Starting a Successful Coffee Shop Journey

Want to know how to start a successful coffee shop? Stick around to find out. In this channel, we interview business owners, entrepreneurs, and CEOs that are good at what they do. Here they... share their secrets and stories so that you too can apply that to your world of business and be successful like them. So make sure to like the video, subscribe and hit the bell to be up to date with the latest business trends or to stay alive because if you don't subscribe, we will find you. In this video... We are interviewing the owner of Joe's Fine Coffee, where he'll be sharing with us the secrets of how he started the business from the ground up to be where it's at today. Here in the great Pacific Northwest, where it always rains, but surprisingly, coffee is still the number one fluid of choice. In fact, you might get stabbed if you drink Folgers coffee. Just don't let them find out. Don't drink Folgers coffee. It sucks. I don't know what you're doing with it. So the demand for high quality coffee is undoubtedly large. So starting a coffee shop might just be the golden ticket. So in this video, Joe will take... a step-by-step on how to start a successful business here in the Pacific Northwest. Coffee businesses love the fact that the world is drinking 2.2 billion cups of coffee each day. However, it is also reported that 70% of all people prefer to make their coffee in the coffee at home as it's becoming easier to become your own barista with increasing technology with coffee makers and espresso machines. However, an average American spends about $1100 per year on coffee shops alone. Many shops want to make their way closer to the city. However, this coffee shop makes its stand in a small town in Maple Falls where its main source of traffic is the highway. I love it. The target audience here is hikers, snowboarders, hitchhikers, hipsters with plaid shirts and hats. hats not fully covering their heads or anybody just on a long trip going home while they're driving on a highway and here we have a sit-in and a drive-thru all right so let's go meet joe or joster or joe meister oh wait jominator let's go meet jominator All right, hey Joe, welcome. Are you a coffee connoisseur? I wouldn't say connoisseur, I'm saying I'm getting to that point, but I really do enjoy coffee. I'm a big fan. Okay, I guess find out where you are on the map. What's your favorite roast? So it depends. Roasts, we have certain different types of roasts, but I like something very light. Light, okay, that's good. So if you want something light and then getting something from an Ethiopian region is really nice. because it's very fruity, beautiful taste. You get a good high score on that because my next question was, what is your favorite origin? Origin, yeah. Ethiopia, Guji region would be really nice. And that's what you guys sell here? So we have one of the roasts here. That's one of our specialties here. Okay. And that's one of my favorites. And it's grown in a higher altitude to about 2,000 meters. So when you have a higher altitude, you have a smaller bean, just like high altitude blueberries. Okay. They just taste so much better. They're a smaller bean. better flavor better everything dude you passed my coffee beautiful all right so uh take us through the beginning of this coffee shop what made you start this was it a passion for coffee or is it a was it a business mindset or motivation what what was it so this business was started out of the passion of the heart this was not a business decision because there's a lot of other things i could have done with the finances that i put into this company and so mainly i know i've traveled to about 150 different coffee shops in the last two years what i tried to do was take the best of what I found in those coffee shops and try to turn that into a place that's awesome, super clean, really good coffee. And it's difficult because sometimes you find two of those things, we don't find all three of those. And so our goal is to focus on three things, people, great process and great products. And we focus on great products. We have great processes that we're always improving as well. And we have really good people. They're happy, you know, reflects on everything. So, you know, that's kind of the reason why I started it's because I wanted to do that. Not because it was a business decision. It was more of, I had the real estate. I needed to do something with it, and that's kind of what happened out of it. That's awesome. So how do you keep a healthy, positive environment where people are focusing on those three aspects? Yeah, it really comes down to the leadership in the company. Eveline does a really good job with that, and it starts from the top. You know, she does a really good job of empowering the people, empowering the baristas here to do whatever they need to make the customer happy. And we also want to focus on quality, and how we do that is not... push them to do something faster, but to push them to do the process better, which will then make the process faster, but the quality of the product will not suffer. And that's what's important to us is have a really high quality product that's also has a really good process, right? And that's, we empower people to change the process. Our process sucks, but we're trying to get better every single day. And that's part of it is improving the process. And if we don't improve the process and we don't empower our baristas to do that, we will not be getting better as a company. That's awesome. All right, so what is your process to