hire that I made was based on a gut feeling
and very often I ended up giving the job to the people who kept enquiring or dropping off CVs. There
was no real system and although I felt I was a good judge of character, I was definitely lucky to get away
with it over the years.
As things got busier, our capacity to deal with a member of staff not showing up worsened and very
often myself, or one of the management team, would be called in on our day off to fill a gap. This was
sometimes because we didn’t have enough staff and sometimes because someone didn’t turn up, but
both are situations that should be dealt with by a more robust hiring system.
The time to hire someone is before you need them. With that in mind we now look to start the hiring
process early.
AS OUR BUSINESS HAS GROWN
It’s vital to be able to understand at what point you’re going to need someone else and this can be
achieved by doing one or all of these things:
Watch your sales growth and understanding the staffing requirements of your business as it grows.
If you can work more efficiently, that’s always best but at some point you will need an extra pair of
hands.
Make your staff understand that you need notice if they’re going to leave and to respect that notice
period once it’s given. Other staff will watch to see how you react so be sure to be respectful of
outgoing staff and let them give a decent notice period without giving them grief for moving on.
Keep track of holiday time owed to staff. Very often we’ve had a perfect roster of staff humming
along for nine months and then realised we had nobody to cover holiday leave during our busiest
period.
The first step is to write up a job description, which is essentially everything they’ll be expected to do. Is
it a position on the floor, till, coffee machine, kitchen or a mix of all these things? What is the pay? What
are the hours? What tasks will they be expected to perform?
This might look something like this:
Barista at 3fe
The role involves:
Making and serving coffee
Operating the till
Regular cleaning of the café and toilets
Liaising with the kitchen staff
Restocking shelves
Customer service as well as dealing queries and complaints
Ensuring the ambiance amongst staff and customers is a positive one
The next step is a person specification, which is a description of the sort of person you’re looking for.
That might look something like this:
Person Specification
Enjoys manual work
Can work early shifts (6.30am)
Punctual
Fast learner
Organised
Task focused
Enjoys routine
Positive attitude
Has previous experience in the hospitality industry
A keen interest in coffee
I’ve always found it useful to have a “bonus for” section, which is made up of criteria that aren’t required
but would be great if the applicant satisfied them.
These might include:
Coffee experience
Coffee qualifications
Kitchen experience
Food safety training
I often get asked why we don’t require coffee experience when we’re hiring baristas and in truth, most of
the baristas that work at 3fe have little to no coffee experience when they start. The first advantage of
this approach is you don’t inherit any bad habits. A lot of the time those bad habits are actually good
habits in a different context, but we have a particular way of making coffee at 3fe and if everyone doesn’t
do it the same way we run into trouble.
That’s not to say that we don’t ever take on improvements suggested by new recruits, but the time to
suggest a change in technique is away from the bar. Once there’s approval for that process it’s rolled out
uniformly and not just by one person whenever they’re working a shift.
Once a person has a good attitude and is keen to learn, we can teach them how to make coffee
because we have that skill set. What I’ve found harder to teach people over the years are things like
turning up for work on time, being professional in your approach and treating your contemporaries with
respect. Things like that are looked at in the vetting stage, everything else you can learn on the job. In
my opinion, attitude trumps experience.
The next step is the survey, and this is probably the most valuable tool. I first came across this
technique when Bridgeen Barbour and Mark Ashbridge at Established in Belfast posted one on one of
their social media accounts and since then we’ve adapted the idea for our own needs and use one
every time we hire someone. We make sure the questions are specific and that there are lots of them so
the survey does most of the hard work for us.
It does a number of things:
It acts as a filter for those applicants who couldn’t be bothered filling out the survey. We found that
once we started using a survey the amount of applicants we got lowered but the quality improved
dramatically. We definitely got less people who wanted any job and more people who wanted this
job.
It avoids a situation where someone starts a job and lands a bombshell on you shortly after they
start. Some questions that can save you a lot of heartache in the long run are:
— Can you work weekends?
— Do you have a work permit?
— Can you speak fluent English?
— Are you willing to clean toilets?
— Can you fulfill the role for at least a 12-month period?
It makes it clear to the applicant what sort of business we run in both an explicit and implicit way.
When you ask people if they value honesty in a business they get a strong sense that your
business definitely does.
The last requirement on the survey is for the applicant to outline their thoughts on equality, diversity and
inclusion in the workplace in three or four sentences. Most people give a fairly safe and warm answer
that fulfills the criteria but I’ve no doubt that there have been people who’ve filled out 39 out of the 40
questions but decided not to do the last one because we sound like a bunch of kooks. A person who
doesn’t believe in this kind of ethos is not a person that I’d like to hire.
What is more is that the applicants that are successful come into a workplace feeling secure and
protected so that if something occurs that they feel is unjust, illegal or in breach of our ethical standpoint,
they can raise that issue without fear of rebuke.
In recent years one of our staff members felt they were being treated unfairly because of their gender
and raised the issue. Initially, I must admit I was defensive about it and was about to launch into a list of
things that I had done to ensure there was a level playing field in the business.
Instead, I bit my tongue and listened and very soon it dawned on me that she was right, and action
needed to be taken. The one positive I could take from the situation is that she felt completely safe in
coming to me and never felt that it would have a negative impact on her role if she raised the issue. Lots
of businesses will make token gestures about inclusivity, diversity and gender balance but the most
progressive businesses will open themselves up to criticism and will be supportive of their staff doing
that. It can be painful at times but it’s always worthwhile.
Survey Questions Example
What is your name / email / phone number?
Are you available for full time employment? Yes / No
Can you work weekends/Bank Holidays? Yes / No
Are you legally allowed work in Ireland? Yes / No
Are you seeking employment for at least a 12-month period? Yes / No
How proficient is your English? First language / Fluent / Very good / Good to poor
Are you available to work from as early as 6.30am and as late as 7.30pm? (Not on the same day)
Yes / No
Have you ever worked in the coffee industry? If so, please give details.
Have you ever worked in the food and beverage or service industry? If so, please give a brief
description.
A customer returns a drink to the bar and says it’s too cold. What is the appropriate response?
A customer returns a bag of coffee that they bought and says that they don’t like it. What is the
appropriate response?
What are your interests outside of work?
What would you like to see more of in Dublin coffee shops?
What would you like to see less of in Dublin coffee shops?
Have you ever been responsible for cashing out tills as part of your work duties?
Why would you like to work for 3fe?
Do you brew coffee at home?
How would you describe your knowledge of coffee? (Coffee knowledge is not necessary but is a
bonus) Excellent / Very good / OK / Not good
What was your best coffee experience to date?
Could you tell a Kenyan coffee from an Indonesian coffee and state which is which (within
reason)?
Have you got any coffee qualifications?
Have you any third level qualifications?
Do you have a full valid driver’s license? Yes / No
Do you have any criminal convictions?
Would you consider yourself a good team player, and if so why?
Which of these tasks would you not be prepared to perform in your daily duties? Cleaning toilets /
Washing dishes / Scrubbing floors / Counting stock
How far from 3fe do you live and how would you make your way there?
What are your salary expectations?
After we’ve gone through the survey responses we’ll draw up a list of six to eight candidates and, within
that, try to create a diverse panel of applicants based on the information they’ve given us. In a country
like Ireland where the population is 95% white Irish this can be difficult to achieve, so we will always
attempt to include minorities in the eight or so candidates. It’s easier to get a gender balance in the
panel but I’m becoming increasingly mindful of our responsibilities towards those that are gender fluid,
gender queer or have a mindset towards their own gender that they want to define themselves.
Given my own background, it can be difficult – and even frustrating – for me as a business owner
(and as a person) to bear in mind how some issue I hadn’t previously considered might make someone
feel uncomfortable. However, at the same time, it’s infinitely more important that you empathise with
those that have both explicit and implicit barriers put in their way and understand that a small gesture on
your behalf can make a hugely positive impact on their lives.
You can also create a diverse panel of interviewers and this too creates a system that can nurture a
diverse working environment. We’ll always give the job to the most suitable applicant but if you’re
constantly hiring the same kind of people you need to ask yourself why there aren’t more people
applying and succeeding from different backgrounds.
I’ve made mistakes thousands of times when it comes to treating staff and prospective staff fairly, but
the first step is accepting that you’re never going to get it all right. Stay open-minded, try to keep
learning and most importantly, don’t be defensive with negative feedback.
Ideally you should start the process of hiring someone six to eight weeks before they’re needed. You
won’t always be in control of this but it’s a healthy standard to set yourself. The process will take three to
four weeks to get to stage where a position is offered and if/when the right candidate comes along,
they’ll more than likely be happy to wait three to four weeks before starting.
If they already have a job they’ll need to give notice of two to three weeks and if they don’t have a job
they’ll be more focused on securing work than on a few weeks difference in a start date. Always make a
point of asking applicants what notice period they’ll need to give if they already have a job. There are
occasions when people are contractually obliged to give long notice periods and, even if they aren’t, it’s
a great character insight. We’ve often waited longer for a new recruit who wants to let their employer
find and train someone new first because they don’t want to leave on bad terms which to me is always a
great sign. Conversely, I’ve been scared off otherwise excellent applicants when they proclaim that
they’ll just quit their job, leave the next day and come work for you. You have to remember that the
person you’re hiring is most likely going to leave your company some day so this step can save you a lot
of heartache. There will always be exceptions but for most people we’ve found this works.
Interviews
The interview stage for a café job should really be an exercise in reaffirming all of the things that
applicants have claimed to be true in their CV and survey. Press them to confirm what you feel is
important to them but don’t put words in their mouths.
It’s also an excellent opportunity to give them a firm understanding of what will be expected of them.
If your business is one that prides itself on quality, make that abundantly clear. Let them know where
your priorities lie. Is it speed, friendliness, quality or all of the above and in what order do they come?
We’ve had occasions where people sit through the interview and decide they don’t want the job
anymore and to my mind that’s a positive outcome for both parties. The last thing you want to do is to
spend three months training someone and then they decide to leave.
Next up is the trial shift and this is where you get some surprises. People that have no experience
and barely made it through the interview can suddenly blossom when they take to the floor of a busy
café. I’ve seen this happen many times. I like to think that you can train most people to work in
hospitality, but there are also people that have an innate talent for it.
I remember one day walking into the café and seeing a trialist walk past with a plate of food and a
cup of coffee. As ridiculous as it sounds, I could tell instantly that he was going to do well. He was
holding both in one hand, was smiling and making eye contact with customers, light on his feet and
when he eventually got to the table, whatever he said made the whole table smile. He ended up getting
the job, soon became a manager and today owns one of the best cafés in the city.
There are others though that don’t take to things as quickly but all’s not lost. What you’re looking for
is a willingness to respond to instruction, learn on the job and an ability to get on with people. Once they
display these traits you have someone you can work with.
