Beyond just having the right business plan and the funding that you need to start your coffee shop business, there is an even greater step that you really need to plan out in order for you to truly make it in the industry. There is nothing more important to a coffee shop business than having the right team. After all, running a coffee shop involves a lot of functions — some of which are highly specialized, and you cannot hope to accomplish everything by yourself.
Finding the right team for a coffee shop is a matter of finding people who not only share your values but finding people who are willing to make your vision a reality. It is all a matter of communication and transmitting on the same wavelength, finding people who are willing to cooperate is no easy step.
Since you are new to the coffee shop business, you may not exactly know where to start when it comes to finding the right employees for your business, so here is a very comprehensive guide on the things that you need to keep in mind and the factors that you need to work on for you to hire the ideal staff.
We will go over how you can develop an eye for talent, how you can attract the best workers to your coffee shop, knowing exactly who to hire, providing the right training, learning from the people that you hire, and even how to leverage new trends in the coffee shop industry so that you were able to attract high-quality workers and conduct the best job interviews.
Having an Eye For Talent
When it comes to forming the right staff for your coffee shop business, it is absolutely critical that you know what to look for in your employees. Beyond just having a passion for coffee and the service industry, you want to be able to hire staff members that have a penchant for customer service and hospitality.
After all, coffee shops are not just places where people stop over to enjoy coffee, it is a place where people want to relax and bask in an ambiance that will ease their minds for the daily grind that they have to go through each and every day.
Teaching someone how to create the perfect cappuccino is doable, but finding someone that really has the heart to put customers at ease is something that comes from within. It is the easiest thing to have a welcoming smile, keep eye contact with the customers, have decent conversation skills, and always be understanding. But very few people will take the time to do so. Finding employees that have these soft skills can go a long way, even if they do not have a lot of experience in the coffee shop business to begin with.
Of course, once you’ve found employees that are a good fit, you have to be able to tell how trainable they are. Most of the time, it is not very important how naturally talented a potential employee is, it is all about how willing the employee is to learn new skills and develop the acuity for a new industry. It is very advantageous therefore for you to find an employee that is naturally humble. Humility is always the best driver of success for coffee shop employees, so you need to be able to gauge that when you conduct your interviews.
Specifically, here are the 3 most common types of employees coffee shops look for.
Hiring Baristas for Your Coffee Shop
When you think about the workers that are absolutely front and center in each and every coffee shop, there is little doubt that baristas are who you think about immediately. For coffee shop businesses, baristas absolutely run the show. At least, that is how it should be.
Baristas are the ones that are directly responsible for brewing the coffee and making the best possible drinks for your patrons. It is not only their job to follow the standard recipes that are on the menu, they also have to create their own custom drinks should a customer request for a ‘barista’s drink’.
Of course, their job description goes way beyond just making coffee, they also need to know how to operate and maintain each and every one of your machines. They are also directly responsible for answering your customer’s questions and concerns directly.
If you want to hire the best possible barista for your coffee shop, you should look for someone that not only wants to give you their best but someone who is dedicated to advancing himself or herself in the industry through further training and education. This position, perhaps beyond any other position in a coffee shop, requires the most love and passion for coffee – you cannot just hire anyone for the job no matter how qualified you may think that person is.
A great barista not only goes above and beyond to serve a great cup of coffee, but he or she also needs to be very knowledgeable about the process of brewing great coffee. This person needs to be very reliable and very honest, they should have excellent people skills, a heart to serve customers, have the patience to correctly sort and manage inventory, and even have great coffee pouring skills.
Beyond just that, personality and attitude are what sets a good barista apart from a great one. When you are looking for the right baristas for your coffee shop, make sure this person is not only in it to get a quick paycheck working a job he/she may not think is too hard to do, but someone who specifically wants to be a barista.
Recruiting Managers for Your Coffee Business
Managers are the next most important staff members that coffee shops have to hire. Oftentimes, coffee shop owners tend to want to act as the managers for their own coffee shops. However, if you have the right amount of startup funding in place, it would be very advantageous to hire a consummate professional who has gone through the rigorous aspects of running a coffee shop already.
Managers are very important because they are the ones that are directly responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of a coffee shop. Everything from managing the coffee shop’s inventory, overlooking the financial health of the coffee shop, and even making sure that customer service standards are met are all part of the manager’s responsibility.
Unlike other positions in your coffee shop business, you absolutely have to make sure that managers are already very experienced in the coffee shop industry. You cannot train someone to be a natural leader, it is something that person would need to have earned through experience.