improve the process? How do people report the problems that they're having? How are you seeing lack of efficiency? And how do you problem solve for all that? Really what happens is we have fractures. So we have a really busy day. It breaks records and we break the system. And only through that do we know that our process sucked before that. And that's the only way we can really tell because theoretically speaking, You know, everything's going to work perfectly until you actually try it. And when you do try it, then you're like, wow, this actually sucks. And every single time we have a record day, that's when we have huge improvements in the process because we know that we have great people. That's never going to change. It's always a process issue, always a process. And we try to focus on attacking the process and not the person because that's where the issue is happening in the first place. Okay, that's awesome. That's great. What is your role in this company? What do you do? So I lead the coffee shop. I run the day-to-day things with scheduling, making sure everything is running smoothly with inventory and all of that. And then I also work here as a barista. Are you a good barista? Do you make good coffee? coffee? Well, yeah, I feel like from when I started, I became better because I had no experience at all. Not even working on it. When you started here? Yes. Wow. Yeah. Zero experience. I had to have a barista trainer come in here and teach me everything before we opened. So I had like a little makeshift espresso machine that I worked on and watched a lot of videos. Yeah. So who does the hiring and the firing? Do you do that? I do. Do you? What's the process of hiring somebody? So the process of hiring is I look at the person and make sure that they're passionate about customers, passionate about people, passionate about coffee and just for me if somebody refers me to someone I'm ready to interview them and find out more about them and see if they're a good fit or not. What would I have to do to get fired? Like what's my limit? Can I do it? If you don't show up when you're scheduled. That's it. I was thinking like you're spinning a cup and you're fired, but no, you show up. Yeah, that's my number one thing. Yeah. You got to commit to this. Functionality. Because we put a lot of time and money into training you and it takes a lot of time to train somebody. And then if you don't show up and then your passion dies down and you're just like, you know, just take this for granted, then that's, you know, you're, you're, you're not fit here. So how long have you guys been open? So we opened in January. The exact date is January 7th, 2019. It was like we planned an opening in September. Okay. And we set a date, September 1st I think that was. That didn't happen and then we kind of went and said, okay maybe in two weeks we'll open. That didn't happen. Maybe in a month. That didn't happen. Because you know there's a lot of things that go into a coffee shop and with renovating the place and just even the training. Like I wasn't ready to be open. Yeah and then January 7th it was, I remember, 10 a.m. We slowly just opened the doors and people started coming in. Wow so did people start coming in right off the first day? Everybody was waiting. We're still like working in here, painting, you know people would you know just poke their head in and ask like, hey when will you guys open? Did you guys do anything beforehand to let people know you're opening? We just set up a coffee stand and we advertised to everyone there that we'll be opening up soon. And the social media. So our next question is how much does it cost to open a coffee shop like that? Can people do what you did with a smaller budget? So it really depends. Once again, I told you I didn't get into this as a huge financial, you know, profit machine. So you have to have money set aside if you want to do it right. I went to 150 coffee shops. Not as a joke. I did it to research and check what's going on. And because of that, you know, I was able to see this is what I need. And I'm going to go new on everything. And we're going to get the best of everything. So we have zero excuses. excuses for ship product we have no excuses for our lackluster product because we have all the best machines and so it costs us a hundred thousand dollars to put this to the state it is together but this is our real estate to find a coffee shop that stands alone that has a drive through that does have no other buildings attached to it is a unique thing we're not renting the place right we own the real estate of it and that's part of the reason why I was able to invest more into it because I know that it's going to reap benefits in the future you know our original budget was 25 000 it didn't work out and it so happens that you know everything worked out and we decided that we're gonna go if we're gonna do this right we're gonna do this right and I can only do one thing for my leadership team is give them the tools to make the right product for us. If I don't give them the right tools, the right ovens, the right machines, the right processes, the right you know tablets, it's not gonna work out and it's my fault at the end of the day because I was unable to give my team what they wanted. I like your model dude. So what's your overhead right now since you said you own the real estate? Obviously it's now smaller right but what is your overhead and you can say percentage wise? Yeah so the most expensive part is labor of course you know that goes anywhere from 25% to 35% depending on the day and how