Words of Wisdom Before You Open A Coffee Shop

Posted on: 2013-03-14 12:00 AM

Words of Wisdom Before You Open A Coffee Shop

Picture this scenario: You walk into a coffee shop, smell the wonderful aroma of the beans, enjoy a delicious brew, and then suddenly get thoughts of starting your own shop. True, there’s something romantic about running your own shop and perfecting various coffee brewing techniques while making friends with customers, but it also involves a lot of hard work and careful planning.

One of Blenz Coffee’s newer locations is a beautiful coffee shop in the core of Downtown Vancouver. I stopped by this location on the intersection of Thurlow St. and West Georgia St. to chat with Harvey, the shop’s friendly franchisee who was eager to share some very useful advice about starting a coffee shop.

Leaving behind the Tech industry for coffee, Harvey brings his years of experience in logistics, data analysis and project management to help prepare him for operating his coffee shop. Even with all his experience though, there are still things Harvey wished he knew before he opened his own Blenz Coffee location. Here are Harvey’s words of wisdom for would-be coffee shop owners:

1. Reach out to other coffee shop owners:
Before you go ahead and open up your own coffee shop, talk with owners of existing stores. Coffee shop owners might not necessarily share numbers like their own profit and cost figures with you (some may), but they’re amazing resources for the variety of tips and advice they can give! If you’re going for a franchise model instead of starting your own independent shop, getting the perspectives of the franchisees of specific brands would be useful in supplementing the information that the coffee shop franchisors provide you. Trade groups, a local example is the Vancouver Coffee Shop Franchisees Association, can also give you insight and information in owning and running a shop. You can save a lot of time and money, and avoid potential headaches just by talking with these all these people!

2. Try working for a coffee shop:
You can get a lot of information from reading “how to run a coffee shop” articles, but you can learn a lot more by working for one. You get to experience the operating challenges first-hand, and see what things work and don’t work. You get to see or do a lot of the backroom stuff too, like ordering and receiving food and supplies, and interacting with suppliers.

3. Find the right people:
The most introverted coffee shop owner can still have a successful store… as long as they have extroverts working with them. The key is to understand what type of people you really need; in this business, you want to have friendly, customer-oriented individuals working with you. Employees can be taught how to prepare coffee, but you have to pay attention to how they interact with people. Having good people is really important.

4. Do your projections:
As with any other business, before you actually start up shop, you have to do your projections. Besides looking at what kind of traffic a particular area gets, do “coffee counts” and keep track of how many people pass by with coffee. If you can, it would be useful to talk to both independent coffee shop owners and franchisees in the area about how their average costs and revenues are like. Ultimately you want to find out as much as you can about the numbers associated with an area, and if opening a coffee shop there will make you money.

5. Trust your gut:
It’s good to analyze information and go for the most logical choices when making decisions, but sometimes you just have to listen to what your gut tells you to do. There are coffee shop owners out there that have made mistakes by trying to do the most logical things; they could have avoided problems by trusting their instincts.

Thanks to Harvey and the Thurlow St. Blenz Coffee location for these pre-opening tips and advice!

What are some advice you can give to would-be coffee shop owners?

Meet Our Guest Blogger - Gerald Cruz

Gerald is a former barista and a full time coffee enthusiast with a background in marketing and events. When not visiting the wonderful selection of coffee shops in the beautiful city of Vancouver, he constantly upgrades his knowledge about coffee: be it about beans, preparation, cool coffee equipment, and latte art designs. Besides a love for coffee, he also has a fervent appreciation for fashion, and is a firm believer that the two go hand in hand.

Find Me Coffee
Helping you find nearby coffee shops, coffee deals, and great cafe products,
all around the world, via web, iPhone, Android & Windows apps.

Windows App Store
Apple App Store
Android
Web Site

Twitter

Facebook

Share This Blog Entry:

Comments

write a Comment

Advertise
With Us

With more than 50,000,000 searches for coffee shops every month you can't afford not to be on findmecoffee.com

Learn More

every coffee shop

BACK TO
TOP

in the world