Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders

As goes the culture, so goes the company. This is just a fact. All of us want to be able to say that our employee cultures are strong, vibrant, and dedicated to the vision we have set for the company. Unfortunately though, it aint that easy.

Today we are addressing this with what I believe may be the most powerful series of insights you've ever heard on employee culture and how to work for and with it to amazing success.

I am so pleased to be talking with the amazing, Stan Slap, author of one of my most recommended books, "Under the Hood : Fire up and Fine-tune your Employee Culture"

Stan is the founder and CEO of SLAP company and has spent the last 3 decades specializing in achieving fierce support from manager, employee and customer cultures. They believe within each of these groups there is one problem that has the biggest impact on the enterprise and one solution that is most valuable, coveted and elusive. The SLAP company has cracked the code on these problems and their solutions are highest rated in many of the world's highest rated companies. They are currently working in 44 countries countries and ahave achieved amazing results in employee culture at companies like Oracle, CNN, Timewarner, Google, Starbucks, eBay, Viacom, and Microsoft among many others.

I don't know of a more potent example of what good and bad employee cultural engagement than the elbow-to-elbow laboratory that is the coffee bar. This episode is absolutely a game changer and foundational listening if you want to create and lead an amazing employee culture.

In this episode you will learn about:

• 4 of the "7 Deadly Sins of Cultural Engagement"
• How culture is formed and what it cares about
• Best practices for engaging and guiding a culture
• How do we fail our employees?
• Secrets to scaling culture
• How to create "cultural legends"
• Why you cannot coax a culture into giving you what you want
• Tactics for true communication
• How do customers factor into your employee culture?

There is honestly so much more here and I implore you to get the book "Under the Hood", listen to this episode several times, take notes, and see how big of an impact these insights have on your company.

Links:

www.slapcompany.com

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Related Episodes:

083: 6 Essential Books for your Professional Growth

6 Essential Books for your Professional Growth

018: Hiring, Culture, and the Future of your Shop

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There are many qualities that contribute to being a solid professional in the coffee shop. Today we are going to focus on two particular qualities that are very critical to get right in the beginning and can set you up for success in the future. Please share this and the related episodes below with your barista staff!

Related episodes:

ep14: A Barista's Guide to Advancing

ep31: Essential Advice for New Baristas

ep56: The Sleepwalking Barista

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We all know that training is one of the most critical skills to master in the professional coffee world. Entire careers are made or broken by the influence of a great or a terrible training experience. It stands to reason then that we would go out of our way to find the best examples of training done right and learn from their sucCess in helping others grow their skills. Today that is exactly what we are doing as we talk with the amazing, Emma Haines of London School of Coffee and Caffeina Consulting. Emma is a SCA AST Barista Skills, Sensory & Brewing and has worked in hospitality and catering training for the last twelve years.

For the last eight years, she has focused on coffee training, in particular specialty coffee training and how to incorporate specialty elements into commercial environments. She works all over Europe and beyond and is a resident trainer at London School of Coffee.She has a strong passion for inclusivity, as reflected in her role on the SCA Equity, Diversity & Inclusivity Taskforce.

Emma's delivery of training ensures that the ability to grow to love coffee and turn it into a passion is available to all, regardless of background.

The heart of what drives Emma is summed up in how she describes her role as trainer, "Facilitating a students learning journey" and in this conversation you will be given many insight into how you can better facilitate your students learning journey.

I am so excited to share this interview with you all!

We discuss:

• Emma's unique road to training
• Her philosophy and approach
• Methods for facilitating true learning
• Being confident and caring
• Providing a safe place for questions
• How to encourage learning vs rote memorization
• How to balance what people want vs what they really need
• Managing outcomes

Links:

www.londonschoolofcoffee.com

www.caffeinaconsulting.com

Related Episodes:

Training Masterclass w/ Gwylim Davies

Mastering the Art of Training w/ Dave Stachowiak

Training Principles for Specialty Coffee w/ Anne Nylander

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The best plant based beverages on the planet!

www.pacificfoods.com/food-service

Coffee! Beer! Founder Friday! Today we get to talk with founder and owner of Tap Room Coffee and Beer in Atlanta, GA. Jonathan founded Tap Room in 2014 and since then has seen great success creating amazing coffee and beer experiences for both his staff and customers.

As an Atlanta native he and the shop have been embraced by the community very well and have a deep passion to serve that community with all they have.

In addition to running Tap Room, Jonathan serves as a coach and consultant for entrepreneurs and coffee startups. He has a passion for genuine personal connection and helping others discover and fulfill their life's calling. As you will see in this interview, Jonathan strives to maintain a healthy balance between business, being involved in the community and church, and living a joy-filled life with his wife and four kids.

This conversation dives into the story of what led Jonathan to start Tap Room and the details of operating the shop, recent expansion, balancing life and work, and managing all the relationships and responsibilities that come with owning your own coffee retail business.