There are of course two ways you can go about hiring managers. When your coffee shop is fairly new, you have to look for managers that already have similar backgrounds from other coffee shops. If you are going to find your coffee shop managers this way, it would even be more advantageous to you if you hire one that has managerial experience running some of the more well-known coffee shops. These managers will be able to provide a tremendous amount of valuable insight for your own coffee shop.
Without a doubt, finding someone with great managerial skills is very challenging. You do not want to rush to find one though because, more than any other employee, the manager of your coffee shop can really make or break your operations. You are essentially putting the well-being of your coffee shop in his or her hands, so taking your time with finding the absolutely perfect candidate will be well worth the time and effort.
Your Coffee Shop’s Finance and Accounting Team
Having the right finance and accounting is critical when it comes to keeping your operations lean. As with any business, a coffee shop requires staff members to take care of income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, taxes, payroll, and the other financial matters of your coffee shop.
Oftentimes when a coffee shop is just starting out, many owners will take initiative and take on accounting and finance roles themselves. This is something that you shouldn’t sustain for the long run, however, because an accountant would know exactly how to manage financial transactions that are not very direct.
If you have a good brand value, for example, because your coffee shop is a franchised coffee shop, would you know how much the brand name of your coffee shop is worth on your balance sheets?
If you handle your payroll, do you know exactly what documents your employees need to present and what information should be in those documents? Not knowing these things will not only cost you money, but it can also get you into a lot of legal trouble. Hiring experienced finance staff members will keep you out of these tricky situations.
Letting The Right Coffee Shop Workers Come To You
When you become well known in the coffee shop industry, recruiting the best employees becomes a lot more simple. Even before you reach such a level, however, you want to be able to get the idea out that you are the right coffee shop for baristas, managers, and other employees to go to.
When it comes to prestige and financial incentives, you cannot yet come to compete with some of the more well-established coffee shops, but you can at least make the right preparations for your coffee shop to be a magnet for good talent. You have to remember that when it comes to coffee shop talent, the most high-performing employees are in high demand.
The ball is in their court, so to speak, so you have to make your own business to be as appealing as possible. These employees need to be convinced that not only will you be a great place to work for in terms of pay, but your coffee shop would give them a lot of chances to grow and reach new heights in the industry. Let us explore some of the ways that you can do this.
1. Culture
It cannot be understated how important setting the right culture for your coffee shop is. Gone are the days where employees just went into work expecting a payday. Nowadays coffee shop employees expect to find a place where they would really fit in. After all, they have a lot of options as far as finding work is concerned.
One way you can improve the perception of the work culture of your coffee shop for potential employees simply by promoting diversity and inclusion. Make sure you have the right messaging, that every worker from every race, every religion, and every background is welcome to work for you.
Also keep in mind that when you preach inclusion like this, it is not just something that you use for employees to have a better impression of your business, it is something that you really need to follow through with and practice.
2. Working Conditions
In order for you to attract the right talent, you also have to have very humane working conditions. Having high-quality working conditions is very important not only when it comes to finding the right talent, but also retaining this talent.
It is no secret that baristas in the United States of America envy their European counterparts as far as working conditions are concerned. You want to be able to ease this envy a little bit and try to give them options to get an adequate amount of paid leave each year.
You also want to make sure that the temperature of your coffee shop isn’t too hot or cold, and you have to make it a priority that worker’s stations are kept clean at all times. If you do not give your employees enough reason to stay – they simply won’t. Studies have shown that providing a great work-life balance to your employees is actually very effective when it comes to maximizing their productivity, so it will be a win-win situation for you in the end.
Knowing How Many Employees to Hire for Your Coffee Business
When you are just starting out with your coffee shop, it is also very important that you do not hire too many employees or too few employees. Knowing how many staff members for your coffee shop to have maximum efficiency is absolutely critical.
The first thing you have to do is to find the right manager for your coffee shop before anything else. The next step would be to hire a staff of about 8-10 team members when you are just starting out. Having this many employees may sound intimidating, but the majority of these employees won’t be there full time, so you need more staff members to handle shifting rotations.
As a matter of fact, the coffee shop manager is likely the only full-time employee you will have when you are just starting out. You also have to take into account that you will have a lot of unexpected sick leaves, vacation leaves, or even resignations. You do not want to be understaffed because that will not only cost you a lot of money, but it will also damage the reputation of your coffee shop.