it is. weekends are profitable days weekdays are at least profitable days weekends you know it can be about you know four or five times as busy as a regular workday and so weekends are really where our money is made okay and so it took us as a company about four months to get to a position where we're able to cash flow everything everyone's getting paid all the taxes are being taken care of everything's worked out where there's a cash flow and a surplus to start moving forward what about your product how much do you spend on product percentage You know, it can be anywhere from 10 to 20% depending on, you know, what you're buying. The most profitable thing in any coffee shop is the drinks. You know, if you're just going to focus on just drink, you'll do okay. But you won't have that extra 25% of income coming from pastries and sandwiches and burritos and things like that if you're doing, you know, coffee shop vibe. All right, so our next question is, what is your business plan? And did you stick to it? Or did it change, evolve over time and you have to adapt to certain things? Yeah, I mean, the only thing I can guarantee you if you're getting into business is change. Everything changes. If you set some structure or you set something in stone, you're automatically set to fail. Be ready for change, be excited about change, and then turn change into improvements, and that's how you can grow the business. Beautiful. All right, so do you market your coffee? Do you spend any budget on advertisements, on any kind of, you know, whether it's online or here, or if you're wanting to push a product? Obviously, you're displaying it, but what's your marketing strategy? How much do you invest? So we haven't invested much in our marketing strategy yet. You know, what we like to do is use what we have. You know, we want to be really resourceful people. And so what we do is use social media to be able to promote the things that we're doing. And that seems to work out pretty well. Everyone's on social media. Everyone, you know, uses social media at coffee shops. People find coffee shops that way as well. So once we do gain a following on those platforms, we like to educate our customers because there's a lot of repeat customers in a coffee shop. What's coming out? What's new? And things like that. Alright, so Evelina, show us the shop. Show us how things are ran and what do we got here? Alright, so when you walk in, you notice right here we have our apparel. We press them with our three mountains. Beautiful. I love it. I like this brand because you guys are mounting. Yeah, that's kind of our brand that we like to put on our coffee bags, tables, and this is our register. It's very simple. Yeah, very simple. You just select a card or... It takes out the phone. Okay. Yeah. And then we have our coffee. So here, lip balm. Very important. My only question is like why a coffee shop? Why would you sell a lip balm? I don't know. That's a joke. It's just a picture thing to do. It's just... hipster it's all guys or something it's the brand it's a local uh farm here in deming yes and is your coffee i mean i know it's probably the only one is it roasted yes okay great awesome and we have our oven this is this is kind of like the front area is all food we have our community restaurants we make your sandwiches and then this is where all of the magic happens. So we make sure everything is clean at the end of the day and sparkling and shining. Yeah it is very clean. And then our fridge we have an undercounter fridge that we can reach in. I'll just wait grab the milk and grab the pitchers and everything. Have you ever switched out coffee beans? We don't we mostly mainly have the same coffee beans because we want to stay consistent with the coffee and have that signature juice kind of coffee. nice rye and gourmet coffee kind of sugar as you can tell and that's a beauty. I have a poster with somebody. I'm kidding. So what kind of flavors do you guys have? So we have our like main coffee flavors right here vanilla, hazelnut, sugar-free vanilla, regular vanilla, caramel, salted caramel and then this here we actually started our Italian sodas so this is more of like for the Italian sodas. strawberry, raspberry, lime, mango. There's some odd people who crash me. Okay. Yeah, we have strawberry, raspberry, lavender. He uses lavender. Which of those go fast? Which is the most popular one? Vanilla. Vanilla, of course. And this is the yield, the scale we use for the yield of how much espresso. And you use that only when you die? Yeah, as soon as it dies, you can take it away and just kind of throughout the day, you see that you take this out again and use that again. Gotcha. So how does the person behind the window, what does their job mainly? Here to do it. I mean obviously not for the shots So once you place an order all of that order will pop open to this KDS and so Whoever is working on espresso machines see the order so they don't need to order right and as soon as they're finished they can um exit that out okay let me know you got we got the sink and all that yeah um we're one of our things that we strive for is cleanliness yeah i noticed that and yes we have a we have a checklist that how does this house look like have you ever been to this house so clean responsibility to make sure your espresso machine is in the oven. The Canadian press is in the oven. You need to put well put in order so the person coming in in the morning has everything ready. Well hey thank you so much for showing me around. This is awesome. You guys have an awesome thing going here. If