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.