When people do trials at 3fe, they only get to wash dishes, clean toilets and clear tables, regardless
of the job they’re applying for. You can tell a lot about a person by how they wash tables or clean toilets
and if they feel those jobs are beneath them then you probably don’t want to hire them.
We’ve had a number of technically excellent baristas apply for jobs and breezed through interviews
only to fall at the trial stage. There have been some who repeatedly keep trying to make coffee to show
off their skill set – despite management asking them not to – which is a very worrying trait. Others have
refused to do menial tasks that they feel are beneath them when their true calling is making coffee.
Suffice to say that none of these applicants were successful.
Offering The Job
After all the applicants have had their trials, it’s a good idea to sit down with your management team and
go through how each person did. It’s important not to talk too much before this point because it’s very
easy to create bias for or against a potential employee with observations early on. Try to include
comments and input from a number of staff who have worked with the trialists because it’s important that
they have a say and feel involved in the hiring of new staff. They’ll probably be spending more time with
them than you will so their feedback and buy-in is vital.
Once you’ve decided who the best applicant was you need to write up an official offer and email it to
them. This may feel a little corporate, but the applicant deserves a clear and concise outline of what
they’re being offered. There is a very clear power dynamic at play here that is often abused so you owe
it to them to make the position you’re offering them unambiguous and clearly defined.
It should include:
Rate of pay
Hours per week
Responsibilities
Management structure
Start date
You should also encourage them to ask any questions that they may have beforehand. It’s generally
best for both sides if you chat back and forth a bit beforehand in fact.
You should be prompt with this step and return correspondence because you may end up at a point
where they decide not to take the job. There’s also a chance that if they interviewed for this position that
they’ve interviewed for others.
While this process is underway don’t be too quick to communicate bad news to unsuccessful
applicants. You may not always get to hire your first choice so it’s nice to have a second or third choice.
Some of our best staff weren’t first picks, you can’t get everything 100% right. After the interview, inform
those applying that you’ll need at least a week to get back in touch but, once you’ve decided, contact
them straight away. This means that you’ve bought yourself some time to send out offers and move on
down the list if they don’t accept the job.
Finally, have all the necessary contracts drawn up and ready for signing so you can finalise the
process. In most jurisdictions you can download template contracts online that adhere to the relevant
employment law but if you have a lawyer or HR firm that can help you with this then better yet. This
helps establish a firm base for your new employee and ensures they feel secure and valued in their new
position.
If you have an induction process, orientation meeting or a staff handbook, now is the time to sit them
down and go through everything with them, before they start work. If you don’t have any of this then just
bring them for lunch and chat about your hopes for the business and what your expectations are for
them, they’re now a stakeholder in the success of everything your business does.
Hiring people is always difficult and it’s always going to be a subjective process but your job as an
employer is to make it as objective as you can. Define the goals, boundaries and scope of the work and
try to get better each time and learn from your inevitable mistakes. When I started my business, people
told me that the worst part of running a business would be hiring and managing people but I can
honestly say that watching people grow and develop in their work has been by far the most rewarding
aspect of what we do.
Continuity Is The Cheapest Staffing Strategy
crucial aspects of running a café but taking a daily snapshot of what you’re
paying doesn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps one of the most ignored and perilous areas of staff cost is
the cost of staff turnover.
When a business has a new member of staff on bar there are two ways they can go about getting
them up to speed. The first is basically to throw them in the deep end. If the roster usually has five shifts,
STAFF COST IS ONE OF THE MOST
they simply take one of those shifts and see what happens.
This not only creates an incredibly difficult learning environment for the new member of staff, it also
puts enormous pressure on the other staff that are working. This usually generates a little tension
between the two parties and that’s never a good thing for a business. What’s more is that invariably the
quality of service and product will suffer and that will have a detrimental effect on quality, the reputation
of your business and consequentially, the turnover.
Unfortunately in my experience, many cafés choose this route, and although there’s a short-term gain
in terms of staff cost, it has long reaching consequences that may not be so obvious. As well as the
quality and reputation suffering, it also has an impact on the morale of the other staff and, very soon,
some of those people might crack and decide to leave, thus perpetuating the problem.
Subsequently, another new member of staff will turn up to get trained on the job by another member
of staff with little experience themselves and at that point quality, morale and viability can go into free
fall.
The method we favour at 3fe is to have the new member come on as an extra member of staff until
they feel confident enough to take a whole shift themselves. People often think we do that for the benefit
of the new recruit but in truth it’s more for the existing team so they can do their own jobs properly in a
less stressful environment.
People underestimate how hard it is to train new staff and how much it takes out of you as you think
through every step and explain every action and consequence. Coupled with the workload that you
already have anyway, showing someone the ropes can be a very difficult day’s work at the best of times.
Many would argue that having an extra member of staff on when they’re training is not commercially
viable but if you can create an environment conducive to learning and maintain a positive working
culture with your existing staff, that in turn will lead to better staff retention, a faster learning curve and a
more viable business. It’s a short-term expense that will save you money in the long run.
The cost of a learning curve is a hard one to quantify, but it’s one I look at as not being an expense
but an investment. A well-trained team in a good working environment is one that will help you create a
viable business that is sustainable and profitable.
Perhaps the most expensive cost of a high staff turnover is one that is very difficult to quantify: the
loss of tacit knowledge in a business. Tacit knowledge is all the knowledge that exists in a business that
isn’t written down. It’s the know-how, the contacts, the hunches, the experience that is built up in
increments over many years that disappears instantly when a person or group of people leave.
There are many examples across all types of businesses where the powers above have cut jobs and
seen only the value of their wages as a saving. When there are four people doing the job of two, it’s
easy to just cut the two that earn the most, but sometimes the tacit knowledge that those people
possess that would disappear could be enough to pull the business down if they were to leave.
There’s no sure-fire way to offset the risk associated with losing tacit knowledge in a business but
having an open learning culture is a good way to hedge against it. If you have people in your business
that are hoarding knowledge about how the place operates and not sharing it throughout the staff, that
can be dangerous both in terms of the culture you’re building and also from a strategic perspective.
I see this very often with cafés that open with a head barista who is charged with driving the coffee
programme where the owner or owners don’t have a lot of experience in coffee. If you are choosing to
take this route, be sure to instill in your staff very early on that they are there to teach their co-workers
and they will be rewarded for doing so.
The reward is crucial because it creates a strong culture of pass-it-on. That makes a business robust
and dynamic, able to deal with shifts that come its way. You need to have a plan for each person’s exit
and have someone to replace him or her if they leave the team, which means there should really be two
people capable of doing each role you require. It’s something that I make staff very aware of and they
see it as a part of their role that they teach other people to do their job. Not only does this safeguard the
system in case they leave, it also means that they’re a viable option for promotion because if they’re the
only one capable of doing their job, they can never leave that position.
You’ll come across many business owners who claim a staff member’s departure has dropped them
in it, but in truth it’s their fault for not building a strong system.
Encourage your staff to share the tacit – and explicit – knowledge of the café and to be open with
what they know, but be sure to reward them for it too. When people make your business stronger and
better, it’s important that they see the benefit too because it sets a precedent for everyone else in the
company to follow suit, to the benefit of all.
Culture
Culture Trumps Quality Control
hospitality businesses, ranging from small independent cafés to the world’s
largest restaurant chain, I’ve seen many systems and organisational tools at work. What I find incredibly
interesting is observing whether a business will implement procedures by the book or allow staff to use
their intuition and judgement. There are also myriad ways in between that strike a balance.
My experience of chains and high street cafés is one where the employees are handed a guidebook
and expected to adhere to every rule within that book. Everything – from what they wear, to what they
say, to how they make coffee – is outlined in bullet points and in no way open to interpretation or
experimentation.
To my mind, this will guarantee a level of consistency but will go a long way towards stifling
innovation, enthusiasm and ultimately quality.
In specialty coffee there are many cafés around the world that pride themselves on their quality
control (QC) procedures to the point that it becomes more important than the product or service itself.
One place that sticks out in my mind had a training programme in place that was so onerous the staff
members weren’t allowed to serve straight espresso until they’d completed the two-year long training
programme.
This was something they were incredibly proud of, and would often boast about it online. The strange
thing was that when I visited the café the espresso was undrinkable. It seemed they were more proud of
their training programme than they were their product. The truth is that providing a quality product is not
a linear process that just requires ticking boxes. As much as I love building a system that works, running
a café is a much more holistic process.
I talk to colleagues constantly about this and always refer to cups of coffee as an obvious example of
where this comes into play. We have a spec sheet where we outline exactly how a cappuccino should
be made and served, down to the finest detail. It outlines what cup is used, what dose, strength and
extraction yield is targeted, where the spoon lies, what temperature it should be, the foam depth, the
style of latte art and even the way the handle should be presented in front of a customer.
Although it’s important to outline these criteria so everyone knows what we’re trying to achieve. It
doesn’t mean there won’t ever be problems and it’s even more crucial to remember that even the most
specific of rulebooks is nowhere near as important as great culture.
Great culture on a coffee bar is about empowering staff to make great decisions and this is where
real quality is achieved. If a staff member is trained up in a situation where drinks that aren’t up to
standard aren’t served, then this will become a norm and becomes part of the culture of the bar.
When they’ve made a drink and they know it’s not up to scratch, they’ll make a split second decision.
Do they serve it anyway knowing they’ll most likely get away with it, without their colleagues knowing, or
do they make it again?
What if there’s a queue out the door? What if they’ve already remade a few drinks that day? Do they
take the hit on this drink and take solace in the fact that there’s plenty more customers to impress? The
other choice, and to my mind the correct choice, is to dump it and start again and get a member of floor
staff to go explain the delay.
We’ve been doing this for years and when we explain to a customer that we’re making their drink
again because we weren’t happy with the first one and we want it to be great, I’ve never had any kind of
complaints.
People will come back to your business because it’s good, so whenever it’s bad you’re giving them a
reason not to come back. Empowering your staff with the decision of whether or not to serve a drink,
serve food – or indeed, to decide about any other process you do – is going to have a greater impact on
ACROSS A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT
the success of your business than any rulebook ever would. Let them know how important their
decisions are and allow them to make decisions that may seem costly in the short term but in the long
term are much more beneficial for them, you and your customers.
The Correlation Of Nice
– probably too much – and I often come across people complaining about
rude customers. I’ve also encountered this within my own shop and also in most of the coffee shops that
I frequent. At this point, I will say that some people are dicks. That’s just the truth of it. There are people
out there who will go out of their way to be rude and obnoxious just for the sake of it and there will
continue to be. We can’t change that.
What is also true though is that there is a direct correlation between how nice you are to your
customers and how nice they are to you. The friendliest cafés always have the nicest customers and the
grumpiest cafés get what they deserve. You’ll find this happening the world over.
Sometimes, however, friendly cafés get rude customers, but I’m always interested when café staff are
complaining that a large number of their customers are being rude to them. If that’s happening then
there’s something wrong, and you should probably start by looking at what you yourself are doing to
provoke this behaviour in your customers.
