Coffee Shop Leadership – Coffee Shop Answers

Your coffee shop is one of your pride and joys. You have spent a lot of time putting it all together and creating a business that is going to help you make your dreams come true. While many customers will come to your coffee shop to relax and enjoy the afternoon, you need to have the right skills to manage your whole team. The good news is that there are steps you can utilize to help you manage your whole team. When the coffee shop owner is able to step in and learn the right steps to manage their team in all situations, and they hire the right team members to join them, they will be able to get more results in the process and can better serve their customers. There are several steps that you can take to make sure that you manage your coffee shop team in a way that is efficient and makes your team feel valuable. Some of these steps include: 1. Automate the Reordering This will not only make your life easier but can improve the lives of the employees who work with you. This will require a little bit of work on your part in order to accomplish. You will need to start by bringing out some of your past invoices and look at some of the ordering you have done in the past. Some of the items you should look into while checking the invoices include the cups, syrups, sugar, coffee beans, and other items that are popular at the shop. You can then use this information to help create an inventory and figure out how much of each item you usually go through in a specific time period. With that information, you will be able to automate your reordering of all the supplies, making slight adjustments during times when you know you will be busier. This helps you to spend less time on the inventory and ensures that your team always has the ingredients and supplies that they need to make the customers happy. This is also a good way to help your business save money. You will be able to reduce how often you purchase some of the less popular items and can order just the items that tend to sell well, making more profit in the process. 2. Streamline Your Scheduling to Manage Your Coffee Shop Employees The next step that you should do is learn how to streamline the scheduling process. Your employees are not going to be happy if they have to question when the schedule will be out all the time. And it is not good for your bottom line and customer service if you have a mix-up all the time with too many employees at some points and too few at others. There are different apps that you can use to help with scheduling. This will ensure that you spend less time on the task while making it simple to get people on the shifts that you need. These apps also allow the employees to take a look at their schedule online, saving them a trip into the store and saving you the hassle of having to read the schedule on the phone. There are several apps that you can choose to use for this. Make sure that the one you choose will have the features that make scheduling a breeze, allows you to make some of the changes you need when necessary, and helps your employees to look at their schedules from any location to save time. 3. Allow Your Coffee Shop Employees to Switch Shifts If you are too strict with the schedule, you are going to have a lot of disgruntled employees, ones who decide not to show up because they need to do something else, and you will waste a lot of time trying to find the replacements that you need. This is not a good situation for you at all. As the manager, you do not need to micromanage everything that your employees are doing all the time. This will not make them feel valued and can be a big waste of energy and time on your part. A better option to choose is to find ways to empower your employees. Sure, you want them to show up for work when they are able to and do a good job. But things do come up, whether your employee has a family or school obligation and gets sick, and having a flexible policy can help with this. Make it easy for your employees to work on finding their own replacements when they can. Then have them communicate this to you when the changes happen. This ensures that you still know what is going on. There will be times when the employee gets sick at the last minute and can’t find a replacement. But if they know about the emergency ahead of time, they can work on finding someone to do the job for them and save you a lot of time and headache. 4. Optimize the Ordering Area One way that you can support some of your staff and make sure that they are able to complete their jobs well is to provide as much efficiency as possible in the area that they work. And when you take the time to optimize their ordering area, you will be able to increase your profits as well. The coffee products that you sell will make a big difference in the profits that you can make as well. For example, you may only make a few dollars for each pound that you sell with coffee beans, but when you turn that pound of beans into some of the specialty drinks that your customers love, you will find that the profits are going to go through the roof. There are several steps that you can take to help maximize some of the sales on high-margin items. These include: Avoid taking up some of the valuable eye-space with some of those low-profit margin offerings. You can put those lower down so the customer can still choose them, but save the good space for something else. Consider displaying some of the syrups and add-ons that you are willing to sell to the customer and make them easy to see and very appealing. Post up signs that show off some of the higher-quality creations that you and your team are able to make so that the customer is willing to give it a try. When you are able to make more money for each drink that you create, you can maximize your profits and earn more than you would just by selling a bag of beans. This is a great way to utilize the time that your team is there and will make the coffee shop bring in more profits. 