So You Want To Open A Coffee Shop?

There are a billion trillion reasons to open your own café. You get to be your own boss, create your own branding, design your space, train a staff how you want, serve products you want, engage with your community, create a community, host events, affect lives every day, get instant gratification by interacting directly with your customers every day. You get to make your own way and your own income. The pride and the street cred for being an entrepreneur is fun. Seeing a car with your sticker on it or a person you don't know wearing one of your t-shirts is a blast. Seeing your staff grow and change as people and move forward toward their potential is rewarding.

But let's face it, that's 2% of what you'll be doing every day.

You might want to be a coffee house owner. That's great. Here's what you'll be doing. You decide if it's a good fit.

• Waking up early every day for your entire career.
• Dealing with cranky morning regulars before they have their coffee.
• Dealing with cranky staff before they have their coffee.
• Fixing bad customer interactions your employees have when they can't.
• Having folks you like quit.
• Having folks you don't like, who aren't good workers, never leave.
• Firing those people and not backing down during their apology and sob story.
• Crying baristas who just broke up with someone, had a fight with a friend or parent, had a family member pass away, are just having a bad day, are still drunk from the night before, just found out they're pregnant, etc. etc.
• Customers confiding secrets in you that you may or may not be legally responsible to share with authorities.
• Your store getting used as a drug delivery system by folks you count on as staff or customers. 
• Drunk customers. Better when it's during the day. 
• Older dudes hitting on college students (on a good day) or high school students (this gets fun...)
• Overdrafted bank accounts.
• Lack of funding for a new project, payroll growth, or inventory.
• The interest from bills you honestly forgot to pay.
• The calls about bills you "forgot to pay."
• Lack of money to replace broken equipment.
• Having to fix equipment.
• Having that repair guy show up in the middle of your morning rush and having to work around his plumber's crack to get drinks out.
• Everything that can go wrong will go wrong mid-Saturday and won't be able to get taken care of until Monday.
• Blowing out fridge coils.
• Realizing after you pay a repair guy that your fridge isn't working because you didn't blow the coils out in the past 6 months. You just paid him $60 to dust for you for 5 minutes.
• That promotion that sounded like a good idea that loses you a ton of money but that you can't repeal.
• That advertisement that looked great until someone reads it to you with different tonality and you realize all of the connotations you didn't mean to imply.
• Constantly getting told to take a day off by your regulars and having everything fall apart when you do.
• Taking a day off and having to come in because someone thought they could get away with skipping out on work.
• Being hungover and still having your store open at 6am with a smile.
• Still being hungover at 6pm and realizing you forgot that high school youth group was showing up for coffee and games.
• Holiday parties. Staff hookups. Awkward shifts. Yeah...
• Still being drunk when you open at 6am with a smile.
• That time a car gets knocked out of park by a kid and goes through your front window.
• The power outage that shuts you down for 2 days when you need the money to pay the power bill.
• Lease negotiations. Credit negotiations. 
• Not understanding what the heck your accountant is talking about but realizing it's bad.
• That friend who expects to never pay because you didn't charge them once.
• That regular who never tips but always talks about how he/she doesn't tip.
• Having regulars stop you while you're out to eat or at the bar and having them not shut up with questions about work.
• The question "How's Business?" all the time.
• The realization that no one ever wants any answer longer than the word "good."
• And finally... never getting to drink any of your own coffee before it's cold because there's things to do and people to please.

I opened Lemonjello's Coffee in 2003 and I still love what I do. I look forward to it (most days). And it has been rewarding. But I would have never signed up for it.

So you want to open a coffee shop still? If you're still thinking about it... I dare you.

Gateway Coffee

A year before I opened Lemonjello's Coffee, I didn't like drip coffee. I loved espresso beverages and had learned how to consistently brew good pots of coffee (I had yet to hear of manual brew methods in 2002). But I knew that if I wanted to open my own shop, I had to learn to like drip coffee.

I had a disadvantage. My mother spent my entire life telling me that coffee was gross. It was bad for you. The Good Lord didn't want us to have it. My dad worked third shift at a local factory and drank Folgers as if his life depended on it. Actually, it probably did. My mom hated the smell, refused to even try it, and hailed it as borderline evil.

I was not a rebellious teenager, but I found myself joining friends in the local coffeehouses and trying the stuff. I felt guilty. It started with flavored lattés, turned to plain lattés, then to vanilla americanos, then plain americanos, then back to lattés. But I knew I had to get the drip thing down.

When I took a job at the bakery I would later convert into Lemonjello's, I was determined. I found a single origin (my first) Organic Peru coffee from a local roaster. I brewed it at the shop every day. For myself, I added vanilla and a couple ounces of soy milk to it and called it the Vanilla Peru. I added it to the menu and it sold well (still does). 

This was my gateway. After some months, I dropped the vanilla. Eventually, I dropped the soy milk. And there I was. A bonafide coffee drinker. Not so hard, right?

I understand my role in the coffee industry. I've trained baristas at my shop that have later worked at and managed successful shops in bigger cities owned by well known micro-roasters. They had to start somewhere. 

I have college students come in for fufu frozen lattés their freshman year that graduate drinking espresso and microlot pourovers. They move to big cities, frequent the "cool" independent shops there, and spend entirely too much of their entry-level income on good coffee. You're welcome.

We all start somewhere and it's time that those of us who are baristas let folks have their gateways. What's the first coffee drink you had? I bet it wasn't a single-farm-single-variety-picked-ripe-washed-process-central-american-espresso pulled at 21 g in and 49.3 g out at 32 seconds because it "breaks rules" and makes that mango acidity really pop on the second sip. 

Just sayin'

Wandering

They say coffee is something you always chase. They're right, at least about me. I have been at this long enough (15+ years) to know what I want, what I like, what I can learn from. So I'm on a quest for 3 things: The Perfect Single Location Café, Perfect Barista Customer Service, and Perfect Zero Waste in action. This is a blog about me watching the world around me in an effort to answer my questions about how this coffee world could maybe work...