We had one instance where staff complained that, for a whole lunch period over two hours, a number
of customers were being rude and abrasive. One of the staff was visibly upset and I was concerned he
might actually turn in his notice.
I came downstairs to the café to talk to them and see what might have caused it and every
suggestion, logically enough, was aimed at the customer. Meanwhile, the weather was cold and rainy, it
was late in the month but still a week from pay-day and the staff were getting tired of us changing the
sandwiches and just want the same routine all the time. There were other factors adding to the staff
member’s frustration.
In the midst of this conversation I glanced at the food counter and noticed that there were no labels
on the sandwiches being displayed which are usually there to let the customer know what the
ingredients are and what price it is. I asked the staff where they were and it turned out that the printer
was broken so they couldn’t print any that day.
It then struck me that the customers were queuing for food and trying to figure out what was in the
sandwiches and how much they were, before being put on the spot as soon as they reached the till
without knowing what was on offer or for how much.
This would have been mildly irritating for some, but incredibly stressful for others and no doubt gave
rise to a lot of nervous tension which manifested itself as rudeness. I asked the staff if a lot of people
had asked about prices and ingredients and they recalled how this had happened repeatedly which in
turn slowed down service and caused more stress and tension again.
It seemed plainly obvious all of a sudden and the next day, when we labeled everything up, you could
instantly see a change in the customers’ behaviour. We learned a valuable lesson from this and any
time we encounter a rude customer we ask ourselves if there is something we have done to create
frustration that might have led to this.
I USE SOCIAL MEDIA QUITE A LOT
If you’re having issues with rudeness always question yourselves first. Here are some of the questions
you should be asking yourselves:
Do your customers get what you’re trying to achieve?
If not, whose fault is that?
Are your queues or wait times too long?
Is your signage clear enough?
Is your music too loud?
Is it easy for your customers to make payments? (Cash-only businesses get this)
Are you running out of your best sellers consistently?
Are your servers asking too many questions at the order stage, and if so why?
Are you being blunt or rude?
Are you being too friendly?
It seems like the obvious thing for a customer to do when they’re unhappy is to tell you about it, but most
people will just say nothing and opt instead for a passive aggressive interaction in the hope that you pick
up on their real problem. Many people have social anxiety around ordering in shops and this too can
cause a lot of problems which lead to rudeness.
A handy trick I’ve used over the years is to ask three questions of any customer that has a complaint
before you offer up any response. This shows them that you’re invested in a solution and care about
resolving the issue. There aren’t specific questions that you need to ask as every situation and customer
is slightly different, but three questions should be more than enough to get an idea of what the problem
is and it gives you an opportunity to learn something about the issue that you may not have realised had
you not engaged with them. Listening to their problem in-depth usually gives you both a chance to calm
down and assess the problem and, more often than not, they offer up a solution in the course of the
conversation. It’s a tactic that has served me very well over the years.
As much as there are rude people out there, it’s your job as a café owner to not only try to spot the
triggers, but also educate the staff that improving the customer experience will also make their working
conditions better and ensure they enjoy coming to work each day.
Respect
the former Liverpool Football Club coach, Gérard Houllier, speak at a
function in Dublin. He must have talked about football for over two hours but it was something else he
said that has stuck with me to this day.
When he took over at the football club, he began to let all the players and staff know how important
respect was and that it should permeate every aspect of what they did as professionals. He insisted that
even the dinner ladies would be spoken to with the same respect that the directors, players,
management team and everyone else would expect.
Right from day one, I always knew that this was something I would insist on when running my own
business. Everyone is expected to address anyone who comes through the door with respect and
courtesy, no matter who they are. Delivery drivers, customers, co-workers and even the competition
should be greeted with a smile and treated exactly how you would wish to be treated.
I recall working in a restaurant during my university years that was owned by a very wealthy
politician’s son. Every weekend, usually with a few drinks on board, he would take it upon himself to
barge into the bar where I worked and start to lecture us about how we should sweep the floor, make the
cocktails, run the drinks and anything else that sprung to mind.
It was abundantly clear to all the staff that he had never done any of these things himself and all he
was actually trying to do was to assert his authority. What he actually managed to achieve, however,
was to alienate his staff and make them feel embarrassed and unappreciated.
I worked hard at that restaurant but, when I think back, I never went that final 5% and never took it as
personally as I did with the other places I worked. When the restaurant closed after a few short years of
little-to-no success, I often remembered the owner’s attitude and wondered what might have been if he
had treated his staff with the respect they deserved.
The service business is a hard business. Tempers often flare and tensions are heightened in the heat
of the moment. I’ve always tried to remain calm and respectful, but whenever I’ve gone over the edge
I’ve made an effort to go back and apologise afterwards, especially when it has involved someone who
is lower down the chain of command, because they are the ones that are shown the least respect in
most businesses. This, to me, creates an environment of mutual respect and makes for a more
progressive attitude amongst the team.
It’s not only the staff that respond to this attitude. I also feel adamant that it means you start to attract
the right suppliers, customers and people who share that same ethos and that value a similar approach.
I often look at aggressive businesses and see it as no real surprise when they’re at constant
loggerheads with their respective stakeholders. Respect breeds respect and that, to me, remains a
constant across all aspects of life.
Whenever things go wrong, as they inevitably do from time to time, my approach always comes into
question from those around me. Giving someone a bollocking might seem like an obvious and even
tempting way to deal with an issue, but in my experience it is a very short-term solution.
Being aggressive with staff will definitely get them to fix the issue at hand but it does nothing for their
motivation levels. It undermines their self-confidence and it instills in them resentment towards you in
the long run.
The problem may go away relatively quickly, but you have to consider if that staff member has your
back when you really need them, or if you have their trust and respect.
There is a huge difference between commanding respect and demanding respect and I think the
I REMEMBER ONCE GOING TO HEAR
latter is not an approach that works. Demanding respect from people shows weakness and does nothing
towards building a strong dynamic team.
Don’t Speak Ill Of Your Competitors
3FE THAT WE NEVER buy anything from someone who’s sales pitch is them bagging out their
competitors. You’d be shocked at how often I have to invoke that rule. If a person thinks it’s more
important to talk badly about their competitors’ business than it is to talk about their own, then that says
a lot about what they’re selling.
In a more general sense I’d be reluctant to start a business relationship with someone on such a
negative tack. Speaking ill of your competition portrays you as weak, negative and probably a little
bitchy. It really isn’t enticing to most prospective customers.
The strange thing in our industry is that many people expect you to hate your competition. I often
chat to people who start criticising our competitors in such a way that they’re waiting for me to join in.
I’ve always made a point of resisting this, no matter how tempting it is, and ensure that our staff know
not to be drawn in either. There’s enough negativity in the world without that going on.
It’s important that when you run a café all your staff know that it’s not cool to get into bitching about
other places. I sometimes forget myself and make jokes or quips about someone else in the industry –
we all do sometimes – but I’ll always see that influence those around me. It’s important when you run a
business to be more careful than you usually would because not only will it influence your co-workers’
behaviour, it will also have a knock-on effect on the culture you create in the business.
Every now and then I’ll hear back about a competitor having a go at us, but again the best way to
deal with this is to rise above it. I’ve always believed that there’s nothing more pathetic than a one-sided
rivalry, so when I hear we’re being criticised, I often remark how much I like their product, it’s the most
I HAVE A RULE AT
appropriate way to deal with.
Assertive vs. Aggressive
business in school and was always learning about the characteristics, traits
and skills of an entrepreneur. As a 14-year-old, I was like most people in that I didn’t self-identify as
being charismatic, driven, determined or risk-taking like the business books would have me believe I
should be. Whenever I read how super-human entrepreneurs were, I’d always feel incredibly
disappointed because I wanted nothing more than to run my own business but I just didn’t think of
myself in those terms.
I think it’s a dangerous thing to teach young people because those terms are usually derived from the
sort of entrepreneurs that get all the limelight and like to talk themselves up. Over the years I’ve met
plenty of successful business owners who are reclusive, or shy, or lacking confidence, but it hasn’t
stopped them from running successful businesses.
When it came to me opening my own business, it wasn’t the thought of doing accounts, working long
hours or finding customers that terrified me, it was the fear of having to tell people what to do.
I hired my first staff member after about three months and I lay awake at night wondering how I was
going to be somebody’s boss. It took me that long to hire someone not because I wasn’t busy enough
but because I was so petrified of the idea of it.
Growing up, I wasn’t very confident, and although I had some good times in school I generally found
it hard to make and keep friends. I wasn’t shy as such, but I definitely wasn’t a leader in anyone’s eyes,
not least my own. The problem was that most people are brought up to believe that the boss should be
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER I STUDIED
an intimidating presence and that belief stayed with me well into my late twenties.
When it came to hiring people I really struggled with this and in the early years I found myself doing
everyone’s tasks just so I could avoid asking them to do it. A chance conversation with a customer, who
in hindsight had probably seen what was going on, made me see the error of my ways as she explained
to me the difference between being assertive and being aggressive.
We’ve all had experience with aggressive people in the workplace, or even just in our everyday lives,
and, in all honesty, their aggression may result in some short-term gains for them. What happens over
time, however, is that you start to take little notice when they lose the rag because they’re always doing
it. You become desensitised to their anger and it stops having any affect on you.
More importantly, you start to lose motivation to work for that person, and in the café business this is
one of the biggest causes of staff turnover. People have better things to do than to be roared at every
day, and so they move on.
What I learned over the years is that being assertive is a much better way to make people react and
you can be serious without losing their respect. If someone roars across a room at you “Why are you
late?”, your instant reaction is probably to get your back up and fight back, or just to recoil and harbour
resentment against them for trying to humiliate you. It’s now hard to keep that person on your side.
Asking someone to talk to you privately and then, quietly and confidently, asking them why they’re
late is a far more effective way of dealing with that situation. They see you as being calm and in
complete control and that is the kind of behaviour that a boss needs to exhibit.
Equally, I’ve learned over the years that silence can be the best way to get your way in an argument.
If you present a supplier or contractor with a problem and they give you an unsatisfactory answer, just
remain silent. What you’ll usually find happening is that they are so uncomfortable with the silence that
they start talking to fill the void. When they start talking, they’ll start backtracking, and very soon they
offer up a favourable solution.
The most important part of assertiveness is not just remaining calm however, but also saying what
you think. Exactly what you think. It’s amazing how many people will skirt around an issue without
realising that they’re only hindering their own chances of resolving the problem.
Joking about an issue or making sly digs on the matter are not effective ways of dealing with
problems. Approaching it this way comes across as passive-aggressive and stops short of engaging
those concerned in real dialogue that will resolve the issue.
Whenever you come to a situation of conflict, resist the urge to lose the rag and start roaring and
screaming and very calmly tell the person exactly what the issue is. I’ve found that, in many cases, the
airing of the exact problem and how you feel about it is enough of a shock to the other party that they
will quickly back down.