5. Automate the Marketing When it comes to any coffee shop out there, it is important to automate some of the marketing that is used. Marketing is the best way to bring in the customers that you would like and when you can automate it a bit, you will see more success in this as well. Traditional marketing for your business is going to be effective, but it does take up a lot of time. Time that you could spend at your coffee shop working with your team and making more money. But it is possible to reduce that time a bit by automating as many of the marketing tasks as you can. For example, it is common for cafes to try and increase some of their profits with a weekly special. You can create specials for a whole month or longer through some of the popular social media accounts and then schedule them to automatically post when the time is right. The promotion will go on at the time you want and you can enjoy some of the money that comes in. Social media marketing is an important part of the process. And if you sit down at the beginning of the month and plan out deals and specials, you can get the promotions set up and scheduled in an hour or less. This saves a lot of time and only requires basic upkeep from you to get it all done. This is just one of the methods that you can use to automate some of the marketing that you would like to do. If you need to promote more, you can get creative and see which methods will bring in the most profits and help you get ahead. 6. Consider Your Training Program to Improve Your Coffee Shop Workforce One of the most important things that you can do when bringing a new employee into the business is their training. Even if the employee has had experience working in the coffee shop in the past, you need to make sure that they are prepared to take on some of their new roles and that they will be trained on the methods you want them to use here. It is a good idea to have a set training program from the start, one that has some clear objectives in place. This does take a bit of time to develop a good training plan, and as you go through training your new employees, you may make changes to help it become more efficient. Having this plan in place puts everyone on the same page and can make them more effective. Trainers will be able to utilize that training plan and can help speed up the whole process. These same trainers will have the benefit of spending less time deciding what to teach and they can just follow the rules that you outline there. This is also a good way for the new employees to learn the ropes of their new job as quickly as possible. You can choose how you would like to do the training program, but some options include an orientation, shadowing some of the other employees to learn the basics, and allowing the trainee time to make some of the drinks so they can get more familiar with how this goes. Ask some of your current employees for their feedback on the training program. Ask them what they thought worked and what did not work for them. This can provide some valuable insight that will help you figure out what changes, if any, you need to make to your training program. 7. Invest in the Right Technology Another thing that you can consider when it comes to managing your coffee shop team is the technology that you use. No employee is going to be happy if they have to use an old or inefficient system in order to keep up with the customers. And the customers will not be happy about it either. A good investment to make in your business is an up-to-date point of sale system or POS. This will help your employees take orders better and keep track of everything for the customers. And it is going to help you when it comes to tracking inventory. In fact, this system could save you 10% just by reducing order errors and theft. It is important that you update the POS as often as required. You are not going to save a lot of time if your team has to wait on the system while it is loading or if they have to fight through all of the menu items that are out of date and can no longer be used when ringing up a customer. The security of the system is better when it is updated as much as possible too. The exact type of technology that you will use does depend on what all you plan to sell. If there are other types of technology that you decide to bring into the business, keep those up to date so that they can actually complete the work that you set out for them. Make Your Employees Feel Valuable No matter what else you do on this list, make sure that all of your employees feel valuable all of the time. No employee will do good work, no matter how talented they are, if they feel like they are just another number to the boss or the manager in charge. Some of the options that we have above are going to help with this a bit. If you allow the employees the flexibility to check their schedules from anywhere and the ability to switch out a scheduled work time if they need to, that is going to go a long way in making them feel like a valued member of your team. You can go further than that though. When there is the potential for a team member to learn a new skill or how to do something and get new training, let them do it. It is easy to think we can do it all on our own, but allowing employees to step in and try out a few things, growing their own skills in the process, can prove to be valuable in helping the employee love their job. If there is ever an open manager position in your business, consider hiring someone who already works there. They already have the skills that you need for it and love working in the position. It can really ruin employee morale to watch someone from the outside get promoted and take over when you have qualified employees who could do the work instead. Find ways to show your appreciation for the employees whenever you can. Providing the raises when needed, the right promotions if you can, and the ability to call them out when they do a good job will all go a long way in helping the employee feel valued. And the more valued the employee feels, the more likely they will stay, which saves you money on hiring and training. Learning How to Manage Your Coffee Shop Team Owning and managing a coffee shop can be a fun experience for many people. You may have dreamed about owning a business and being your own boss for years, or it could be a relatively new dream that you are excited to work towards now. No matter what has brought you to this point, it is an exciting time and you want to get it right. Focusing on your team and helping them to feel valuable will be some of the first steps to helping them get the job done. When you spend too much time micro-managing them and trying to control every little thing, it diminishes the hard work and talents of the team that you have assembled. When you show your employees that you appreciate their hard work and all the great customer service that they provide, you will find that managing them is easier than ever before. When you are ready to learn how to successfully manage your coffee shop team, take a look at some of our great suggestions above.