100 Things You Need to Know Before You Open A Coffeeshop

The flip side of coffeeshops that serve bad coffee are coffeeshops that do nothing but serve extraordinary coffee.  A lot of people who open their own coffeeshops are so obsessed with having the best coffee in town that they forget that their real goal should be to have the best coffeeshop in town.

Consider this statement by George Sabados, a business consultant for the coffee industry, in a recent article on CoffeeGeek.com:

All too often in my consultancy work I come across café owners obsessed with the coffee making but not the institution they operate. For example, out of over 500 businesses I have personally coached, less than 10 revealed that they bothered to put together a business plan. Fewer than a dozen had a regular training plan in place for staff, and only half a dozen could tell me their financial position immediately, at the push of a button. Yet, well over 200 knew their coffee better than they knew their business.

Many coffeeshop owners fail to understand that they are running a business, not competing in a barista competition. As a result, they lose track of their primary goal, which is to please customers. By focusing all of their energies on serving a tiny cadre of coffee afficionados just like themselves, they undercut the market for their goods, and end up with a very loyal but vanishingly small base insufficient to support their overhead costs.

The fact is, while there are a lot of people in the world who love coffee, there are few who have a palate sophisticated enough to tell the difference between very good, great, and extraordinary coffee. So, if the only thing your coffeeshop has to offer is extraordinary coffee while the coffeeshop down the street has very good coffee and a great atmosphere, guess who is going to attract the most customers?

The exception that proves this rule is a wonderful "cafe" here in San Francisco called Blue Bottle Coffee Co. I put "cafe" in quotation marks because Blue Bottle is really more of a streetside stand than a coffeeshop. They operate out of a garage in an alleyway, serving delightful little hand-crafted espresso drinks. The only seating is a four foot bar with a couple of bar stools. Blue Bottle succeeds as a business because they have matched their costs to their product. Unlike a true coffeeshop, they are selling nothing but coffee and espresso and have adjusted their expenses accordingly. With this type of shoestring operation it's possible to do nothing but cater to the coffee elite and they have captured that market with gusto.*

But most people who decide to go into the coffee business aren't looking to open a road-side stands. They are looking to open coffeeshops and they have to look beyond the coffee elite to sustain their business.

This should by no means discourage coffee experts from going into the business. As Coffee to the People makes clear, it is possible to please coffee afficianados while simultaneously succeeding as a coffee business. The key is to remember that coffee isn't everything.

*Personally, I still prefer our espresso to Blue Bottle's (mostly because I'm not a fan of the ristretto shot, which makes for a blander experience), but I always stop in when I'm the neighborhood. ;-)