1: It’s Just Coffee

It’s Just Coffee

People don’t make detours because your coffee is better. Even for the barista crowd, after all the fuzz, it’s just coffee. We don’t drink our coffee just about anywhere but neither are we going to the other side of town for a cup. We’ll meet people over a cup, for sure. We’ll check out the new opening in the other district, granted. You hear about New Yorkers hopping bars to get this drink there, and that drink there.

While I appreciate that level of dedication, it’s equally an enormous time sink. Put crudely, don’t count on people traveling to your café. When I just started running the shop, I felt attention to the coffee program was going to be the solution to get people back through the door. I thought, the reason we’re in a bad position is people don’t like the drink. So naturally, I spent a lot of time working on recipes, retraining of the baristas, and keeping up to date with extraction trends in the industry.

None of that was time wasted, but it definitely wasn’t time well spent. In fact, some of our regulars didn’t like the turn of aesthetic we took. They’d grown to liking thick, syrupy espresso that unfortunately was just hopelessly underextracted. So when we changed to pulling more diluted shots that were also more balanced and sweet, we had put stress on their loyalty that we needed to keep going. Of course there were also those that did like the new style we adopted. We had hoped that they would act as ambassadors to their friends and bring them into the space, offsetting the barrier we had put up for the more conservative regulars. And while that certainly did happen with some, and my estimate is that the disgruntled old guard and new adopters ended up as a zero sum, in the end it didn’t get that many more bodies through the door. We might have been back in the game as a café that served coffee to a modern standard, but in truth that only meant we were back among many contenders, and definitely not the only pick of the bunch.

Thinking of the time spent on getting the coffee programme back into relevance, perhaps it would have been more effective to host more community events? Or maybe we could have worked on modernising the food programme or fixing the margins? Every choice in allocating time means another item on the list is put on the backburner. It was only later, when I got more involved with the local business community and their support and we started putting their tips to practice, that we really started to notice an uptick in turnover. Work on building a community of locals instead. Work on making them feel good and getting emotionally invested in your business’s success. Have them be the ambassadors for your success. Of course a basic level of quality needs to be met, but with a trained team, a set of standards and decent, well-maintained equipment that’s essentially trivial.

Don’t spend fortunes brewing the best cup, spend fortunes on the happiness of your guests.