Sales Channels
Why Running a Cafe Sucks and Why We Went Virtual
Dealing with the Public
This isn’t to say I don’t like people. But I do like to consider what kind of energy I am inviting into my world on a day to day basis. For example, I would hate to be the person processing insurance claims over the phone just as much as I didn’t like having to watch barely supervised children run around the cafe, sticking their hands into the fish tank.
Through the delivery mechanism, I saw how we can have a quick friendly chat & be off to the next one.
Dealing with Employees
A good lesson I’ve learned in scale is to know where you want to stop. For us, Cait, Joe & myself, none of us want to be managed, nor do we want to manage other people. Having the cafe open when we did raised awareness of the online delivery, which was great for us. We designed the cafe to be run with just one person most of the time. The problem was when more people, including groups would come in, and that one person would be bombarded. More business meant more daily staff to worry about, and that’s just not what we got into this to do.
At this point, they run the delivery businesses on a week to week basis just fine without me. Even doubling the amount of business we do for that would require we bring in at least 2 more people, and we’d rather just not.
Daily Routine
The monotony of running a cafe on a day to day basis required a lot of lists & daily tasks to keep track of. From keeping all the ingredients stocked, prepped and ready for sale on a daily basis was a major PIA compared to the weekly requirement of the meal subscription.