Cafe Kitchen: Relaxed food for friends from the Lantana Café

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If you’re already a cafe owner and are looking to give your business a boost, you can skip to chapter three and onwards, which will help you to tweak your cafe business strategy and offer advice as to how to increase success. How to start a cafe business If you run a premised cafe, there's a chance you don't usually offer a takeaway and delivery service as part of your everyday offering. If this is the case, you'll need to adjust your business insurance. Now that you understand the value of upselling – and the positive effect it can bring for your business – it’s important that you understand how to upsell effectively. Give a reason

Insurance – you may be required to have some forms of insurance in place before opening, depending on your business’s circumstances. Read more about coffee shop insurance here. If you have the budget, you may want to consider enlisting the help of an interior designer to help you decorate your cafe. They will be able to give you design tips that will facilitate a good customer experience, as well as give you tips on how clever product placement can facilitate upselling. Cafe regulations and licenses to consider Bistro is a word used to describe a small restaurant or café which serves simple and moderately priced meals, which don’t have any particular cultural inspiration, in a modest setting. Its origins are French but nowadays the phrase is still used in the hospitality industry in conjunction with restaurants that are often connected to hotels, bars and pubs. What is a Bistro table? You may be looking for ways to increase custom in quiet periods, or you may be looking to expand your business on the whole. No matter what your goal is, there’s a good chance that reading through the following tips, and incorporating some of them into your daily procedures, will help to boost your cafe business for the better. Learn how to upsell Similarly, improving the fortunes of an existing business may appear just as daunting. But that doesn't have to be the case.

Logo – you may want to design a simple icon to represent your brand, so that your cafe name does not always have to be spelled out, or your full logo used. Brand logos exist in our mind as vague representations, so the important thing is to make sure people recognise your logo and associate it with what you sell, rather than perfectly recalling every detail. This means it's best to keep it simple.

Immediate location – the location of your business building will have an impact on the number of people that see your business, and the volume of customers that you receive. For example, in a town centre, are you located on the main high street, or down a quiet side street? A cafe located in a quiet area, for instance, might be able to save money by opening around midday – rather than in the morning – if there are few potential customers around early on.Area – it’s important to consider the wider area that you’ll be based in too, and how this could affect custom. For instance, think of the differences between a busy city centre cafe, and a coffee shop in a village square. Preferences – if your cafe has a strong theme or concept, then this will likely define your core customers based on their preferences towards that theme. For instance, a dog-friendly cafe will be looking to attract dog lovers almost exclusively. If you're planning on offering deliveries, you need to make sure your delivery vehicles and drivers are insured for commercial use, as most normal car insurance policies don't cover this. Does your alcohol licence cover you for takeaway alcoholic drinks? Though a relatively old advertising technique, posters and flyers can still be effective in marketing your coffee shop – especially if you have a new product or promotion that you want people to know about. Even something as simple as handing out flyers with a free drink offer can work wonders, as it helps people cross the threshold of your business for the first time. After they have been once, they are much more likely to come a second and third time – providing the experience was positive. As you can see, the potential variety of products on a cafe’s menu spans a wide range. You’ll have to make a number of decisions about what types of product you want your business to sell, as well as consider the implications that selling certain products may bring – for example a licence to sell alcohol. Different products will have different profit margins, and this is important to bear in mind, too.

There’s a chance that you may have to deal with underperformance or misconduct of staff members. In this situation, it can be useful to have a pre-set disciplinary procedure to follow and to make your staff aware of this procedure when you hire them. This will also give you the chance to focus on improving the quality of the items left. By only selling your most popular items, you have the chance to boost turnover by increasing the number of sales you make. Service style There are many benefits of recruiting cafe staff, including reducing your own workload so you have more time to focus on other areas of the business. However, there are also certain downfalls that can come with having employees, such as those associated with not hiring the right people (discussed below), and entrusting the fate of your business to a stranger. Environmental Health Service – you will likely be required to register your business with the Environmental Health Service before opening your doors to the public. Lifestyle – the type of lifestyle that consumers lead can be a good indicator of the type of cafe they may be attracted to.

The chances are that, by this stage, you’ve already chosen your business premises - or you have a strong idea of where you would like it to be. The location of your cafe’s premises is incredibly important, but even after you’ve chosen the perfect place, there is still much to be done. Again, this is a traditional, tried-and-tested marketing technique – and cafes across the UK still use it because it works. A customer loyalty scheme will help to facilitate return custom and differentiate you from competitors if you use your own unique system. Both my husband and I had the Shakshouka, freshly baked bread, and washed it down with a turmeric latte. I am very new to these flavoured lattes and rather enjoyed the turmeric latte than the matcha latte that I recently tried for the first time at Where The Pancakes Are at Flat Iron food court. For tax purposes in the U.S., you'll also want to secure an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS. If your cafe usually serves alcohol on its premises, bear in mind that you might not legally be able to sell alcohol if your premises licence doesn't include authorised off-sales.

Familiarize yourself with the legal requirements. Starting a cafe involves not only the legal "hoops" every new small business needs to navigate, but also the additional health and safety requirements of the food service industry. In the U.S., for instance, you will need to obtain a host of licences and permits (not to mention proof of insurance) on the local, state, and federal levels. Décor and atmosphere – a strong sense of style can sometimes be enough to pull in the punters – provided it is well-executed. Take this Egyptian-style cafe and this 50’s style diner as two good examples. A high level of customer service needs to be present and practised across your entire business, which means making sure that all of your staff’s customer service skills are up to scratch. Give them proper training before they get started so they know what’s expected of them, and reward the right behaviour to help ensure that standards don’t slip. What to do when it all goes wrong

Vision

The customer isn’t always right, but it’s important that you learn to judge when to give in - and when to stand your ground. Sometimes, the cost of giving away a free coffee isn’t much compared to permanently losing a customer. In other cases, by taking the time to sit with the customer and understand each other’s situations you can come to a mutually beneficial resolution. Train your staff well Having a successful cafe or coffee shop is achievable – the key is in thorough and clever planning. Layout – customers are likely to start reading your menu from the upper left corner – as they would a book – and finish towards the bottom right. Bear this in mind when considering your menu’s layout. An up-market residential village could mean consumers are likely to be retired, or middle-aged with children.