Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders

If you want to do well in competition you have to study the rules. Without this you are flying blind and will probably get a less that stellar result for your effort. The same thing is true for your career.

Today on Shift Break we will be talking about the importance of learning the "rules" as it applies to your professional journey in coffee and why doing this will give you a much better chance of success.

Related episodes:

• Laziness & the Most Important Decision
• 243 : Encore Episode! "The Sleepwalking Barista (Owner)"
• 031 : Essential Advice for New Baristas : Tips to help you successfully navigate and thrive in your new coffee career
• Patience & Passivity : Career Advice for the Long Game
• 014 : A Barista's Guide to Advancing: How to take full advantage of where you are and set yourself up for success in coffee
• The Barista Slump

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There is a lot of information available to us through our POS systems that show us the numbers behind the business. Owners and managers read these numbers to get a sense of not only how the business is doing, but also to get an idea of where it needs to go and what decisions need to be made to make that happen. So it is quite important that we have a sensible way to approach and use the data so the conclusions we come to and actions we take benefit the business long term.

Today I am so pleased to be talking with Mark Calhoun and Jim Strarcev of PerfectCube!

After they sold their financial technology business to Charles Schwab, Mark and Jim pivoted to the retail space by opening a gelato shop. They ultimately wanted to learn the retail business so they could create a better software solution for mom-and-pop stores and small franchises.

The result is PerfectCube, an online platform that allows small retailers to easily track their performance and even forecast the near future. In the space of a few minutes, users can get a read on sales, inventory levels and other important metrics. PerfectCube can assess what hours of the day have the highest sales and which individual products sold fastest, not just today, but last week, last month and last year.

Mark and Jim give a great work shop at Coffee Fest trade shows called -Real Number in Your Cafe- and today they are going to be discussing with us their path to retail, approach to the numbers, and how owners and operators should be managing the metrics to make the best choices for how they run their cafes.

We cover:

• From big data to gelato
• Learning the key points of focus for retail
• Taking care of customers
• Looking at what was behind the data
• Short term thinking, long term damage
• False positives and confirmation bias
• Iportance of easy visualization
• Metrics to pay attention to
• Next steps to get and use data well

Links:

www.perfectcube.co

PerfectCube on Facebook

Related episodes:

009 : How to Approach Data and Metrics w/ Simon Ouderkirk

170 : Why your Inventory Counts w/ Albert Amar and Pierre-Francois Rio of SwiftCount

172 : Why Tracking Performance is a Must!

184 : Making Great Business Decisions w/ Dave Stachowiak

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www.coffeefest.com

If your shop does not have specific standards for the products your serve and the way you serve them, then you are leaving a lot of the success of your coffee shop up to chance. Question is, how do you go about setting standards? Where do the parameters come from?

In today's Shift Break we will be discussing an equation for how to set up the basics of your cafe's quality standards in a fashion that is informed, practical, and flexible.

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• 298 : A Trophy, or Atrophy?
• 235 : 4 Tips for Training your Staff
• 172 : Why Tracking Performance is a Must!
• 123 : The 10 Essentials of a Barista Manual
• Communicate, Duplicate, Repeat
• Your Peers are not your Customers
• How to ruin a Game of Telephone

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Ground Control Cyclops Brewer

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These are the two most important and intensive processes in the cafe yet they often are the most rush and poorly thought through. The preparations we make and the actions we take when hiring and training staff will and does create a ripple effect that is felt by everyone who interacts with your business for years to come.

Maybe more than ever, a proper focus on hiring and training with excellence is the key to creating resilience and sustainability in our coffee shops. Strong investment in the beginning helps alleviate issues down the road.

Today we will be going through a detailed presentation I delivered at Coffee Fest that dives into some very practical advice to equip you to bring on, and care for well, the right people for your coffee shop and customers.