Don’t Boast About The Long Hours
world over there’s a culture of competition that usually comes out in the
form of measuring how many hours one works. I’ve often sat with a group of business owners and it’s
never long before they start to brag about how many hours they work or how long it’s been since they’ve
had a holiday, and for a long time not only was I impressed by this, I also started to aspire to it.
I worked seven days a week for the first two years of my business, often leaving my house at 6.30am
and returning at 7.30pm. Looking back on that now, I don’t see it as an old war story to regale my friends
with but a sad story that I am deeply ashamed of.
The truth is that I did that because I wasn’t running my business properly and there were many things
I could have done to bring my hours back into line. I talk with many business owners these days on this
topic and many vehemently disagree with me but I truly believe that there is always a way to do things
better, faster and more efficiently. Just because you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If you prepare properly you should know the task at hand and you should attack that challenge each
day. In truth, running a business to me is like running a race and you should never feel pride for taking
twice as long to finish the race.
There are other costs to working long hours. The effect it has on your family and friends is quite
obvious and one that people tend to be very conscious of, regardless of whether it changes their
behavior. The effect it has on your staff though is one that often goes unnoticed.
When you are working obscene hours and doing every task it is incredibly demotivating for the team
around you. What you’re effectively telling them is that you have to do all of these tasks because you
don’t trust them to do it.
Most people that I’ve worked with are motivated by a number of different factors. Money, power, and
creativity typically come into it in some combination, but there can also be other factors. One thing that
motivates all the best people I’ve worked with though is the desire to learn. In my experience that is the
greatest motivator of all.
People need to feel that they are progressing and when it’s not possible to progress them with job
titles, power, or money, it’s always possible to progress them with knowledge. Helping your staff
understand more about what they’re doing will not only free you up so you have more time to yourself, it
also motivates them to learn more and progress again. Teaching your staff new skills only ever
augments their loyalty to your business but it’s a leap of fate that very few business owners ever learn to
take.
Whenever I’m learning a new task I tend to make a bags of it the first time around, but if I keep trying
and keep coming back I’ll eventually get it right, and that’s how we learn. Most business owners are
motivated to overcome their mistakes and not let it affect their confidence because they have the will to
succeed.
The problem is that when those same business owners see their staff make the same mistakes, they
have no tolerance for it and they end up taking the workload back and denying their staff the same
learning curve they once benefited from. They then end up in a situation where the core workload of the
business can only be done by them and they suddenly have an 80-hour week, every week.
People have short memories and they forget how hard learning is and how we all make mistakes.
Creating a dialogue around the mistakes and helping your team realise that mistakes are all part of the
process are the important things.
Educating and training staff has always been high on the list of priorities for me. I meet so many
AMONGST BUSINESS OWNERS THE
business owners who refuse to do it because they have a high staff turnover. What never occurs to them
is that perhaps they have a high staff turnover because they don’t invest in their staff’s education and
training. It’s a risk for every business to take but for me it’s a greater risk not to develop our team.
The other excuse I hear from worn-out business owners is that their staff are not capable of doing the
tasks they need them to do. This is sometimes unfortunately true. In this case though I’d still pin the
blame back on the business owner because she or he has hired the wrong people.
Perhaps they can’t afford to hire people with the requisite skill set? I understand this completely, and
for a long time this was the case with me, but you can only really accept this as a short-term excuse. If
you can’t afford to hire the right people in the long-term and your business can’t run without you working
excessive hours then you don’t have a viable business model.
The fear of staff leaving is to many people the biggest barrier to developing their team but strangely, it
has become a huge source of pride for me in my business. I promised myself many years ago that I
would never begrudge a staff member leaving for ambitious reasons and it’s something I still believe
today.
We’ve lost many key staff over the years at 3fe but when I see them go on to launch their own
businesses or take up prestigious positions at other companies, that to me is a sign that we are
developing great people and doing a great job.
Your business, regardless of its function, must have a culture of learning and development. There
must be structures and systems in place to not only support those that are naturally inquisitive and want
to learn, but to ensure that everyone in the team is learning and developing, whether they know it or not.
Once this is happening you will find that the people that work for you and the people you attract soon
begin to perform better at those tasks than you ever did. That frees you up to focus on more strategic
aspects of your business and take aspects of your life back that you would have otherwise lost. It’s a
very strange feeling for me to sit in my café and realise I’m no longer qualified to work there, but one I
take a strange source of pride from.
An Email Never Solved An Argument
consider getting into this game so they can escape the endless stream of
emails they get daily in their office jobs. Unfortunately, I can assure you that running a coffee shop does
not signal the end of emails. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Most modern jobs entail a huge amounts of email and when you consider all of the other tasks that a
coffee shop owner has at hand, topping it all off with an inbox full of queries, requests and complaints is
an unfortunate reality.
Email has become as much of a nuisance as it is a help to me, and I find it difficult at the best of
times to separate my inbox from my to-do list. These days, I find I’ve had to start deleting unsolicited
emails without a response because of the time it takes up every week formulating answers. I’m also
increasingly conscious that if you become that person who answers emails promptly then people are
more likely to email you. Very soon your job ends up being like a batting cage with a relentless stream of
emails being flung your way.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is the potential for email to create
conflict where there is an easy solution at hand. Email can struggle to convey tone, and can force
people into taking positions instead of focusing on interests.
There are many excellent books out there on conflict resolution (the best of which I feel is Getting to
Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton) so I think you’ll be best served referring to one of
those for guidance on techniques. What I can assure you of, however, is that when you start a business,
conflict resolution will become one of your primary activities. Be it repairing damage, or preventing future
issues, conflict is an expensive and often unnecessary activity for a business to be involved in.
What I can tell you about conflict is that in all my years running a business and even in my previous
THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO
jobs, I can’t recall one instance where conflict was resolved via email. It always took an eye-to-eye
meeting to resolve an issue, and when I say resolve, that’s the important part.
Resolving a conflict is very different from making a decision on the conflict. If a senior party pulls
rank, a supplier backs down, or a final offer is reluctantly accepted this doesn’t resolve a conflict, it just
pushes it on down the line to reappear another day.
When someone loses out in a conflict, they don’t forget about it. The way business works, they’ll
someday be in a position where you will need their help and at that stage they’re very likely to not give
you any.
I’ve always been shocked at the bravado and machismo that surrounds running a business and how
the perception remains that if you get one over on your suppliers you’re a good business owner. In my
experience, nothing is further from the truth. People are more likely to go that extra mile for you when
you’re helping them and although in the short term you might scare or intimidate them into action, in the
long run they’re not going to be there for you.
Whenever you find yourself at a point where you can feel conflict arising, step away from the
keyboard and pick up the phone, Skype them or, better still, drop by and see them if you can. There is
nuance and tone in human interaction that can’t be conveyed in email that is worth so much to a
business relationship. People are also more likely to hint at their real reasons because it’s not written
down and recorded in an email. In one sense, business is business and can be cutthroat – but business
is really about people and, as useful as email is, you can’t let it fester conflict that can disrupt your
business plan, waste your time, and add extra stress to your life.
Family & Friends
be sure to know that you need a solid group of family and friends to get
you through it because there will be times when you don’t have the energy or confidence to move on
without the right people’s support.
I have a wry smile when I hear the phrase “self-made woman/man” because, to my mind, there’s no
way to do it without a support group and the people who claim this title are, to put it bluntly, lying or
delusional.
When you eventually get to open your shop, you’ll no doubt open your doors on the first day to be
greeted by many of your family and friends. In the first few months of opening 3fe, I received huge
support from loved ones who were happy to walk whatever distance out of their usual commute to
support the business I had just opened.
The confusing thing for me though was that I felt awful charging them and so I usually ended handing
over free coffees, often despite their insistence on paying. It felt wrong to charge them even though I
knew it was losing me money.
It was only after a few too many drinks in a Dublin bar that a close friend of mine opened up to me
and made me realise the awkward situation I’d created. He had been coming to the shop initially to
support me and really felt awful that he was leaving having taken something from me, and thus doing
the opposite of what he had set out to do.
Coupled with that was the fact that after he had visited a few times he had grown to love the coffee,
he felt he couldn’t come back because he was afraid I’d think he was scrounging off me. He wanted to
support my business and he wanted to pay for his coffee and I was denying him that wish and also
making him feel pretty bad about it too.
After that night, I decided that everyone was getting charged, no matter who they were. I soon
realised it was a lot less painful than I had imagined. Anyone who I had comp’d before was obviously
someone close and, by definition, they were the ones who wanted to support me the most. Paying for
coffee was actually what they wanted to do.
The result of this was that very soon I began to see more of my friends and family showing up at the
shop, now relieved that I wouldn’t suspect them of seeking freebies. They were enjoying being valued
customers at a great coffee shop.
The other issue it created was that I was setting an example to the staff at the shop and I’d find they
too started to hand out free coffees to their friends and family without permission. As annoyed as I was
about it, I knew that the problem started with me and until I was disciplined about it the issue would
remain.
Charging people money is a fundamental part of running any business, however obvious that seems.
Despite that, restaurants, bars and cafés have always had a culture of not charging their mates or
contemporaries but this can be really damaging. As soon as somebody makes an exception, it put
pressure on everyone else to follow suit.
Say one of your staff gives a free coffee to their friend. When they come back, do your other staff
members feel compelled to give them a free coffee too? How about if they come back with a group of
three, do all members of the group get free coffee? The bottom line is that people who want to support
your businesses will be happy to pay – especially when we are talking about the scale of products that a
café sells – and if they aren’t happy to do so, then they’re probably not a friend.
A simple way to control this is to insist that no drinks get made without an order docket from your
WHEN YOU LAUNCH ANY BUSINESS
POS system. This also means staff have any easy reason not to give out comps because the system
won’t allow it. This often gets them out of awkward situations.
If and when you are giving out comps, say for a disgruntled customer for example, the rule still
applies. If there is no docket for a drink there is a big chance that someone’s drink will go missing
because their drink ends up going to the person who has been comp’d a coffee.
It seems like a silly mistake, but I’ve seen it happen a hundred times. Even though I get free coffee at
3fe, I still queue up and order so that there’s a docket for my drink. The system is the most important
thing.
Another scenario where this tended to work in our favour was with any celebrities that ever visited
3fe. We have a rule at the shop that we don’t bother famous people for photos or autographs. They
have to queue like everyone else, pay like everyone else and they get the same (hopefully excellent)
service that a regular customer gets.
It’s for this reason that most of these people come back, because they get treated like regular folks.
One sportsperson in particular, who shall remain nameless, remarked how refreshing it was to be paying
and queuing like a normal customer instead of being pestered for photos and pandered to by
sycophantic proprietors. He loved just being treated like a regular customer and so he and his
teammates kept coming back.
We had another famous person at 3fe that used to post lots of photos on social media from 3fe
because they loved the place so much. A local PR executive asked me how much this service had cost
me. When I told them that not only had I not paid for it, but that I was actually charging them for the
coffee, she was absolutely dumbfounded.