Provide the Right Training
Now that you have the right staff in place, you have to provide ample training for them to be able to maximize their success. Training your baristas and staff members for success is absolutely critical if you want to run a highly efficient and successful coffee shop business. You have to keep in mind that your coffee shop won’t succeed if you do not have the right system in place for everything your staff members have to work on.
Think about the protocol that the staff members at Starbucks go through to maximize their performance. Those are not just things that the baristas came up with on their own, it is a clearly laid out process that they trained to perfect. You have to have the same thing in place if you are going to compete with some of the larger coffee shop businesses.
Aside from providing easy-to-understand instructions to your staff members, you have to have clear guidelines that will improve your customer service. Of course, you do not want to go completely scripted. But you want to make sure that the good customer service that each of your patrons enjoys remains consistent and is provided by each and every one of your staff members, from the managers to the baristas, to the cleaning personnel.
As with all guidelines, you have to have an employee handbook in place where all of these guidelines are written down clearly. You want to make sure that each member of your staff has a copy of these guidelines so that they will always defer to it not only for their own performance but so that they can use it to train future employees as well.
Do Not Shy Away From Giving Feedback
Giving feedback, whether this feedback is positive or negative, may be awkward and difficult to communicate to your employees, but it is something that you should never shy away from. As you are well aware, a staff member could perform very well or a staff member can perform very poorly, the way you provide feedback to employees is very important if you want to make sure that those good performances remain consistent, and those poor performances are remedied.
- Good Performances
One of the biggest mistakes that new coffee shop owners make when it comes to providing feedback to employees is that owners often only notice the things that need to be improved upon. Remember that an employee that performs brilliantly should never go unnoticed. If you fail to acknowledge good performances, these employees may feel discouraged and they may not know that they are doing a good job so they have no reason to continue it.
Saying a simple “good job” is a great way to make sure that you keep the morale of your employees high. Oftentimes, you want to go beyond this though, and offer rewards and recognition for top performers. Of course, it is fairly standard to have an employee of the month, but it would also be a good idea to give rewards such as vacations and cash incentives to top performers.
Also, remember that top-performing staff members perform to the best of their ability so that they can level up as well. Do not forget that it is your responsibility to make sure that your employees do not remain stagnant in the same position. Make sure that promotions and opportunities to earn a bigger income are available to them. If you do not provide this, you simply can’t blame them if they would rather go work for a place that does offer these things.
- Bad Performances
When a staff member for your coffee shop performs poorly, provide feedback in the most positive way you can manage. You do not want the employee to feel discouraged because you said that his or her performance was not adequate. Instead, try to acknowledge why you think this person did not perform well and try to offer a remedy to that.
Remember, it is not a good idea to think that a staff member is inherently lazy. If that staff member performs poorly, there is probably a very valid reason for that performance. Try to be as understanding as you possibly can.
In order for that employee to improve, you have to make sure that he or she knows that you value them and that they are an integral part of the team. The more useful and valued you make them feel, the more incentive they have to give your coffee shop their best.
The worst possible thing you can do is develop a poor reputation when it comes to handling your employees. Oftentimes, baristas and managers are well connected and your reputation will quickly spread to potential employees making your coffee shop very undesirable to work for.
Attracting Young People
Even though we have already discussed some of the steps you can take to make your coffee shop a magnet for the right talent, there is a very special consideration that is worth considering. For you to optimize the workflow of your coffee shop, it is very important that you leverage the power of Millenials and Gen Z.
After all, coffee shops are very hip and young so you want to make sure that the energy of the staff members that you choose is indicative of that. That doesn’t mean that ageism should play a part in your hiring process, this simply means that you should be proactive in making sure that your coffee shop is a place where young people, new members of the workforce, would want to work.
Meaningful Work
If you have noticed some of the younger workers today, you will notice that they are very idealistic. This is actually very good because it is indicative that these people are actually passionate about the value that they give to the world, they are not just there to collect a paycheck.
You want to be able to modernize the prerogatives of your coffee shop. Young people will want to know that you are dedicated to reducing your carbon footprint. One of the steps you can do to achieve this is simply replacing your plastic straws with paper straws. This will also give you an opportunity to sell high-end metal straws as well. You want to make sure that your coffee is ethically sourced and healthy. These commitments are very important to young people.
Recruiting a Top-Notch Coffee Shop Staff
With these things in mind, you will be able to recruit a staff that will not only be crucial in making sure your coffee shop business becomes successful, you might even have a new family that will make your business journey much more meaningful. Choosing the right people to share your new life with as a coffee shop owner may be very difficult, but will be well worth the effort in the end.
