Claire and Andrew Bowen, Coffee Shop Consultants, authors, "The Daily Grind"

  Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity. And I really appreciate all the comments and reviews and suggestions that we're getting from listeners as we travel around the world talking to creatives about how they get inspired and how they organize ideas. And of course, how they gain the confidence and think connections to launch their work out into the world.

And it's that launching today that we're going to focus on. And if you know me and If you know this podcast, we talk about coffee shops a lot, and we talk about having coffee as a way of doing business and getting to know people. And what's perfect is that I'm today talking to a husband and wife team that focuses on how to run profitable coffee shops.

And my guests are Claire and Andrew Bowen. Welcome to the show. Yeah.

Thank you for having us on. Yes. Thank you very

much for inviting us on. Excited to

be on. It's going to be terrific. And we're right in the middle of the UK in Oxford today. Yeah. Thank you. . It's always good to stamp our passport in the UK.

Folks, the book that this couple has written, The Daily Grind, and I love that title, but I love the subhead even more. How to open and run a coffee shop that makes money. It's in all caps right on the cover. I think anybody can open a coffee shop as you've probably determined, but how many coffee shops can really make money?

What's been your experience about how people go into this business and what their expectations are, maybe vis a vis making money. And then what is their experience?

A lot of people think that it's quite easy to open a coffee shop. In fact it's the lower barrier to entry in the hospitality market.

It's doesn't cost that much to open a coffee shop as opposed to a restaurant. And a lot of people go into coffee shops and they think, oh, They're making an absolute fortune. There's a queue out the door. There's lots of people is buzzing, they're making a fortune. But the reality is not everyone makes money from opening a coffee shop and a lot of people lose money.

So that's our job is to make sure that then the percentage that makes money. .

I think part of the problem is Mark, is that it is very easy and very quick to open a coffee shop, but it's even easier to lose a ton of money. Once you've opened, if you don't get the basics right, if you don't get the fundamentals right.

Then, you are, you might as well take your money and burn it in the car park.

It'll be just as good. There you go. Let's have a little role play then, because literally, maybe as we connected and I started reading your book, I had in mind opening a coffee shop. I said, I love coffee shops.

I love the experience. I love the service hospitality side of it. I would also love to have, some music playing in my coffee shop. And so let's say I had this in mind and I ran into you two on the street and I said, hey, how fortuitous that I meet up with you because I'm going to open a coffee shop.

What would you say directly back to me?

The first thing we'd say is what are you going to be famous for? tHe days of opening a coffee shop and selling nice coffee and nice cake and a sandwich are pretty much gone. And I think the successful ones are the ones that are famous for something.

Somewhere, if you like music, do you want to open a music venue cafe? Or, are you going to be a mother and baby or even a dog cafe or a cat cafe? Are you going to be famous for something? Are you going to be the place that is the hub of the community? And that, Getting people to understand why they want to open, I think, is the first thing we challenge them.

There's no point in just, taking over a unit, putting a nice coffee machine in it, and expecting people to roll up, because there's more to it. You're not selling coffee in a coffee shop, believe it or not. You're selling happiness. You're encouraging people to come. People come there for lots of different reasons.

And only one of them is the physical act of drinking a cup of coffee, the meeting, the socializing, the, chatting, having a business call, just a place to relax, place to meet family, place to work, place to be inspired. There's loads of other reasons that underpin that. And you need to get those things right as well.

And the other thing we say to you is you don't go too small. So in terms of metrics your sales, obviously if you've got it to some respect, it's the same with the drive through your sales are capped at how many customers you have and how many times, how much they spend.

So the number of customers you can have is capped by how many seats you've got or how fast you are in the drive thru. So working that out, it's no good having 10, 000 people an hour walking past your coffee shop and thinking, Wow, that's going to be really busy. If you could only serve 10 of them an hour.

I love especially, what are you going to be famous for? For sure. Cause I'm always an advocate of good, positioning and exclusivity, but for sure that you're selling happiness that at this stage of the game in coffee shops, it's very little to do with the coffee, as you say.

