Well, the harsh reality of this is that it isn’t quite as simple as wrapping a system around everything and then just sitting back and expecting it all to run smoothly. Within the coffee business you will find that your customers react very badly to a fast food mentality of ‘would you like fries with that?’, or by being herded like sheep from one section to another.
You need to find the balance between creating great systems to help manage the day-to-day functions of the business and also, through great training (and great initial recruitment), ensuring that your staff have the ability to think outside these systems when necessary, as well as allow their personality to shine through. This is not a particularly easy balance to strike.
The sorts of things that absolutely must be covered by a system are items such as:
toilet cleaning rotas coffee machine cleaning opening routines
closing routines rotas
staffing systems (appraisals, disciplinary, grievance procedures etc.) food production
food rotation cash procedures.
In an ideal world what you want to be doing is creating a ‘brand manual’ and an ‘operations manual’ before you actually open.
7
Money
Money is a quite remarkably complex part of the equation – not because so many people don’t understand simple economics, but because so many people have a quite remarkably mixed up relationship with money. Countless years of indoctrination by poorly paid teachers, parents who lived through the war or didn’t earn enough, and various social and political conditioning, very often leaves us thinking that money is, at heart, an evil thing that must be avoided if we don’t want to burn in the pits of hell.
Sadly for you unless you can create a healthy relationship with money, you will end up burning in the pits of entrepreneurial hell – the bankruptcy court and that, trust us, is a very bad thing.
Great business fallacies number one – The international bureau of money distribution
This wonderful global organisation exists to redistribute the money and resources in the world in a ‘fair manner’. It is a wonderful invention. The people that run it spend all day observing all the good and the bad people out there. They pay particular attention to all those folk running small businesses who ‘work very hard’. After they have worked hard for a long time and done a ‘really good job’, they reward them with cold hard cash. They also observe all the lazy people who don’t produce a great product but rely on good locations, slick marketing and fancy sales techniques to sell their products. They make certain that those people are punished and have their bottoms soundly thrashed.
The good people never get their bottoms thrashed – they will ultimately be rewarded with a nice comfy chair, lots of cash and a villa in Spain.
There’s only one problem with this wonderful organisation – it doesn’t exist. The only place it exists is in the imaginations of the millions of small business owners out there (and indeed hard working employees) who genuinely are doing a ‘good job’ but aren’t currently being rewarded for it.
Sadly money (and indeed life) doesn’t work that way and it never will – it isn’t fair. The houses of good people burn down as often as the houses of bad people. Charity workers get run over by buses as often as rapists and murders. Neither the fire nor the bus driver makes a judgement on who to burn or run over. Money makes no judgement either. If such an organisation did exist we would never have poverty and there would be no shortage of any essential items. All the houses and hotel buildings in places like Dubai and Las Vegas would have been instantly transferred to people who would never keep building houses and hotels in places like Las Vegas but would have instantly transferred all the cranes and builders to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
If money was distributed fairly and for real value, people would never spend money on nonsense like Feng Shui, reality TV or gossip magazines that focus on the latest movements of footballers’ wives.
Money moves to the celebrity and not necessarily to the most talented.
Additionally many of these small business owners have a concept of finite money. They have this fear and embarrassment that if they take a pound from a customer that this is one less pound they will have to spend on other essential goods. They get wrapped up in ‘not wanting to rip the customer off’ whilst sobbing gently at the end of each month as they realise, once again, that they really aren’t making enough to pay the rent, let alone get a decent holiday.
People buy for all sorts of reasons and it is fundamentally NOT your business to judge them or worry about ‘ripping them off’ with an expensive cup of coffee of piece of cake. We all have
different criteria for buying things, much of which is all wrapped up in all sorts of odd and deep social conditioning. If this wasn’t the case then there would be no need for any premium brands at all. We’d all be driving around in Hyundais and nobody would be buying Mercedes, BMWs or even Fords. We’d all shop for all our food at the cheapest discount stores and nobody would contemplate eating or drinking products like champagne, foie gras or caviar.
Regardless of the economic situation, people spend money on what they regard as important and not what is necessarily right or even fair. The classic example of this is to drive through the absolutely worst neighbourhood near you and observe how many satellite TV aerials are stuck onto the walls outside. Peer through a few windows and observe just how big the TV is that is being watched inside. These items aren’t cheap but they are what matters to the people who buy them. Their criteria are possibly different to yours or mine, but regardless of how little money they have they’re still prioritising and making damn sure they have enough money to pay the satellite subscription every month.
The small business owner needs to stop relying on the IBMD and fight hard for some of the money that is out there. There will always be people who crave a good cup of coffee and it is your job to make really sure that they know about you and that you shout loudly and proudly about your brilliant product. Your lazy competitor up the street may have the better site and an inferior product but unless you do everything in your power to keep your business in the mind of the customer then he will get their ten or twenty pounds per week and not you. And unless you charge properly for what you sell you’ll soon end up with no business at all.