In our conversation we cover:

• Risk and business relationships
• Customer retention
• Hospitality to staff
• Building relationships
• Balancing life and entrepreneurship
• Funding the shop
• Different set up and build out for beer and coffee
• Advice to other coffee business people

Don't sleep on this interview! It is sure to inspire, inform, and get you thinking about ways you too can create more margin for life amidst work while still having excellence in you shop.

Links:

• www.taproomcoffee.com
• Taproom on Instagram
• Sprudge Feature on Ground Floor Coffee

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There is a little problem we need to talk about that may not seem like a biggie but can wear away at morale and breed needless frustration. The bar area can sometimes attract a variety of staff members who are not on shift or are from other departments. Over time the bar starts to be treated as a pantry or lounge and not a professional work environment. Today we are chatting about this devolutionary phenomenon and some solutions to aid in developing respect for the bar and the people who are tasked with its upkeep.

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We will always have our emotions with us at work. In the fast-paced customer facing work of coffee retail we can cycle through a whole host of emotions in just one shift and not all of them are helpful to the situations we find ourselves in. One way we have tried to deal with it is by denying our emotions and detaching. Today's guest is going to challenge us to become emotion scientists and embrace the emotions we have at work to harness them for both great business outcomes and our over-all health as we engage in daily emotional labor.

I am so pleased to welcome to the show, Andrea Hoban! Andrea is Co-Founder and head of learning at Oji Life Lab, and has more than twenty years of experience in leading large teams and building business. She is a certified executive coach and leadership development practitioner who has helped hundreds of professionals learn to harness their emotions to achieve their goals. At Oji, she is reimagining the way we learn skills like emotional intelligence to directly impact the quality of our lives.

I believe this episode is one of the most important ones you can listen to. Emotional intelligence has such a profound impact on not only our careers and personal lives, but on those we lead and the people we serve. If we want strong people, teams, and businesses then harnessing our emotions at work is the first step in that direction.

In this episode you will learn about:

• The correlation between emotions and achieving business outcomes
• How the leaders emotions impact the company
• How to use negative me potions for good
• Mood regulation
• Increasing self-awareness
• Noticing blindspots and biases
• Healthy approaches to emotional labor and much more!

Links:

www.ojilifelab.com

Andrea Hoban on LinkedIn

Related Episodes:

Deep Listening w/ Oscar Trimboli

Self Care 101

Dealing with Stress in the Cafe w/ Joe Sanok

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When it comes how we divide our attention and energy we can tend to skew to one side or another. This leaves us with too much focus on one area and not enough in another which ultimately makes a sustainable coffee job impossible.

Today on Shift Break we are going to talk about the importance of recognizing the need for balance and how to achieve it on shift for a great career.

Effortless Inventory with ODEKO!

odeko.com/keystotheshop

Clean that equipment with Urnex!

www.urnex.com

When the fridge goes down, the ice machine is not making ice, and the display case is making weird sounds...it's time to call a tech ASAP! Well that is exactly what we did in this episode. Today we get to talk to master refrigeration technician, Luke Peterson of The Maintenance Dept.

The point of this conversation today is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to properly care for the other pieces of non-coffee equipment that keep our businesses running well.

Not many of us take measures to install, use, and maintain our refrigeration equipment properly and as a result we end up out of commission and paying huge bills. This can all be avoided and Luke is here to tell us how!

Be sure and subscribe and share this episode with a friend!

LINKS:

The Maintenance Department

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Bar backing is one of the most important roles in the cafe. Either as a dedicated position or as a set of responsibilities shared, when it is embraced and executed well, it makes the whole shift successful.

Today we chat about this critical part of the bar and some mindsets and best practices for bringing it into focus and working as a bar back with joy and pride.

How do you decide which opportunity for expansion is good and which one is not for you? If you are in business you will get offers to open a location in many different contexts but when you are knee deep in operating your first store it can be challenging to see the next step clearly.

Today we are getting the perspective of one entrepreneur who is expanding to a second location within the first year of opening his first shop. Kyle Wells is the co-owner of Torpedo Coffee in Denver, CO and a past Founder Friday guest. I wanted to bring Kyle back to give us insight into his own process of accessing opportunities and making the decision to say yes to one of many the have been made since opening.

Kyle and his wife Falene are are true entrepreneurs and Kyle communicates very clearly and with a balanced perspective about that life and in this interview he lays out a lot of very useful information that you can use to help you on your own journey

In the conversation you will learn:

• How this opportunity won Kyle over
• The signs that you are ready to say yes to expanding
• How to prepare yourself for the added responsibility
• How to prepare you team and invest into the current culture
• The importance of delegation, systems, and trust
• The importance of working "on" your business not "in" it
• Kyles advice for how to assess opportunity

Links:

@Torpedocoffee

@theclosequarters

www.torpedocoffee.com

Founder Friday w/ Kyle Wells "Before and After"

Need consulting or training? Lets talk!

[email protected]

www.keystotheshop.com/consulting