you are locally, stop by, say hi to Evelina. She is awesome. She made a great drink. So yeah. Give us top five things somebody needs to do or steps in order to open up a coffee shop like this. And I'm not talking in a sense of like, hey, work on your character or you got to this, but like literally step by step, not even the first five steps, but the top five steps. So the first thing you want to got a really good location. You know, like any real estate person would know location, location, location, very important. Then you got to determine, are you going to be the entrepreneur? Are you going to be the owner of the company? If you're going to be an entrepreneur, start gaining the skills to be a great barista. If you're going to open an espresso stand, get good at the craft. Number three, make sure that you have all the codes, everything lined up for the health department. Very, very important. If you do not have that, you're not going to be able to operate. Number four, make sure you have occupancy for the building. If you don't, you won't be able to occupy the building. Pretty simple stuff. And number five, just make sure you have a good team around you. You have to have a great team, you know. So how did you fund this business? Did you have a business beforehand? Do you run something on the other end of things? Yeah, so the company, we have about 10 steps away from here. That definitely funded this company. You know, I started that when I was 16 years old in my bedroom with a couple buddies, went to our garage and this warehouse now. Now we have 30 people, so we're growing and moving forward. And we're going to do that on the next video. We really wanted to... interview your other business, we'll walk through and show you what that is. I mean, he just gave me a quick glance and that's, it's pretty awesome. So make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll show you what he has in store for us for our next videos to come. All right. So walk through your average workday. And I, you know, I'll ask Evelina this later, but from your perspective, as the owner that's running two businesses, in a sense, you know, you're working there, you come in here. What are these your work day and what do you expect from your workers? Yeah, that's a good question. What I really like about the thing that I do is it changes every day. It's really difficult to tell you exactly what's going to happen. I can only tell you that my day starts at 8 because that's our first morning meeting. And from there, I can't really tell you what goes on. And do people hear me at that meeting or is that separate? So it's separate. So they have little scrums here. So in between sessions, in between the workers coming in and going, they'll have a couple minute meeting explaining what's going on. They also go through defects, change points, and improvements. We do that. We have a Voxer channel where we communicate back and forth. And so for my responsibilities at the company next door, I'm actually passing a lot of those on right now. And a lot of it is tailored to emails. phone calls, essentially a lot of HR, a lot of leadership, making sure my team is equipped. equipped with the right tools and resources to be able to move the business forward. Do you think it's possible for somebody to open up a business like this and be successful, not knowing anything about the food industry, anything about the drink industry? Yeah. So this is what I believe as a philosophy for anyone I hire. I don't care about anything except for an attitude. And if you're a kind person, skills can be taught. We did not know how to operate. And what I love about coming into an industry fresh, you disrupt it. You don't have any boundaries because you don't know. what's not possible. Not knowing what's not possible allows you to do the impossible. Another question I have is what are three things people can do to really screw it up? Let's say they have the money, they'll throw into it. They have the passion to do business. What are the three things that they can do when they have the money? They have the passion, how can they screw up? Easy. You do shortcuts. Okay. The most important thing is quality. Speed is the third most important thing. Okay. Quality is the most important, the simplicity of the process, and speed is the third most important. And so if you're not focusing on quality, you're going to disrupt this $100,000 investment you made because you have a shit inferior product when it should be a premium product expressed by the interior and exterior of the building along with the people here. Okay. That's a huge thing. Well, that's huge. If you got quality down, you pretty much got all of it down. So, all right. Well, thanks so much, man. Thanks for this interview. This is awesome. Great content. If you want to know more, go on their website, go on their YouTube channel. Joe's Fine Coffee. You guys can find us on YouTube and you can just look us up online. Get connected. Yeah. This is a great atmosphere. Like you're saying, it's about relationships. If you're in the area, stop by, say hi, and have a cup of coffee. Adios. All right. Well, that's all for today. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. You guys found out what it takes to open up a coffee shop, but it's doable, right? Even if you haven't done it before, it's doable. And this, these, these things. You can open it, right? It takes the will to do it, the will to change, and just willingness to keep trying, right? You don't have to be good at it at first. It's the effort that matters, right?