We cover:

• Values based hiring and the problem of false-promises
• Building the role and job description
• Steps of the interview process and the role of feedback
• Ways to attract staff
• Proper views toward training and onboarding
• Structures to equip baristas
• Patience, follow through and intentionality
• Manuals and teach trainers to teach

Related Episodes:

• Hiring Friends and Making Enemies
• 278 : Making great Hiring Decisions
• Hard Work is Hard
• Training TMI
• Shifting the Shadow Shift
• 296: Holistic Barista Training w/ David Castillo of Go Get Em Tiger , Los Angeles
• 123 : The 10 Essentials of a Barista Manual
• 130 : Anne Nylander | Training Principles for Specialty Coffee Professionals

Visit our sponsors!

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www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

New York City is undoubtedly one of the coffee capitals of the world. With a seemingly endless number of options to choose from, it is hard to stand out and create something that makes people notice and even hard to keep their attention and patronage. Birch Coffee in NYC was founded with the intention to level up the hospitality and customer service one can expect in a coffee house and has been busy building and making this a reality since 2009. Today on Founder Friday we get to talk with the Co-Funder of Birch Coffee, Jeremy Lyman!

Jeremy Lyman is the co-founder of Birch Coffee, a New York City-based coffee company. Since its first store opened in 2009, the company has grown to become one of New York City's premiere and most loved independent coffee shop chains. With more than a dozen locations throughout the city, the focus of Birch is on customer service.

Service is something Jeremy believed was lacking in the Specialty Coffee industry and being that both he and his partner Paul are consumers first and worked in bars and restaurants for years before, they realized that this was what was necessary to stand out in the industry. In order to grow the company, he has overseen the development of not only a high level of service, but methods in which to hone and develop those skills amongst his teams.

Jeremy, Paul, and their team have also figured out creative ways to stand out. From eliminating wifi and introducing conversation starters to designing extraordinarily unique napkins, they have caught the eye of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Forbes who have paid specific attention to these differentiators.

In this conversation we will not only her the story of Birch Coffee's founding and growth but we will also be hearing about Jeremy's journey as an owner through the years as he owns up about hard lessons, values, the impact of vulnerability, and what we considers the most valuable thing owners can focus on at any stage of their cafes development.

I loved this talk and was greatly moved by Jeremy's honesty and candor. I hope you enjoy this episode but more than that I hope it helps inspire you to new levels of personal and professional excellence.

• Excellent customer service
• First steps and lessons learned early
• Overcoming arrogance
• What makes a great partnership
• Recovery and Vulnerability
• Being honest and self aware
• Making good decisions
• Healthy and unhealthy fear
• The vital role of feedback and observation
• Training baristas for real world scenarios
• Looking for the lessons in everything
• Advice for entrepreneurs

Links:

www.birchcoffee.com

Follow Birch on Instagram

Email: [email protected]

Related episodes:

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228 : Cracking the Leadership Code w/ Alain Hunkins

181 : Organizational Self-Knowledge

145: Founder Friday w/ Red Rooster Coffee Roasters co-founder, Haden Polseno-Hensley

017 : Founder Friday w/ Jonathan Rubinstein of Joe Coffee: Entrepreneurship | Coffee Business | Hiring | Barista Culture | Growth

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At work there is unnecessary difficulty and then there is just…necessary difficulty. The trouble is that sometimes we can blur the line between the two and generally will default the thinking all difficulty is to be avoided or is a sign of something wrong with the system, ourselves, or the people we lead.

On this Shift Break I channel my inner old man (kinda) as we will be discussing the necessary difficulty of work and how to avoid blaming others, and why embracing hard work as a blessing and not a curse can change you and your business.

Interested in consulting services? Reach out to : [email protected]

Listen to these episodes next:

• Laziness & the Most Important Decision
• 056 : The Sleepwalking Barista
• Patience & Passivity : Career Advice for the Long Game
• 6 Truths about Power
• 283 : 5 Bad Reasons to Open a Coffee Shop
• 226 : The Art of being Indispensable at Work w/Bruce Tulgan

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What makes a successful coffee bar? This whole show is dedicated to exploring the depths of the question and yet there are a few fundamental elements that, if practiced, will greatly help your coffee bar succeed. Were are not going to be talking about the common things you might associate with success such as location, Cost of Goods, and great customer service. Those things and many like them are definitely important but even if you have the major pieces in place, there are aspects of your shop that are quite nuanced and are responsible for hold those big pieces in place.

