Helping your local coffeeshop stay afloat
For those of you who may assume opening a coffeehouse means brewing a little coffee and raking in the dough, I have some news -- it is HARD WORK. AND it is hard to break even, let alone make a profit. We're at our one-year anniversary and still struggling financially. Thankfully, we have been growing. We actually sell a good amount of coffee, but being in San Francisco and insisting on certain basic human decencies like providing a health care program to our employees, we still haven't quite turned a corner.
SO, once again, any ideas out there would be appreciated. How do we get enough additional customers in the door to increase our sales the 15% we need to stay afloat?
Currently, we run an ad on the front page of the Haight Ashbury Beat, which is about all the traditional advertising we can afford and believe is cost-effective. If you check out the paper (http://www.haightashburybeat.com) you'll see our ad as a banner at the bottom of the front page. Any suggestions for an ad that will draw people better?
We also have some events, we you can see on our announcements page. We have game night the first Saturday night of every month.
We used to have open mic every Friday, but our host up and left and the event died off. If anyone knows of a good open mic host or group looking for a forum, let's hear it.
Other ideas?
Karin
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Reader Comments (2)
The sandwiches you folks serve are nice - high quality and the portions being large are also nice. Even if prices have to be $0.50 to $1.00 more than competition, skimping on ingredients or having wimpy portions isn't a good thing. The People's Cafe has shrunk the size of their salads and has skimped around the edges over the last five years to the point that I don't like going there often. If you were to expand your food offerings to include salads, I suspect you'd get a jump in business.
Another idea: Go talk to the people at Booksmith two blocks down Haight and see if you can work out a win-win partnership. Talk to them about having your shop supply coffee to the author speaking events they host. You could do it at a deep discount or maybe just as a break-even service, perhaps, and have them give you a direct plug at the event itself, quite literally before the author gets up to speak ("We'd like to thank......." sort of thing). In turn, tell Booksmith that you will PROMINANTELY display their monthly schedule. They get coffee on the cheap, adding to the quality of their speaking events, along with greater exposure at your place. In turn, you get a direct plug into one of the core target audiences perfect for your shop. As a local small retailer and purveyor of ideas and proponent of free speech - and as liberal/left owners at that bookshop - they're a natural neighborhood partner for you to seek.
From my rough guesstimate, it looks like you're getting more foot traffic at this point (Jan. 2007) vs. when you posted this message -- hope so!
Good luck.
Eric Dubin