Want to know how to start a successful coffee shop? Stick around to find out. In this channel, we interview business owners, entrepreneurs, and CEOs that are good at what they do. Here they...

share their secrets and stories so that you too can apply that to your world of business and be successful like them. So make sure to like the video, subscribe and hit the bell to be up to date with the latest business trends or to stay alive because if you don't subscribe, we will find you. In this video...

We are interviewing the owner of Joe's Fine Coffee, where he'll be sharing with us the secrets of how he started the business from the ground up to be where it's at today. Here in the great Pacific Northwest, where it always rains, but surprisingly, coffee is still the number one fluid of choice. In fact, you might get stabbed if you drink Folgers coffee.

Just don't let them find out. Don't drink Folgers coffee. It sucks. I don't know what you're doing with it.

So the demand for high quality coffee is undoubtedly large. So starting a coffee shop might just be the golden ticket. So in this video, Joe will take... a step-by-step on how to start a successful business here in the Pacific Northwest. Coffee businesses love the fact that the world is drinking 2.2 billion cups of coffee each day.

However, it is also reported that 70% of all people prefer to make their coffee in the coffee at home as it's becoming easier to become your own barista with increasing technology with coffee makers and espresso machines. However, an average American spends about $1100 per year on coffee shops alone. Many shops want to make their way closer to the city.

However, this coffee shop makes its stand in a small town in Maple Falls where its main source of traffic is the highway. I love it. The target audience here is hikers, snowboarders, hitchhikers, hipsters with plaid shirts and hats. hats not fully covering their heads or anybody just on a long trip going home while they're driving on a highway and here we have a sit-in and a drive-thru all right so let's go meet joe or joster or joe meister oh wait jominator let's go meet jominator All right, hey Joe, welcome. Are you a coffee connoisseur?

I wouldn't say connoisseur, I'm saying I'm getting to that point, but I really do enjoy coffee. I'm a big fan. Okay, I guess find out where you are on the map.

What's your favorite roast? So it depends. Roasts, we have certain different types of roasts, but I like something very light. Light, okay, that's good. So if you want something light and then getting something from an Ethiopian region is really nice.

because it's very fruity, beautiful taste. You get a good high score on that because my next question was, what is your favorite origin? Origin, yeah.

Ethiopia, Guji region would be really nice. And that's what you guys sell here? So we have one of the roasts here.

That's one of our specialties here. Okay. And that's one of my favorites.

And it's grown in a higher altitude to about 2,000 meters. So when you have a higher altitude, you have a smaller bean, just like high altitude blueberries. Okay. They just taste so much better.

They're a smaller bean. better flavor better everything dude you passed my coffee beautiful all right so uh take us through the beginning of this coffee shop what made you start this was it a passion for coffee or is it a was it a business mindset or motivation what what was it so this business was started out of the passion of the heart this was not a business decision because there's a lot of other things i could have done with the finances that i put into this company and so mainly i know i've traveled to about 150 different coffee shops in the last two years what i tried to do was take the best of what I found in those coffee shops and try to turn that into a place that's awesome, super clean, really good coffee. And it's difficult because sometimes you find two of those things, we don't find all three of those.

And so our goal is to focus on three things, people, great process and great products. And we focus on great products. We have great processes that we're always improving as well. And we have really good people.

They're happy, you know, reflects on everything. So, you know, that's kind of the reason why I started it's because I wanted to do that. Not because it was a business decision.

It was more of, I had the real estate. I needed to do something with it, and that's kind of what happened out of it. That's awesome.

So how do you keep a healthy, positive environment where people are focusing on those three aspects? Yeah, it really comes down to the leadership in the company. Eveline does a really good job with that, and it starts from the top.

You know, she does a really good job of empowering the people, empowering the baristas here to do whatever they need to make the customer happy. And we also want to focus on quality, and how we do that is not... push them to do something faster, but to push them to do the process better, which will then make the process faster, but the quality of the product will not suffer. And that's what's important to us is have a really high quality product that's also has a really good process, right? And that's, we empower people to change the process.

Our process sucks, but we're trying to get better every single day. And that's part of it is improving the process. And if we don't improve the process and we don't empower our baristas to do that, we will not be getting better as a company. That's awesome.

All right, so what is your process to improve the process? How do people report the problems that they're having? How are you seeing lack of efficiency? And how do you problem solve for all that?