Because you can get a good coffee just about anywhere. But look at the contradiction of some of the famous things you said. If we're going to be the mom and baby coffee shop, then we're probably not going to be the quiet place to work. So you really can't be all things to all people, can you?

Yeah, exactly. And that's a very common mistake. People make, they want to please everybody. And it's absolutely impossible to do that. As you just said, if you have want to attract mums and babies, you're not going to attract the workers who want to be quietly on their laptops. So choosing who you want to serve.

Your avatar, as we call it, your ideal customer is vital before you go down the line of choosing where to open and what you're going to sell. So you're going to choose your why you want to do it, and then who you want to serve. Because we all, we always say you wouldn't open a vegan restaurant in the middle of a meat market.

Your customer, your ideal customer has to be outside your door.

Yeah, people are a bit lazy when it comes to coffee. Needs to be either close to where you are. Or on route to where you're going. It needs to be exceptional. We're not, we don't operate five star restaurants where you're going to take a, where you're going to book six months in advance and travel a hundred, hundred miles to as an event.

It's something, it's almost as a necessity of life. It's almost sort of something like air, and mobile phone. No, it's something we take for granted, but you want, but people ain't going to travel far for it. Your location is

critical. Yes. Let's touch on that then because I was surprised in the book you spent quite a bit of real estate in the book talking about location, selecting the location, leasing the location, dressing up and designing location is quite famous as a real estate term, but I never put that much into it when I thought about coffee shops, but you've really focused on this and had quite an analysis of how to choose the right location.

As you quite rightly say, it's the biggest chapter in our book. Once you've decided on what you're going to be famous for and who your customer is going to be, location comes next. And we wrote the book in a logical way that how we would have liked to have had a book written for us when we first started to think how do I work out in order, rather than going down rabbit holes, how do I work out in order what I have to do to be successfully opened?

And location is key. We see so many people open. In the wrong location where their customers aren't there and they wonder why it's not working or as Andrew alluded to earlier open too small they want to open small because they think it's a safer option. They're not going to Lose as much, the rent is cheaper.

Yeah, the rent is cheaper not gonna it's not going to be so fearful for them to sign on the dotted line but what we want to do is for people to look at The location for them. It may be a fantastic location for somebody else. What you've got to do is look at the location and decide for yourself which location is best.

And we've put together a 74 point checklist where you can Analyze each location and so you can work out which is the best location for you. Yeah,

I suppose when you look at the big boys, the Starbucks, the Dunkin's of the world, they have got literally hundreds of people in their estate department and they've got hundreds of realtors out there looking for sites and they've got a very clear plan of what they want, a very clear in set of rules before they'll open somewhere and they'll check the demographic and they'll check the average earnings per capita and per household, all that sort of stuff.

But what we try to do with the book is because the average independent or most independents have I either haven't thought of that or even have got no idea what goes on behind the scenes. So the whole purpose of that first chapter being so big and pushing it so much second chapter, sorry was that it, it would give the independents who, the guys that we work with a headstart really to give them bring it back up to a level, level playing field where, you know, because Starbucks haven't opened there, there's a reason why.

I couldn't help but think of that because it used to be, hey, once a Starbucks opened, they never closed. So they just push through and figure it out. But that's not really the case anymore for these big chains. If it's not working, they shutter it. Yeah.

I think when you see what they, unfortunately, they use their scale to take over an area.

n? bAck in the sort of early: 2000

They couldn't make them all work. So when the option came, when they squeezed out a lot of the existing competition they were in a bit more monopolistic position and they were able to shut a few and they are very ruthless now. They took the opportunity during COVID to completely reassess their estate and, close the ones that weren't washing their face much quicker than, at the normal route when the lease comes to an end.

Yes. And so that kind of pressure on the independents that you work primarily with what then I love the fact that there is a 74 point checklist, by the way and it's not 70. It's not 75. It's 74 points.

We should have made one extra really 25,

but that's the kind of critique I get. From editors and it's you can't think of one more, but I think it's more memorable on the 74 but, but the fact that you have to have this rigor and many times on our podcast, because we like to talk about creativity and, oh, the design and the recipes and what we'll be famous for, but this kind of rigor of decision making is what we creatives need the most.