In my spare time I love nothing more than visiting the best restaurants I can get to and relaxing with a
great meal. In Dublin, I tend to know many of the waiting staff, chefs and restaurateurs due to the line of
work I’m in and a lot of the time this usually means they’ll treat us to glasses of champagne, extra
tasters or sometimes even comp’d courses. This makes me feel really uncomfortable and often I worry
that they think that I think that I deserve this kind of treatment.
The other thing this does is that it precludes me from complaining if I’m not happy with my meal. If
someone gives you a free course, or glass of wine, and then your main course arrives over-cooked, you
feel awful about complaining. I know this because it happened to me and I just kept quiet and ate it. If
I’m visiting your business, it’s because I want to support your business, not to take from it, so please do
charge me.
The situation gets intolerably worse whenever I visit a coffee shop. Usually it goes something like this:
I join the queue but a member of staff spots me and either beckons me to the front or else
abandons their post to come down to me.
The other people in the queue now hate me.
The server not only refuses to accept any money from me but also refuses to let me order what I
want, e.g. a chocolatey, sweet Brazilian espresso.
I’m told to sit down and they’ll bring everything to me.
The customers sitting in the “no table-service” café now hate me.
My stomach rumbles in hope that they bring me some food, part of the reason I am here.
I wait a long time whilst they clean all the equipment and make a number of attempts at preparing
my drink.
They arrive with no food.
They also bring me a high acidity, fruity, zero-chocolate, Kenyan filter coffee.
The coffee tastes awful and I don’t complain because I didn’t pay.
I try again to pay but I’m dragged back to my table and presented with some samples of the guest
coffee they have in. I feel obliged to finish it and comment on it in a positive way. It, too, is awful.
More samples arrive.
Yet more samples.
In a final effort to not seem cheap I throw an amount of money into the tip jar that greatly exceeds
what I had intended spending because I have no change.
I leave over-caffeinated, hungry, and in the wake of a café full of disgruntled customers still waiting
for their drinks.
The baristas breathe a sigh of relief that the high-maintenance customer has left.
The only downside of friends and family visiting your café is that it’s hard to draw a line between
personal time and work time, an issue that I’ve always found it difficult to deal with. People associate
cafés with hanging out, chatting, and enjoying themselves so when they see you there they expect you
to do the same thing.
The problem is that you’re at work and there are always a thousand things to do. Even when it’s quiet
you need to be prepping for when it’s busy, but it’s very difficult for your friends and family to see this.
If you put it in a different context it’s easier to see the issue. I have a friend who works in a financial
institution in the city and he’d often drop by to see me at work on his lunch break. He’d buy a coffee and
then approach the machine and start chatting to me and although I was happy to see him, I’d always
have a lot to do when he came by.
It was a really difficult thing to talk to him about but I posed the question of what he would do if I came
into his office and start chatting to him about the football while he was working? What would he do if I
sat there waiting for his attention for half an hour while he spoke to a client?
Cafés are such social environments that it’s easy for people you know to forget that you’re at work,
and that, perhaps, it’s not the most convenient time for you to talk. It’s a very difficult subject to broach
but I would recommend nipping the problem in the bud early on to avoid some much more awkward
conversations later on.
One thing that I always find happening is that I’d be chatting about a birthday present, a trip away, or
some other issue with a friend or family member on the phone and they’d say, “Have a think about it and
I’ll drop by the shop for a chat”.
This is the point where the problem begins because in their mind they’ve organised to go for coffee
together but the issue is you’ll be working while that happens. When I point this out to people, I always
try to be as careful as possible because, of course, you don’t want to seem ungrateful of their custom or
dismissive of their friendship.
The best answer to this is to say, “Well, why don’t we meet at <other local café> so I can talk
properly, it’s always tricky to chat while I’m working and I can’t guarantee I won’t be too busy”. This helps
them understand the issue and gives you a chance to discuss it when you meet them off-site in a nonpushy way.
This however doesn’t give you an out for those who turn up unannounced, but at the same time you
need to be mindful that it works both ways and sometimes you become the problem. Your friends and
family will come to your café to relax, unwind, and get away from work for a while so you need to mindful
of that. I’ve often found myself at a table chatting with someone when it slowly dawns on me that they
came there for some peace and quiet, which I am effectively denying them.
When you run a café, you need to become the master of the wink. It’s a gesture that says, “Hey, how
are you? I’m in the middle of something right now. It’s good to see you and let me know if you need
anything?” all in one easy movement. You learn it over time.
Finally, the last, and perhaps the most important time to consider friends and family, is when you
need professional help in other areas. Whenever someone I know is starting a business, I always hear
how they’re saving money because their mum/friend/girlfriend/roommate/etc. is a
plumber/architect/graphic designer/carpenter etc.
Be very careful with these decisions because they sometimes end up causing a lot of trouble. If a friend
or family member is offering to help out, you need to ask yourself some questions:
If I didn’t know them, would I hire them to do the job?
If they’re doing me a favour, can I expect a high standard of work?
Can I afford to pay them their usual rate? And, if so, should I?
If the work isn’t up to standard, will I be able to address that issue with them without affecting our
personal relationship?
There are definitely going to be times when you need the help of family and friends, but you need to be
careful that you go into each arrangement with your open eyes. I learned this the hard way with my Dad
who has always helped me with my business. He’s had more than 40 years of experience in the building
industry as an engineer, director and project manager. As a result, every time we have a new project
under way he’s been an invaluable source of contacts, advice, experience and feedback. I’m not sure I’d
have gotten where I am today without his help and advice and although the phrase “You know what you
should do…” will forever haunt me, the constant stream of ideas, encouragement and criticism has been
invaluable to me.
Sometimes it goes wrong though, and that’s been a difficult thing to deal with at times. One
contractor that he put me in touch with, having done business with him for 40 years, came out to do
some work at our café. He told us the job would be no hassle and he was only going to charge us cost
price because he was a friend of my Dad’s.
Unfortunately, the work he did turned out to be pretty poor and when I called him to see if he could fix
it he told me he’d “only done it as a favour”. I was now a source of frustration for him because he didn’t
feel obliged to re-do the work because he wasn’t making any money on it, and it was now going to cost
him money to repair it.
This put me in a tricky position because I didn’t want to compromise my Dad’s relationship with him
over the job that he’d done but, at the same time, I needed the work to be re-done. He ended up talking
to my Dad over the phone about how ungrateful I was for the “favour” he did for me which in turn caused
friction between my Dad and me.
In the end, I had to hire a third party to come and undo his work and re-do it so it ended up costing
me more than twice the price. It was a costly lesson and one I’m very eager to pass on to anyone
starting a business.
When I’m talking to people who are starting their own businesses, I always try to advise them that the
most obvious choices aren’t always the best ones. You can easily discover through your own friends that
you’ve amassed a large group of contractors out of their social and family networks, but be sure you’re
hiring them for the right reasons.
In the early days, I had to rely on a lot of family and friends. I’m very grateful for their help of course,
but when it reached a point where the business was going well, I realised that in some cases I was
milking them for help a bit more than I should.
Recently we built out a new shop and I got my Dad to invoice me for his services and advice. It felt a
bit weird for us both, but once it was paid it felt like the right thing. He’d helped an enormous amount
and it’s now past the stage where I should expect that help for free.
I come from a relatively large extended family and over the years I’ve worked in a few family
businesses that have taught me some lessons I’ll never forget. Family businesses are often more
politically charged than other businesses and when you combine family and business life things can
become very volatile very quickly.
I made a decision early on to not hire family or friends because you risk not only the business
relationship but also the personal one. It’s also a little unfair on that family member because in a
business they may find it extra difficult to be properly accepted by their work colleagues. I like to think
that I get on very well with the people who work for me but, at the same time, I’m under no illusions that
they all need to sit down and bitch about me from time to time.
Taking the piss out of your boss is every worker’s right. The odd time I’ve caught someone doing it, I
haven’t made a big deal about it because I remember how I did it myself in the past. It can be quite
therapeutic or cathartic, and usually everyone realises that they’re just venting and it’s a bit of harmless
fun.
It’s also a chance for people to bond by uniting against a “common enemy”, but when you hire a
family member you deny them that chance to connect with their co-workers. They’ll always be seen as
an outsider, and whenever they get a promotion, raise, or any sort of reward, people will question your
motives and feel hard done by.
I can think of lots of instances where family businesses, or businesses that hire friends and family, do
perform very well, but I’ve also seen a lot where it doesn’t. I’ve seen brothers, sisters, husbands and
wives all fall out irrevocably and that’s never worth the success of any business. It’s impossible to launch
a business without the help of family or friends, but be sure that you manage those relationships as
carefully as you manage your business.
Social Media
Twitter had been going for about three years but had only taken hold
amongst a small group in Ireland. The shop we opened was aimed at the geeky online coffee
community I knew from coffee forums and thankfully there was a large cross section of society that
indulged in those forums and also had Twitter accounts. It was an immediate and easy way for me to
talk to them and was essentially my whole marketing strategy.
As Twitter grew, so did our follower base and those who joined were quick to come across the
business because at the time we were one of few in the city that used Twitter. To say that Twitter had a
massive role in our success is by no means an exaggeration. At times I felt like I was running a Twitter
business.
One example that illustrates that more than any was around the start of winter 2010 when we moved
the coffee bar from the lobby of the Twisted Pepper to the bar in the back. The purpose of this was to
create a bigger space so that we could seat more people and make more money but unfortunately it had
an adverse affect.
The small, cosy café in the lobby suddenly turned into a dark and largely empty space with a coffee
machine in the corner. Without the presence of daylight and with the strong smell of whatever club night
had been on the previous night, the café soon became an awkward space and morale began to fall
away as fast as the customer base. In truth, I was starting to feel like it was time to pack things in.
It was right about this time that I got a DM on Twitter from a Mr. Sean Bonner who I had chatted to
only briefly before via a mutual friend, without ever really knowing what it was that he did. Today, I know
that he’s a dude who’s famous amongst techies for being famous amongst techies and I still don’t know
much else about him.
Sean came to Dublin for 24 hours to see a Glen E. Friedman photography exhibition and stayed in a
dingy hotel nearby just so he’d be close to what he was told was the only decent espresso in Dublin. He
came to the café, we drank coffee together and then off he went. I thought that was that.
The next day an article penned by Sean appeared on boingboing.net entitled “Road notes: 24 hours
in Dublin with photographer Glen E. Friedman and barista champ Colin Harmon” and my business
changed overnight.
Out of nowhere, people started to appear, mostly American techies based in Dublin, and very soon
they started to bring their friends. Sean’s immediate network and the greater network around them got
wind of my shop in a way that was validating what we did better than any advertising campaign ever
could. We went from making 50 drinks a day to very soon making 150, 200, and even 300 drinks a day,
and it was all sparked off by a simple Twitter conversation that hooked me up with a guy people trusted.