Really what happens is we have fractures. So we have a really busy day. It breaks records and we break the system. And only through that do we know that our process sucked before that. And that's the only way we can really tell because theoretically speaking, You know, everything's going to work perfectly until you actually try it.

And when you do try it, then you're like, wow, this actually sucks. And every single time we have a record day, that's when we have huge improvements in the process because we know that we have great people. That's never going to change. It's always a process issue, always a process.

And we try to focus on attacking the process and not the person because that's where the issue is happening in the first place. Okay, that's awesome. That's great. What is your role in this company?

What do you do? So I lead the coffee shop. I run the day-to-day things with scheduling, making sure everything is running smoothly with inventory and all of that. And then I also work here as a barista. Are you a good barista?

Do you make good coffee? coffee? Well, yeah, I feel like from when I started, I became better because I had no experience at all.

Not even working on it. When you started here? Yes. Wow. Yeah.

Zero experience. I had to have a barista trainer come in here and teach me everything before we opened. So I had like a little makeshift espresso machine that I worked on and watched a lot of videos. Yeah.

So who does the hiring and the firing? Do you do that? I do.

Do you? What's the process of hiring somebody? So the process of hiring is I look at the person and make sure that they're passionate about customers, passionate about people, passionate about coffee and just for me if somebody refers me to someone I'm ready to interview them and find out more about them and see if they're a good fit or not. What would I have to do to get fired?

Like what's my limit? Can I do it? If you don't show up when you're scheduled.

That's it. I was thinking like you're spinning a cup and you're fired, but no, you show up. Yeah, that's my number one thing. Yeah. You got to commit to this.

Functionality. Because we put a lot of time and money into training you and it takes a lot of time to train somebody. And then if you don't show up and then your passion dies down and you're just like, you know, just take this for granted, then that's, you know, you're, you're, you're not fit here. So how long have you guys been open? So we opened in January.

The exact date is January 7th, 2019. It was like we planned an opening in September. Okay. And we set a date, September 1st I think that was. That didn't happen and then we kind of went and said, okay maybe in two weeks we'll open. That didn't happen.

Maybe in a month. That didn't happen. Because you know there's a lot of things that go into a coffee shop and with renovating the place and just even the training. Like I wasn't ready to be open.

Yeah and then January 7th it was, I remember, 10 a.m. We slowly just opened the doors and people started coming in. Wow so did people start coming in right off the first day? Everybody was waiting. We're still like working in here, painting, you know people would you know just poke their head in and ask like, hey when will you guys open?

Did you guys do anything beforehand to let people know you're opening? We just set up a coffee stand and we advertised to everyone there that we'll be opening up soon. And the social media. So our next question is how much does it cost to open a coffee shop like that? Can people do what you did with a smaller budget?

So it really depends. Once again, I told you I didn't get into this as a huge financial, you know, profit machine. So you have to have money set aside if you want to do it right.

I went to 150 coffee shops. Not as a joke. I did it to research and check what's going on. And because of that, you know, I was able to see this is what I need.

And I'm going to go new on everything. And we're going to get the best of everything. So we have zero excuses.

excuses for ship product we have no excuses for our lackluster product because we have all the best machines and so it costs us a hundred thousand dollars to put this to the state it is together but this is our real estate to find a coffee shop that stands alone that has a drive through that does have no other buildings attached to it is a unique thing we're not renting the place right we own the real estate of it and that's part of the reason why I was able to invest more into it because I know that it's going to reap benefits in the future you know our original budget was 25 000 it didn't work out and it so happens that you know everything worked out and we decided that we're gonna go if we're gonna do this right we're gonna do this right and I can only do one thing for my leadership team is give them the tools to make the right product for us. If I don't give them the right tools, the right ovens, the right machines, the right processes, the right you know tablets, it's not gonna work out and it's my fault at the end of the day because I was unable to give my team what they wanted. I like your model dude.

So what's your overhead right now since you said you own the real estate? Obviously it's now smaller right but what is your overhead and you can say percentage wise? Yeah so the most expensive part is labor of course you know that goes anywhere from 25% to 35% depending on the day and how it is. weekends are profitable days weekdays are at least profitable days weekends you know it can be about you know four or five times as busy as a regular workday and so weekends are really where our money is made okay and so it took us as a company about four months to get to a position where we're able to cash flow everything everyone's getting paid all the taxes are being taken care of everything's worked out where there's a cash flow and a surplus to start moving forward what about your product how much do you spend on product percentage You know, it can be anywhere from 10 to 20% depending on, you know, what you're buying.

