Opening a retail coffee house - part 7

The first few months of having the business went by really fast. We opened in September and before we knew it, Thanksgiving was just around the corner. We closed on Thanksgiving Day and the day after. It felt great to have two whole days off of work. But the problem with having your own business is that when you're closed you don't get paid. There's no vacation pay you can use or holiday pay, you just get NO pay. The first few months were hard because business didn't boom like we had thought. We were naive...perhaps we watched that baseball movie too much and really believed that "if you build it, they will come." Well, it doesn't really work that way, there's something called marketing that you had to do. So, we started making flyers and putting it on people's cars. But did you know that you need a permit from the city to do that? Well, we didn't know...oops! The flyers didn't really work anyways. We didn't seem to get any new business from it. What helped us was that we were open next to a dry cleaners. I don't use dry cleaners very often, but alot of other people sure do and this dry cleaners was open early at 7am for their customers to pick up before work. We made sure we would open our front doors and let the great smell of coffee flow out in the mornings. We also started advertising in those coupon books that get mailed to homes. Those coupon books actually did quite well especially when we were offering buy one get one free.

Opening a retail coffee house - part 6

When we first opened we decided we would be open 7 days a week. We were young, didn't have kids and full of energy, so we didn't mind all the work. Oh, but did I mention that we didn't hire anyone either. We didn't want to borrow any money to start the business, so we just used our savings and a lot of sweat equity. Our hours were Monday - Friday 6:00am to 7:00pm and Saturdays and Sundays 8:00am - 5:00pm. It was alot of hours and soon all the days became a blur. When you're working every single day, it becomes hard to distinguish between the days since there is no looking forward to a weekend...or a day off. Sundays were our slowest days in sales. In the beginning, we would sometimes only do sales of $50 that day. After a couple of months we decided that we would at least close at noon on Sundays, so that we could have 1/2 a day off. It was very exciting looking forward to those Sunday afternoons. Looking back, we should have planned to be closed on Sundays or at least 1/2 day. Opening a business is very exciting and rewarding, but everyone needs a break to rest and relax and rejuvenate. It's hard to be creative and think of marketing ideas for your business, when you are exhausted.

Opening a retail coffee house - part 5

A month before we opened the shop, we had to start thinking about our food menu. We had decided on all the coffee drinks and now had to decide on what pastries we wanted to serve. It was a harder task than I had envisioned. I looked through the yellow pages for wholesale bakeries but there really wasn't very many. I actually found only 2 in the area that would come by and give me some samples. They were Le Boulanger and Fullbloom bakery. For those of you not familiar with the Fullbloom name, they are one of the main suppliers to the bay area Starbucks. When I called upon them, they had only been in business for about 1 year and was just a new business. The owner herself came out to see me with the samples and while we were talking she mentioned that she was making a bid on the Starbucks business and she was keeping her fingers crossed. I guess things turned out well for her as she is supplying all of the Bay Area Starbucks from Sacramento to Monterey. They have the best blueberry scones. We decided to order from them and also from Le Boulanger. The hard part was deciding how many to order for the first day. We were very naive. We didn't plan any big grand opening and didn't do any advertising and yet we still thought we would have a mad rush of people. So for our first day we ordered 12 dozen assorted croissants. Yep, 144 croissants in total. What were we thinking? Needless to say, we had ALOT left over. We only made $78.00 in sales that first day!