Trust is the key thing to take away from this story. If you follow someone on any of the various
platforms, it’s usually because you trust in the quality of the service or product that they provide. If you
endorse them on social media, the people who follow you, the people who trust you, will take a risk on
trusting that business too. This is the core of social media, and it’s 100% built on trust.
The crucial thing is not to abuse that trust and that is where many businesses fall down. Once you
start making erroneous claims, spamming them with useless information or putting on the hard sell, that
trust is broken and you’ll quickly be abandoned.
When someone has elected to follow you, be confident in the knowledge that you’ve already earned
their respect so you’re cool to just go ahead and present what you’re doing as it is. Have a bit of fun with
it, engage with customers (and the odd bit of mischief is always nice too) but don’t get too pushy or
WHEN WE OPENED OUR BUSINESS
they’ll all start to drop off.
The tone of your social media should be playful, honest and humble and when you sit back and read
it, it should sound like something you would say. This is simple advice, but crucial advice.
There are basic rules that most businesses should adhere:
Keep things positive.
Try not to engage in arguments, ask people with complaints to pop by or email.
Be inclusive and respectful.
Put your website, location and opening hours on your bio.
It’s vitally important not to post inane or mindless pitches like “We have the best cupcakes in the city!” or
“Isn’t the weather great!” Nobody will care or take any notice. I often ask myself, “Would I text this to a
friend?” when I’m tweeting something. Would it sound lame? The language of social media has become
increasingly unconvincing over the years and unfortunately too many businesses take it as a norm.
Never is this more evident than with hashtags, the Cool Dad of the social media world. If you have an
event or campaign running, by all means have a hashtag to reflect that, and then very often you can get
some real traction from it. The problem arises where people think the campaign is the hashtag and
there’s a subtle yet crucial difference between these.
One of the sports teams I follow recently launched a hashtag entitled something similar to
#oneteamtogether (I’m not being specific here because it would kill me to be sued by one of my
favourite sports teams). The problem here is that the hashtag is the campaign, there’s nothing else to it,
that’s all there is and people don’t care. If you texted this to your mates they’d laugh at you.
I clicked on the hashtag on their Twitter account (that I’ve since unfollowed) and it was all but unused
aside from some sarcastic retorts from opposing fans that are probably unprintable. The hashtag was
likely the brainchild of someone who had probably never seen a game in their life and couldn’t think of
any better means to actually engage with that team’s fans, or perhaps even why they wanted to do that
in the first place.
What this also highlights is that a business’ social media accounts need to be reflective of the
business itself – and its customers – or it really starts to jar. Small businesses have a huge advantage
over large businesses because you’ve a massive opportunity to show your audience that there are real
personalities behind the business. That does more to engage your customers than any hashtag ever
will.
I’d rather follow a café that tweets “Wow, that was tough”, than one that tweets “Tomorrow we have
50¢ off all muffins”. I want to see that the businesses I support are living, breathing entities, and so do
most people out there. A lot of businesses look to a PR company to run their social media, but
measuring your success in followers is a one-eyed metric. We’ve never used any PR company and we
have a really engaged follower count of 15,000 Twitter followers and 20,000 Instagram followers, many
more than the PR firms who have offered to come and help us.
We used to let all of our staff post on social media, but it got a bit messy as we grew so these days
we have a WhatsApp group where anyone can post a photo. If any of the staff members that have social
media access see a photo on there that they like, they can upload it and that way we all feel involved.
The tone of our social media is not curated, edited or designed to any great extent but, to me, that’s one
of its strengths.
I often get approached by photographers and marketers who want to “fix” our Instagram feed
because it’s inconsistent, varying in quality and clearly not curated. They’re often shocked to find that it’s
intentionally that way so that people get an engaging insight into a business that is run by actual people.
Our Instagram is vibrant, mischievous and fun, something we’re very proud of and the follower count
that we have reflects that. I understand that some people would prefer a more tailored approach but, to
me, that is dull and lacking any real unique qualities that would make me want to engage.
I know there are more refined feeds with a strict visual framework in place for many coffee shops, but
I’ve always felt they come across as monotonous and sometimes pompous which is way off what we as
a business try to convey. Our business has always tried to be inclusive, not exclusive, and the social
media aesthetic is a big part of that.
Social media has, in many quarters, been sterilised and now lacks the social aspect of it that initially
made it great. By all means be careful of the content you put out there but not at the risk of presenting
yourself as a faceless entity without real people driving it, and with nothing to say.
We Are All Marketing Scum
run different business, no matter the kind, that they “don’t do marketing” is
one that I’ve heard many, many times. I feel it’s important to establish early on that, yes, everyone is a
marketer.
Marketers have a bad reputation and when I tell people I love marketing I might as well be telling
them that I’m a dolphin hunter,
I’d probably get a better reaction.
Most people think of marketing as tricking people into buying your product or service and, yes, there
is a lot of businesses that try to do just that, but to me marketing is all about finding the people who
would love to buy what you’re selling, or more importantly, help them to find you.
Think of it this way: right now there is a product on the market that you would absolutely love and you
would be more than happy to part with your hard earned cash to get your hands on it. You would then
show this product to your like-minded friends and they too would follow suit and buy this product so they
too can be as happy and fulfilled as you.
At this very moment in time that product exists and you don’t know about it and it’s going to go out of
business before you or your friends find out about it and that’s because of bad marketing. Kind of scary,
right?
THE CLAIM FROM MY PEERS WHO
It’s important for business owners to understand that marketing is about helping people to notice you
and form an opinion on what you do. Your identity in their minds is what is essentially your “brand”, but
for many independent business owners these are words they’d never consider using when referring to
their own business.
The thought of marketing or branding has been turned into an almost repulsive pursuit but it doesn’t
need to be like that. The ultimate irony is that marketing is in need of a re-brand and it has a lot of work
to do before it gets people back on board what is a vital activity for any business owner.
Marketing can be fun and in my mind, it should be fun. It gives you an opportunity to create an
identity for what you do and present your work in its best light. Following up on that promise is another
matter but that’s covered in other areas of this book.
There are many different kinds of marketing and the key is to pick the ones that are appropriate and
appealing to you. Social media is the go-to these days but the common rhetoric that you must be on
social media is ridiculous. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, or just don’t want to do it, then don’t.
Maybe you’d prefer to write a blog, just post pictures on Instagram or maybe even have a radio ad
with catchy jingle. The important thing is that it’s reflective of who you are as a business.
Where most people slip up is understanding what marketing is and most confuse it with advertising.
Advertising is still an incredibly powerful form of marketing but unfortunately it’s not an appropriate
method for every business.
TV advertising is still the most impactful form of marketing and despite the rise of the Internet it is still
a multi-billion euro industry. The only catch is that you need to spend big to be noticed and, for most,
that is not achievable or appropriate for the businesses they run.
One of my favourite campaigns of recent years is the Volvo campaign with Jean-Claude Van Damme
(look it up if you haven’t seen it) but I can be assured that it cost more to make than my business turns
over in a year.
When it comes to small businesses there isn’t always the budget so you need to market what you do
within your means. Every business needs to market itself so that it can attract the customers it wants,
communicate the values that it has and remain at the forefront of its customers minds when they’re
deciding where they want to go for coffee.
Two Guys & A Bottle Of Milk
3FE I was pretty broke and every penny had to count. One of the most
frustrating things to happen back then was the almost daily theft of a bottle of milk from my delivery. It
wasn’t a huge amount of money but it really began to grate on me and the cost of it rose over time.
The shop was located close to some late night and after-hours clubs, so there were a lot of people
knocking around with the propensity to steal bottles of milk.
What compounded the problem was that I was only doing about 100 drinks a day at the time and one
bottle of milk will usually get you through 20 drinks, allowing for the usual spread of cappuccinos, lattes,
espressos, Americanos and so on.
The upshot of this was that I was always running out of milk in the last hour and usually had to run to
get milk or send a helpful customer to get some in return for a free coffee.
People would ask why I didn’t just increase the order, but my situation was such that storage wasn’t a
viable option and, in any case, I could only order bottles in batches of six. To say this situation was a
pain in the neck was an understatement.
My first solution to this problem was asking the milkman to deliver later so the culprit would be
deterred by daylight. It seemed they were coming between 5.30am and 6am, so moving it back might
deter them from stealing.
The milkman was so vexed on my behalf that not only did he move it back but he also staged a
stake-out by parking across the road from the milk he’d dropped off. Unfortunately the bandit never
showed and so he stopped waiting but as soon as normal service resumed the bottles started going
missing again. Maybe they were in a position where they didn’t have the money to feed themselves or
their family properly. The fact that the milk was being taken every day indicated that it was probably very
important to them.
I tried putting a box outside for drop-offs but that got stolen too and very soon I was at my wits’ end,
frustrated by my inability to deter the thief as well as the constant need for emergency milk runs. I think,
deep down, I was more frustrated that I didn’t have the success, resources and power to do anything
about it. The milk perhaps wasn’t really the issue at all.
It got to the point where I was so frustrated I knew I had to do something to change the situation so I
sat down to think about it and, slowly, I began to gain some perspective and clarity in my mind.
Essentially there were two people in this story, the guy stealing the milk and me. I felt like I was the
victim in all this and the one on the losing side of the tale but then I began to think about who the other
person might be. Why were they stealing milk? Why were they getting up at 5.30am to steal it? What
must be happening in their life that they might need to do this?
I started to think about what sort of situation they might be in to justify this kind of behaviour and then
I began to calm down. It struck me that maybe I was actually the one with the upper hand in this minidrama of two people. When I really thought about it, I would much rather be the guy getting milk stolen
than be the person stealing milk.
Rationalising it this way helped me accept the situation that, in the greater scheme of things, wasn’t
that big a problem at all. As fuzzy as it sounds, I became quite thankful for my own position and never
thought much more about it until about four months later when it abruptly stopped. I often wonder now
why that might have been, although it’s not something I’ll ever find out.
In later years, once we owned our own premises, we were able to just give a lobby key to the delivery
driver which stopped the problem from reoccurring but I’ve never forgotten the lesson I learned from
this. You won’t always be able to control the things you’re frustrated by, or worried about, and
sometimes you just need to accept that for what it is.
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF RUNNING OF
Running coffee shops can be an incredibly joyous pursuit but there are times when it can also be a
bit of a shit stick. It’s important though that when it does get like that, you stop and appreciate that you
might just be holding the better end of the stick.
Have Fun
over and over again and it’s one I constantly have to remind myself about. The
reason I got into this business was because I wanted a better way of life, I wanted to enjoy myself, I
wanted to work with a team of people who loved what they do. It’s obviously not an absolute cakewalk,
but there is definitely a lot more fun in doing what I’m doing now than what I did before. Success has
obviously been a bonus but even if it all fell apart tomorrow, I would just open another coffee shop, I love
it that much.
Despite this, from time to time, I get down about little things and I have to remind myself that there
are so many people out there that would love to be doing what I’m doing. I get emails from them every
week. Some of them are reading this book! There was a stage not so long ago when I was longing to do
THIS IS A LESSON I LEARN
what I do now, so why not enjoy it?