The most profitable thing in any coffee shop is the drinks. You know, if you're just going to focus on just drink, you'll do okay. But you won't have that extra 25% of income coming from pastries and sandwiches and burritos and things like that if you're doing, you know, coffee shop vibe.

All right, so our next question is, what is your business plan? And did you stick to it? Or did it change, evolve over time and you have to adapt to certain things?

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I can guarantee you if you're getting into business is change. Everything changes. If you set some structure or you set something in stone, you're automatically set to fail.

Be ready for change, be excited about change, and then turn change into improvements, and that's how you can grow the business. Beautiful. All right, so do you market your coffee? Do you spend any budget on advertisements, on any kind of, you know, whether it's online or here, or if you're wanting to push a product? Obviously, you're displaying it, but what's your marketing strategy?

How much do you invest? So we haven't invested much in our marketing strategy yet. You know, what we like to do is use what we have.

You know, we want to be really resourceful people. And so what we do is use social media to be able to promote the things that we're doing. And that seems to work out pretty well.

Everyone's on social media. Everyone, you know, uses social media at coffee shops. People find coffee shops that way as well.

So once we do gain a following on those platforms, we like to educate our customers because there's a lot of repeat customers in a coffee shop. What's coming out? What's new? And things like that.

Alright, so Evelina, show us the shop. Show us how things are ran and what do we got here? Alright, so when you walk in, you notice right here we have our apparel.

We press them with our three mountains. Beautiful. I love it.

I like this brand because you guys are mounting. Yeah, that's kind of our brand that we like to put on our coffee bags, tables, and this is our register. It's very simple.

Yeah, very simple. You just select a card or... It takes out the phone.

Okay. Yeah. And then we have our coffee. So here, lip balm.

Very important. My only question is like why a coffee shop? Why would you sell a lip balm?

I don't know. That's a joke. It's just a picture thing to do.

It's just... hipster it's all guys or something it's the brand it's a local uh farm here in deming yes and is your coffee i mean i know it's probably the only one is it roasted yes okay great awesome and we have our oven this is this is kind of like the front area is all food we have our community restaurants we make your sandwiches and then this is where all of the magic happens. So we make sure everything is clean at the end of the day and sparkling and shining.

Yeah it is very clean. And then our fridge we have an undercounter fridge that we can reach in. I'll just wait grab the milk and grab the pitchers and everything.

Have you ever switched out coffee beans? We don't we mostly mainly have the same coffee beans because we want to stay consistent with the coffee and have that signature juice kind of coffee. nice rye and gourmet coffee kind of sugar as you can tell and that's a beauty.

I have a poster with somebody. I'm kidding. So what kind of flavors do you guys have?

So we have our like main coffee flavors right here vanilla, hazelnut, sugar-free vanilla, regular vanilla, caramel, salted caramel and then this here we actually started our Italian sodas so this is more of like for the Italian sodas. strawberry, raspberry, lime, mango. There's some odd people who crash me. Okay.

Yeah, we have strawberry, raspberry, lavender. He uses lavender. Which of those go fast?

Which is the most popular one? Vanilla. Vanilla, of course.

And this is the yield, the scale we use for the yield of how much espresso. And you use that only when you die? Yeah, as soon as it dies, you can take it away and just kind of throughout the day, you see that you take this out again and use that again. Gotcha. So how does the person behind the window, what does their job mainly?

Here to do it. I mean obviously not for the shots So once you place an order all of that order will pop open to this KDS and so Whoever is working on espresso machines see the order so they don't need to order right and as soon as they're finished they can um exit that out okay let me know you got we got the sink and all that yeah um we're one of our things that we strive for is cleanliness yeah i noticed that and yes we have a we have a checklist that how does this house look like have you ever been to this house so clean responsibility to make sure your espresso machine is in the oven. The Canadian press is in the oven.

You need to put well put in order so the person coming in in the morning has everything ready. Well hey thank you so much for showing me around. This is awesome. You guys have an awesome thing going here.