Today we will be exploring the top 5 rules for a successful coffee shop, why they are important, and what it looks like to implement them to make your cafe sustainable for you and everyone associated with it.

We cover:

• Doing the right thing facing reality
• Celebrating staff and community
• People-first systems
• Pursuing humility, empathy
• Iterating your business
• Passion and realism
• Feedback and communication
• Accepting different means to and end
• Values in various contexts

Recommended episodes related to this:

• 173 : 5 Areas of Focus for Retailers
• 276 : Six Ideas for Increasing your Revenue
• 269 : What to Focus on after you Launch
• 194 : Encore Episode! Leadership in the Cafe: 10 Steps to being a People First Leader | Aired January 17 2017
• 057 : SOP's FTW! Success through Standard Operating Procedures
• 108 : Founder Friday w/ Dorian Bolden of Beyu Caffe in Durham, NC
• 043 : Founder Friday w/ Kathy Turiano: Joe Bean Coffee Roasters

Visit our sponsors!

www.prima-coffee.com/keys

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

Quality control and assurance is common in most well established coffee shops. Even if it is not a dedicated position, it at least is an area where we invest a lot of time and effort. What we don't see very much of is a focus on care. How do the staff and customers experience the business and what are we doing to make sure we are dialing in that experience?

Today on Shift Break we will talk about how investing in care assurance is a critical to success.

Related episodes:

• Fear and Trust
• Systems as Care
• 208: Building a Company that Cares w/ Kyra Kennedy of Baratza
• 162 : Discussing "Baristastainability" w/ Jenna Gotthelf of Counter Culture Coffee
• 085 : How we Ruin the Specialty Experience
• 248 : The 5 Elements of Resourcing your Team

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The best espresso machines in the world!

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Winning coffee awards and competitions is pretty cool. There are many benefits to pursuing accolades for your coffee shop through such as marketing opportunities, sharpening skills, energizing staff, and networking. The question we have to ask ourselves though is, just how critical are competitors and awards tot he success of our shops and what metric should we be using to gauge the health of our businesses?

In today's episode we will be talking about how the pursuit of awards can often become a means to ignore the more foundational issues within the shop and actually contribute to further disfunction by prioritizing external validation over internal health.

We discuss:

• Benefits and place of competition
• Where we go astray
• Why "Best of" doesn't mean what you think
• The consequences
• Feeding our ego
• Mindset for ROI no matter what
• Escaping responsibility through community
• Focus on "first things" and internal health

Related Episodes:

• Icing on the Cake: Competitions vs. the Shop
• Accurate Reflection
• 010: How Are Competitions Relevant? w/ Jess Steffy: Barista competitions / Coffee Shops / Employee engagement / Professional growth
• 045 : Simple, Powerful Hospitality w/ Philip Turner
• 173 : 5 Areas of Focus for Retailers
• 158 : A Management Masterclass w/ Jon Felix Lund, VP of Operations for Coava Coffee Roasters / Portland, OR
• 296: Holistic Barista Training w/ David Castillo of Go Get Em Tiger , Los Angeles

Visit our sponsors!

www.prima-coffee.com/keys

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

On a daily basis we have opportunities to take a customer's genuine curiosity and excitement and either affirm it and guide them or to stamp it out and push them away. In coffee shops all over the world the former scenario play out but what we see too much of these days is the latter. Customers being essentially scolded for their budding enthusiasm for coffee.

Today on Shift Break I am re-airing an old episode called "Curbing Their Enthusiasm". In it we explore the problem, what it causes, and how to fix our mindsets so we can be effective and genuinely excited guides for our customers.

Related Episodes:

Making the customer the Enemy

Gossip: How this toxic element destroys community in the coffee shop and what to do instead

Managing Anger : Tips on how to deal with getting angry behind the coffee bar in a healthy way

Visit our awesome Sponsors!

Elevated batch brew and so much more!

Ground Control Cyclops Brewer

The best espresso machines in the world!

www.lamarzoccousa.com