When you visit a café, it’s immediately apparent if the people working there are enjoying themselves.
In most cases, that comes directly from the owner. It’s a wonderful experience to eat or drink in a
business where the staff love what they’re doing and I believe 100% that you can taste the difference.
Over the years we’ve done water tastings, “manky cheese sauce”, fancy dress, pay-what-you-like,
painted cartoons on the wall, unveiled a tribute wall of barista champions and plenty more initiatives that
weren’t done to make more money, but just to have a laugh. The upshot of it is that people respond so
positively to it that you probably do end up making more money!
When your business starts moving and things start falling into grooves, you have to be very careful
that you don’t become complacent and stop having fun. Retaining an interest in the business when
times are hard really will depend on your enjoying the essential nature of the job, so remind yourself to
take it in, to experiment and take risks on occasions and remember to enjoy it.
Over the years when we’ve been faced with serious issues we’ve often taken ridiculous decisions and
that sense of fun has helped us persevere:
When our café was in need of a boost, we started a weekly menu that was a freshly made take on
a take-away classic. We called it “Fat Friday” and the response was unbelievable.
We named a new (and more expensive) coffee blend “Malarkey” because we wanted people to
approach it with an open mind.
When the Electricity Supply Board installed a 2 × 2 metre metal box in our café courtyard we
commissioned a local artist to install a monthly cartoon or illustration to cover the eyesore.
We served a water tasting at our café to show people exactly how much thought went into all of
our drinks. We got hammered online but our day-to-day customers loved it.
We started a series of signature beverages (a tasty concoction that contained coffee) that changed
every month and offered a prize to the baristas that came up with the recipe. It was even entitled
“Fun” on the menu.
When I look back on my career and think about what we’ve achieved at 3fe, I’ll always think first to the
times when we were having fun and the fond memories that all the staff hold from those times. The irony
in all of that is that those times are often the most lucrative too.
Numbers
Coffee As A High Margin Product
the industry know that coffee is a high margin product and that comes with
it a perception that it’s very profitable. Unfortunately the truth is a little more complicated than that.
The gross margin on a cup of coffee should probably sit close to the 70–80% range, which in itself is
quite impressive and understandably attracts a lot of attention. The problem is that the 70% gross
margin is 70% of a product that doesn’t cost very much.
If you take a high-ticket item like, say, a car that costs €20,000 they usually operate on a low margin
of say 5–10%. When you take the tax off, the margin, although comparatively small by percentage, is
quite attractive in terms of the real cash margin itself, in this case a whopping €1,626.02.
A cup of coffee, by contrast, sold at €3.50 will return you a gross margin of only €2.25 but that
equates to approximately 70%. The reality is that you’re not going to change the world with €2.25 but
you may start to make some traction if you can figure out how to do that 100, 200, 400 or 600 times a
day. Suddenly you have high gross margin and a high cumulative cash margin.
The bad news is that doing it 600 times a day brings with it a series of costs that turn your high gross
margin into quite a low net margin. You’ll need more staff, electricity, a better and probably more
expensive location, more equipment and very soon it’s starting to look very unattractive again.
You might seem more inclined to move in the direction of the high cash margin when you see that,
but you need to consider the other variables that are at play here. The frequency of sale for a car garage
might only be a few cars a week, at best. The cost of business is higher, staff will not come cheap and
the stock alone may run into hundreds of thousands of euro before you even open your doors.
There are no hard and fast rules in any industry but cash margin, percentage margin, frequency of
sale and the cost of doing business will quickly form a clear picture of what you need to charge. When it
comes to coffee, it definitely can be a high margin product. I would go as far as to say that it needs to be
a high margin product, but be mindful that the net margins are often 5% in most successful coffee shops
and there are many others who operate on a deficit.
PEOPLE BOTH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
Understanding Margins
shops because I loved coffee and because I loved the social environment of
cafés. That was pretty much it. Whenever anyone raised the topic of margins, markups and profits, I
typically just shut down the conversation. I thought of those terms as dirty words that had nothing to do
with what I wanted to achieve.
Even with a business degree under my belt, the financial aspects of a business were often an
afterthought and I chose to ignore them for a very long time, until it got to the stage where I realised I
wasn’t going to last much longer if I didn’t learn about them.
Once I decided to get my head around how margins worked, however, I quickly found that a
surprising amount of people around me didn’t understand them fully either. In fact, most people were
just estimating what they should be charging for their products and services.
Every business needs to charge more than what it costs them to offer a product or service. The raw
cost of a product is relatively easy to understand but figuring out how much more you need to charge to
have a viable business is very tricky.
This guide is designed to start you off and help you understand how margins work, but I would
encourage you to constantly look at your margins and to constantly double check your figures because,
even 15 years in, I constantly make mistakes with these things.
The first thing that gets people is usually the difference between a margin and a markup, a lot of
people think that the terms are interchangeable but that can be a costly mistake to make.
The way I’ve always explained it is as follows:
I GOT INTO RUNNING COFFEE
A margin is a percentage of your selling price whereas a markup is an additional percentage on top of
your cost price.
The easiest way to explain this is with simple numbers like the number 10. If you paid €10 for a product
and you wanted to have a 30% markup on that product you take 30% of 10 and add it to ten.
30% of €10 = €3
€3 + €10 = €13
Selling price with a 30% markup is €13
Margins work off the selling price itself, so if we were selling a product at €13 and you wanted to make a
30% margin, you would take 30% off the selling price and that will tell you how much you need to be
buying it for.
30% of €13 = €3.90
€13 − €3.90 = €9.10
Cost price of €13 product with a 30% margin is €9.10
The important thing to note here is that 30% of €13 (selling price) is greater than 30% of €10 (cost price)
and that’s crucial to understanding how margins differ to markups.
Once you become familiar with this it becomes clear that a 50% margin is achieved by having a 100%
markup.
Here’s a quick demonstration of how that is achieved:
Gross vs. Net
You will also encounter the terms gross margin and net margin. Essentially, gross margin is the margin
you make on top of simply the cost of the goods themselves, whereas net margin is the margin that you
make once you’ve taken away the cost of everything – from staff, to heating, to advertising and
everything else – that allows you to sell those goods, i.e. your cup of coffee.
Personally, I have always used margins because I prefer to know exactly how much I make on each
sale. I’ve also found that most guidelines are built around margins. For example, any food that you make
in your business should have a gross margin of 70%, but if you’re buying it in it should have a gross
margin of between 30–40%, depending on the product. If you can get 50% or more then take it!
Margins work in strange ways and sometimes they can play tricks on you. Say, for instance, you have
a 40% margin on a product and you give someone a 10% discount. Logic would suggest that you now
have a 30% margin, right? Wrong.
If the product cost €6 and you’re selling it for €10, that’s a 40% margin. If you give a 10% discount
you sell it for €9 which means €3 gross profit which is a 33% margin.
Margins are always based on the selling price, so you have to recalculate it based on the actual price
you sell it for, not on the initial retail price.
A more uncommon method of margin is a fixed cash margin. This is where you put a set extra
amount to the price of every item you sell, say €5. In this scenario a sandwich that cost you €3 would be
sold for €8; a mug that cost you €10 would be sold for €15; a bag of coffee that cost you €20 would be
sold for €25. This would really only suit a retail environment where all the items were low-cost items and
otherwise the benefit and cost of stocking expensive items wouldn’t be worth it.
The only other complication I have come across using a pricing structure that is margin-based was
the question of sales tax. No online guide that I have found has ever dealt with this issue, so I will here.
When calculating the margin or the markup, do so without the sales tax and once you have calculated
the sales tax, add it at the end.
You can leave the sales tax on but then you must leave it on all the way through the calculation to
keep it consistent. The reason I leave it out until the end is because it makes the calculation less
complicated and you can see what your margin will be without the sales tax. In truth, you will reach the
same sales price whether you apply the sales tax or margin first. The important thing to remember is
that if you are leaving the sales tax off your calculation of the sales price, you have to leave it off the
purchase price too, or else your numbers will be totally skewed.
If this seems a bit daunting then go to the link below that has a number of handy tools to help you
calculate your margins, markups and taxes.
www.whatiknowaboutrunningcoffeeshops.com/margins
Based on: www.omnicalculator.com/business/margin-and-vat
The Staff Cost Equilibrium
at your café is a weekly task that you should do religiously. If you can have a
crack at doing it daily I’d advise that too. We use a system that gives us a live reading as we go by
linking your clock-in software to the till in your café and letting you know what your staff cost percentage
is on a minute-by-minute basis. There are no hard and fast rules about what your staff cost should be as
everyone has a different context and the profit margin can be quite variable depending on what your
rent, product cost, volume, and so on are.
In saying that, most coffee shops I know would struggle to operate below 25% staff cost and would
begin to hemorrhage money above 40%. There are always exceptions, but these numbers seem to ring
true for most of the business owners I’ve spoken to.
The context of the business has a big impact on what you can do.
I have a friend who runs a café that has tables, chairs and food. They don’t bring your order to your
table but instead call your number when your order is ready. This may seem like a small thing but it
means that their staff cost is lowered because they don’t need a person to run that order to a table.
As a consequence, her staff cost runs between 22%–28% every week. This might seem like a nobrainer for a business owner because of the money you save, but it also puts in place some barriers.
They get a lot of criticism from customers for this policy, many of whom expect the food and coffee to be
brought to them. They also have to charge less for the coffee as a result because they can only get
away with so much if they’re making customers collect their own drinks.
At our place we charge a full 30% more per cup but we will bring your cup to your table for you. It is
small differences like this that help you to – or prevent you from – charging more for your coffee.
Ultimately, the important thing is to get the right balance. If you’re charging a premium for the coffee, not
running it to the table and your staff cost is over 40%, you’ll know you’ve gotten it all wrong.
The first thing to figure out is how to calculate your staff cost,
a process that isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I’ve had some very painful conversations with
people who’ve gotten this very wrong in the past and it’s usually down to the same reason.
Say a café is doing €12,000 a week and their staff cost is €4,000. The owner puts one over the other,
€4,000/€12,000 = 33%. Nice and easy and a decent figure. Not so, I’m afraid.
The café may be turning over €12,000 a week but a percentage of that is sales tax and once you
take that away it might drop by around 20% (by markup), depending on the tax structures where you
CALCULATING THE STAFF COST
are. This leaves you with an actual turnover of €10,000. Unfortunately that’s not the only error.
Most countries have an employer’s tax to pay on top of an employee’s salary, which for example is
often in the region of 10%. This means that the staff cost of €4,000 should now be raised to €4,400.
The equation now looks very different:
€4,400/€10,000 = 44%
Suddenly, a person who was running what they thought was a healthy staff cost realises that their staff
cost is unsustainable and is most likely the reason why they’re not making any money. I learned this
lesson the hard way and I’ve been to countless businesses where I can see they’re making the same
one.