If you are locally, stop by, say hi to Evelina. She is awesome. She made a great drink. So yeah. Give us top five things somebody needs to do or steps in order to open up a coffee shop like this.

And I'm not talking in a sense of like, hey, work on your character or you got to this, but like literally step by step, not even the first five steps, but the top five steps. So the first thing you want to got a really good location. You know, like any real estate person would know location, location, location, very important. Then you got to determine, are you going to be the entrepreneur? Are you going to be the owner of the company?

If you're going to be an entrepreneur, start gaining the skills to be a great barista. If you're going to open an espresso stand, get good at the craft. Number three, make sure that you have all the codes, everything lined up for the health department. Very, very important.

If you do not have that, you're not going to be able to operate. Number four, make sure you have occupancy for the building. If you don't, you won't be able to occupy the building.

Pretty simple stuff. And number five, just make sure you have a good team around you. You have to have a great team, you know. So how did you fund this business?

Did you have a business beforehand? Do you run something on the other end of things? Yeah, so the company, we have about 10 steps away from here.

That definitely funded this company. You know, I started that when I was 16 years old in my bedroom with a couple buddies, went to our garage and this warehouse now. Now we have 30 people, so we're growing and moving forward.

And we're going to do that on the next video. We really wanted to... interview your other business, we'll walk through and show you what that is. I mean, he just gave me a quick glance and that's, it's pretty awesome.

So make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll show you what he has in store for us for our next videos to come. All right. So walk through your average workday. And I, you know, I'll ask Evelina this later, but from your perspective, as the owner that's running two businesses, in a sense, you know, you're working there, you come in here. What are these your work day and what do you expect from your workers?

Yeah, that's a good question. What I really like about the thing that I do is it changes every day. It's really difficult to tell you exactly what's going to happen. I can only tell you that my day starts at 8 because that's our first morning meeting.

And from there, I can't really tell you what goes on. And do people hear me at that meeting or is that separate? So it's separate.

So they have little scrums here. So in between sessions, in between the workers coming in and going, they'll have a couple minute meeting explaining what's going on. They also go through defects, change points, and improvements. We do that. We have a Voxer channel where we communicate back and forth.

And so for my responsibilities at the company next door, I'm actually passing a lot of those on right now. And a lot of it is tailored to emails. phone calls, essentially a lot of HR, a lot of leadership, making sure my team is equipped. equipped with the right tools and resources to be able to move the business forward.

Do you think it's possible for somebody to open up a business like this and be successful, not knowing anything about the food industry, anything about the drink industry? Yeah. So this is what I believe as a philosophy for anyone I hire.

I don't care about anything except for an attitude. And if you're a kind person, skills can be taught. We did not know how to operate. And what I love about coming into an industry fresh, you disrupt it.

You don't have any boundaries because you don't know. what's not possible. Not knowing what's not possible allows you to do the impossible.

Another question I have is what are three things people can do to really screw it up? Let's say they have the money, they'll throw into it. They have the passion to do business.

What are the three things that they can do when they have the money? They have the passion, how can they screw up? Easy.

You do shortcuts. Okay. The most important thing is quality.

Speed is the third most important thing. Okay. Quality is the most important, the simplicity of the process, and speed is the third most important. And so if you're not focusing on quality, you're going to disrupt this $100,000 investment you made because you have a shit inferior product when it should be a premium product expressed by the interior and exterior of the building along with the people here.

Okay. That's a huge thing. Well, that's huge. If you got quality down, you pretty much got all of it down. So, all right.

Well, thanks so much, man. Thanks for this interview. This is awesome. Great content.

If you want to know more, go on their website, go on their YouTube channel. Joe's Fine Coffee. You guys can find us on YouTube and you can just look us up online.

Get connected. Yeah. This is a great atmosphere.

Like you're saying, it's about relationships. If you're in the area, stop by, say hi, and have a cup of coffee. Adios. All right.

Well, that's all for today. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. You guys found out what it takes to open up a coffee shop, but it's doable, right? Even if you haven't done it before, it's doable. And this, these, these things.

You can open it, right? It takes the will to do it, the will to change, and just willingness to keep trying, right? You don't have to be good at it at first.

It's the effort that matters, right?

Transcript for:Starting a Successful Coffee Shop Journey

Transcript for:
Starting a Successful Coffee Shop Journey