So you’re planning to get into café business. Well who doesn’t? Pardon my lack of enthusiasm that’s due to my years of experience in this field. I love coffee to bits I love everything about it that includes the business side of it but…

I see too many people with zero experience dreaming of opening their own little café; just like the ones they’ve seen on their favorite TV show where there is an easy going, stress free owner and his/her adorable customers dwell in a lovely small and quiet space made of love and understanding (!)

It does look good on the screen but in real life such a place wouldn’t last a few months. You need either tons of customers or very high prices that don’t bother the few that do stick around. Third and the most ideal scenario would be to meet in the middle and find that balance.

Whatever way you choose to follow, it will mean a lot of work; especially for the entrepreneur himself/herself. You may have just finished school or just got fired after enduring years of rat race in a boring firm thinking “how hard can it be to open a café and run it?”

All I’m saying is get familiar with the field before you jump into it; get a temporary job as a waiter or a cook at a café. Test the water. If it’s what you thought it was and you really enjoy the intense flow of it, go for it! Good luck.

That’s what you’re going to hear when you tell an experienced business person that you’re planning to open a café or a restaurant or whatever kind of store.

This is a tricky subject because sometimes seemingly perfect places may end up being a fatal mistake for your business. A very busy street with lots of potential customers may be the worst place for your café. It’s not always clear why that’s the case.

Sometimes on a street where cloth stores write success history a shoe store may go bankrupt. Another street which is perfect for hardware stores may be the last thing where people want to stick around and have a bite.

What you should do is go and ask the business owners around for their honest opinion; see if there is too much competition for you in that particular area and see if they manage. Are they happy to be located there? Sometimes a street may be full of restaurants and cafés but they could all be doing quite well despite the competition. Visit those places as a customer or just hang around at lunch time or in the early evening when people drop by after work and before they go home.

Also, ask around what kind of busineses had been started and how long they lasted in that particular space you’re planning to rent and start a business. If two or more businesses similar to yours had opened and closed on the same spot, leave it at that; don’t go further unless you love taking huge risks and you have an incredible idea that’s going to revolutionize the business as we know it (!) as Starbucks.

Speaking of Starbucks, do not be fooled by the success of big brands either. Because their name is already built; they may open a store in your mom’s garage and make it work whereas if you tried it on that very spot, even your mom may quit visiting.

Don’t be shy; do your enquirey well and don’t ignore the signs just because you happen to like the particular area so much. You can always come back to hang out there but that doesn’t mean it’s worth losing your savings over it.
Good luck.

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law right? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Man… Nothing else could define café business better!

I’ve worked in cafés for more than a decade and the things I’ve seen and the problems I had to face are the kind of things that I couldn’t even come up with if I tried. And any time I thought I ‘that’s it I’ve seen everything I could see in this business’ something new and twisted showed up; be it customers complaining something about something that had nothing to do with the café itself to machines choosing the perfect (!) moments to let us down.

As an entrepreneur you are the first person that everybody is going to blame; your customers, your workers, you name it. It’s all your fault and nobody wants to hear explanations and excuses. “I don’t want to hear it! Fix it and give me my meal”; “I don’t want to hear it! Fix it and pay my salary”; “I don’t want to hear it! Fix it and make our oven work again”, etc.

If you’re just a worker it may be annoying to listen to a customer yak about something for a few minutes but as soon as your shift is over it’s “sayanora suckers!”. When you’re the owner however, your reputation is on the line. If you’re not careful only a few seemingly small complaints may kill your business especially in this internet age where everybody is dying to bitch about something on platforms that make it way too easy for them to have a field day. On one hand of course it’s a good idea to keep businesses like restaurants and cafés that may have an influence on our health on their toes, but on the other hand there are too many idiots out there who don’t know what they’re talking about like the ones who would go to an Indian restaurant and complain that the food was too spicey, for example.

Be prepared; check your system and make sure that everything is on the up and up but be prepared psychologically to face the unexpected when it shows up because it will. But that’s part of the fun; it really is; you’ll know when you face it. Good luck