It’s incredibly important to get this right and remember:
Gross Staff Cost/Net sales = Staff cost %
Staff cost is very difficult to manage on a weekly or daily basis if you don’t monitor it regularly and take
action in appropriate ways. There will always be things that hurt your staff cost, such as illness,
equipment breaking down or freak weather conditions, but you’ll only be able to deal with these
unexpected costs if you’ve been prudent during the regular day-to-day running of the business. If you
have salaried staff, their cost never goes anywhere, even when they do. If they take a holiday you then
have to pay someone the 40-odd hours a week that they work which will seriously ramp up your staff
cost.
You also need to be conscious that staff that are paid hourly are entitled to holiday pay, which in
Ireland at least is 8% of their earnings. Just because you ran nine months of the year at 35% it doesn’t
mean that you’re not in for a nasty surprise when everyone comes to cash in their holiday hours. I’d
always advise making sure every quarter-end that everyone is taking their holidays and the pay that
goes with it. It’s not only hugely important to have well rested staff; it also means that you won’t get hit
with a massive wage bill towards the end of the year.
Finding the balance in workflow when it comes to staff cost is a very tricky thing at the best of times
but as your business grows you’ll need to adjust it to suit. You need to staff the business responsibly and
be conscious of the effect your rostering has not just on the numbers, but also on the people who you’ve
charged with driving your business.
It’s quite commonplace for businesses to roster on a full-strength team and then just send people
home if it’s not busy. This may seem like a fine idea, but you need to consider the effect that has on the
person you are sending home. Does that make them feel valued? Does that make them want your
business to succeed? Will that affect their decision making in future when they have a choice to make
that could impact the quality of your product or service?
A strong, motivated team is vital for any business and sending people home is never a good sign.
There are times when we do it, but it’s always a last resort and we’re careful to make sure it’s not always
the same person going home. It’s also a good idea to ask around if anyone actually would prefer to go
home. There’s usually someone that would jump at the chance for whatever reason – be it a football
match to watch, or a headache that won’t go away. It also presents an opportunity for a staff member to
cash in some holiday hours they may have accrued.
If you do need to send someone home, it makes sense to send home those that are paid hourly
because the salaried staff members are a fixed cost. In saying that, if everyone’s been working hard and
the staff cost is generally under control there’s always an opportunity to reward a senior member of staff
with an unexpected half-day. When the bad times come, remembering the good times will help people to
motivate themselves to get through them.
Another practice that I personally despise is the decision to roster people on for ridiculously short
shifts. I’ve seen café owners roster staff on for three and half hours because that covers the busy
morning rush and they aren’t needed for the rest of the day. This might solve the numbers issue but, to
me, it’s disrespectful to your staff and it speaks volumes about the type of business you run. It’s one
thing to send someone home because it’s quiet, but to intentionally pencil them in for a tiny shift is
degrading and must have a massive impact on that person’s desire to execute the vision of what you
want your business to achieve.
Long shifts are equally damaging to staff and if you find your team are doing 12 hours at a time, I
personally believe you need to question what your business is doing and why. It’s not a popular belief
amongst business owners, but I strongly believe in ensuring staff work hard for less hours than to burn
themselves out on 60- or 70-hour weeks.
A practice more common to restaurants is the “split shift” where you effectively work two shifts in the
same day. It’s quite common for a restaurant to pay the team for lunch, then not pay them for two hours
while it’s quiet, then put them back on for the dinner service. This, again, seems like a great idea on
paper, but to me it is an outdated practice that has serious implications for your staff’s morale, potential
and confidence as well as their mental and physical health.
Too many businesses are run on paper and don’t consider their staff in the equation. I’m adamant,
however, that it’s not just a matter of compassion and decency; it’s also a wise business decision. To
use a tired old analogy, running a business is like running an engine and you need to make sure every
component is working at the peak of its powers. People often accuse me of being soft on my staff but a
business that balances compassion and responsibility with managing the numbers is often a very
profitable one too.
The strange thing is that I often find out about staff not taking breaks, or not taking all their holiday
days, and some even wear it like a medal. If the staff aren’t taking their breaks then they aren’t doing
their job in my mind. If salaried staff are contracted to work 37.5 hours a week then they’re in trouble for
working any less or any more than that.
Equally, with days off, there should be a concerted effort to ensure that everyone has two days off in
a row. If you’re open seven days a week and a staff member has a Tuesday and a Saturday off, that
really impacts their ability to enjoy their time off. It may take a bit of maneuvering, but giving people
consecutive days off is worth a lot more in the long run in terms of the relationship you build with your
staff.
At 3fe, we make a big effort to ensure that the staff understand the importance of staff cost. In the
particular context that we’ve been given, our optimum staff cost percentage runs at about 32%. When
the staff are tired, overworked and cranky, I’ll often run the numbers on the weekly staff cost and find it’s
running somewhere between 27% and 31%. The money you’re saving there might appear to be a good
thing but in my experience it’s often followed by a huge argument, a resignation, or some other fatiguerelated catastrophe.
Equally, if I find people standing around, people are bored, or orders are going missing, I can almost
be assured that we’re running above 33%. The strange thing about staff cost is that it becomes almost
intuitive in the way you work. I’ve always found that I’ve hated working on an over-staffed bar because
there’s no urgency, no tempo and consequently, no buzz.
When there are too many people on bar it just feels wrong and the customers pick up on it very
quickly. When you’ve got just the right number, people work with purpose, everyone is tuned in and the
service is a lot better because everyone is thinking.
In our weekly meetings with the management team, the first thing we discuss is the staff cost
percentage. It’s one of those things that you can be extremely open about with staff because it doesn’t
necessarily tell them how much everyone earns, but does help them understand how their actions affect
their conditions and pay.
Some of the things this communicates are:
If their colleagues are being unproductive it directly affects their earning potential.
They can only get a raise if the percentage allows it.
They need to consider those we take “on trial” for new positions very seriously.
If the turnover rises and the staff cost drops by percentage then there’s room to improve wages.
Every now and then, when the staff cost percentage creeps up, we call a meeting to explain the
situation and cut a shift to bring things back into line. If you prepare for this and create a conversation
around the decision, you’ll be amazed how your team will own the problem. People can be incredibly
innovative when they’re put under pressure in the right circumstances, and whenever we do this we’ve
often ended up with staff suggesting new ways to do things faster and better.
It’s all very well running a business within this limit, but I also believe in using it to benefit the staff.
Whenever we are running below our staff cost target for a quarter we then use that extra wiggle room to
give people a raise. In my mind, the 32% is the staff’s money and so if we run at 29% there’s room to
repay the hard work of the people in the business.
Running our Grand Canal Street shop over the past seven years, I’ve noticed a trend that I can now
look back on that is invaluable and that is the need to invest in staff hours. When cafés open they’re
often staffed in such a way that they can only serve so many cups of coffee. The problem with that is
that the owner’s eagerness to control costs has curtailed their ability to grow the business and at a
certain level they need to invest in more staff.
If they’re doing 200 drinks a day and have two staff, they’re probably close to the point where the wait
is too long or quality is suffering. The business owner is waiting to hit 300 drinks before they get a third
member of staff because they know that at 300 drinks a day a third staff member is sustainable. The
issue is that the extra 100 people a day won’t come back because the service is shoddy or won’t come
in at all because the queue is too long. This is coffee checkmate.
If you’re business is generally growing, you will reach these points where you just need to invest in
more staff hours so you can reach the next level. Of course keeping things lean will keep the tempo up,
make staff innovate and build their competence but this will not yield a perpetual return.
In my experience, the pattern goes like this:
Staff cost is high
Turnover increases
Staff cost is low
Shop is too busy
Invest in staff
Staff cost is high
The strange thing about our staff cost is that it is particular to us. Every café should look to industry
standards but you need find your own tolerances around that. Certain factors will make your
circumstance slightly different to other peoples and so it’s good to set your own standards within these
guidelines.
Mitigating factors like the ones below can make your situation that bit different:
Consistent and predictable business all day with no down time.
Slightly more seats than most cafés.
Access to a uniquely high margin product.
Unusually high or low tax rates.
And although it’s a rational, objective business process in operation, there’s a very human element to it
too. When it’s running at its optimum – not its minimum or its maximum – it does just feel right. To me,
that’s important, and although I might make a few more percent in my margin by shaving things tighter
next month, I know the sustainability of my business and welfare of my staff will ensure financial viability
of the business I run in the longer term.
Keeping Track
at 3fe that I wish I’d started many years ago and it helps me keep track of
how things are going on a day-to-day basis. It is by no means a complicated spreadsheet, but it gives
me a simple overview of our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and it is always one of the first thing I
recommend that people who have opened coffee shops start to do.
If you’re not familiar with how spreadsheets work, ask a friend to set this one up for you and it will
definitely start you off on the right footing. Over time, mine has become more complex, as will yours, but
the basics are there as a solid core.
I RUN A VERY SIMPLE SPREADSHEET
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I owe everything you’ve read about here to my family. Anything I’ve achieved has
been built on their strength, patience and occasional criticism.
My wife Yvonne not only pushed me into this game, she also got me through those first few months
washing dishes on her lunch break in my one-man shop. Her support and patience have been
unwavering since.
Oscar, Dallan and Bóinn provide comic relief, Jill fronts the moral support team and Ian is the
unmovable force I aspire to be. My parents gave me all the skills to make this possible and without Leo
and Ger I’d be a long way back. Thanks for making me consider the important things and giggle at the
other stuff.
To Steve Leighton, for taking a risk on me when he had better things to be doing and for being the
friend and business partner I need in equal measure. I still deny working as a waitress in a cocktail bar,
when I met him.
The business would not be a business without Trevor O’Shea, Cosimo Libardo and James Hoffmann
who were a wonderful source of support, advice, insight, compassion and bollockings.
To Pete Williams, Matt Perger, Declan Bagnall, Fiona McHugh, Rachel Firth, Dan Hegarty, Paul
Stack, Ger O’Donohoe, Peter Dore-Smith, David Walsh, Meister, Karl Purdy, Jenn Rugolo, Martin
Kiernan, Stephen Morrissey, and my classmates and lecturers at UCD Smurfit Business School, thank
you for your advice and feedback over the course of this book and much further beyond.
To my extended family at Nuova Simonelli, particularly Michele, Lauro, Giovanni, Mauro, Nando, and
Marco, I am eternally grateful for the perspective you’ve afforded me.
The experience I gained over the years thanks to World Coffee Events has also been something I
would be far worse without and I’m excited for the future of SCA.
To my editor, Ian Lamont, for always breaking it gently, as well as Conor and David at WorkGroup for
consistently making my thoughts more presentable.
To all the staff at 3fe, both past and present, I’m continually baffled that you buy into what we’re trying
to do but eternally grateful for it. That you all enjoy the book is a victory in itself.
Finally, I’d like to thank the people of Dublin and all of our customers for creating the best city in the
world to do business.