And I gotta say, I really enjoyed the the most recent one with Shannon. Yeah. It really resonated because the things that she talked about it's, the importance of the look and the feel and the smell and the colors and the textures, are all still important in a coffee shop, important, really important, which is people don't, again, they don't understand.

the importance of that. They might go somewhere and like it but not quite understand why they like it. But the people that get it right do so much better than the guys that just make it up as they go along and just paint the walls red or, and not even think about the impact of color.

So that is in terms of that creative thing. It is really important to understand those nuances as well. So once you've got your site, let's make it look special. Cause the better it looks, the better it feels, the more you can charge. And the more, our customers you're likely to attract.

And the more people are going to like it without even knowing about it. There's a book called gastro physics. From the guy, it was Charles Spence from the University of Oxford, who we know. And in there it talks about the textures of food and the sort of crunch on your tongue and all that sort of things that make a difference.

And we love all that because that's those tiny little things that make can be the difference between okay and wow.

When you have a chapter on wow service. And service gets a tough rap these days. We are very critical. We post our reviews on every platform we can. We have an opinion about everything about the service.

Then you overlap. I had to combine these two chapters in my mind, though. But then you've got training and the nurturing of the people that provide. The service. That's also a tough one for business people right now. Hiring, training, retaining employees. What's the state of the state? Even since you've written the book, I'm sure you're getting a lot of feedback from your coffee shop owners.

Actually it's all over the news at the moment with hospitality, people saying that it's really hard to get good people to work in hospitality. Over here in the UK, we had Brexit where we came away from Europe and so that did influence a lot with the workforce. However...

What we say is if you employ the right people, you treat them well, and you employ for the hospitality gene, and you nurture those people, they're more likely to stay with you, they're more likely to give good service, and in the long run, it's cost effective. If you pay as much as you possibly can, and more, and treat your team they're going to stay and they're going to do a good

job.

Yeah. It starts at the very top in terms of the culture. It goes, actually goes back to that. iF you're a, if you know who would want to work in a business where the boss is constantly moaning about how good is how bad these people are. All that sort of stuff. And you hear all over the, I don't know, where you hear over there in the States and Mark, I'm sure you do, where the business owners are moaning.

I can't get people and the people I get aren't really very good. And it wasn't like, it wasn't like back in the old days, but actually that, that to me shouts as a really bad culture within that organization and people won't put up for it anymore. You need that to get that culture right in your business before anything.

And that goes back to that. Why? What you can do things, people want to work for somewhere that they can go. to the bar at the end of the night or at the family dinner and say, I work for these guys. And they go, wow, they're great. They don't want to go to, they want to go home and say, I work for X and they go blooming egg.

It's, you've got to get that culture, and that's the thing that labor turnover is such a. Hidden cost within a business. Totally. But I, and

Claire, you mentioned this hospitality gene. I would love to know your tips and tricks for interviewing.

Where do you put your hand to find that pulse? On the wrist of the prospective employee.

It's go, it's going back to when I was a nurse and a midwife. I take the pulse. Yeah. . No. The hospitality gene as we like to call it is you employ people for the gene rather than experience.

So if somebody came to me and they smiled, they were eager to work, they didn't stand there with their arms crossed or leaning against the the bar and you did, they were looking to do things, clearing tables, just to interact with the customers. Now I call that the hospitality gene.

Because I can teach people how to make a fantastic cup of coffee, but I cannot teach the hospitality gene. You've either got it or you haven't.

That's so good. Thanks for this advice. You're making me think about a lot of things before I... Open my coffee shop. I'll definitely go through the 74 points.

That is for sure. Listeners, my guests are Claire and Andrew Bowen in Oxford, UK. They are coffee shop and cafe consultants, especially to independents. So we're learning a lot about how to open and run a coffee shop. But now I'd like to turn the page to the book itself and a little bit about the craftsmanship and the process.

You've been doing this consulting work and at some point you said, or someone suggested, you really ought to write all this down and put it in a book. What was the impetus for you getting this

book going? I think it started initially we had, when we had, when we have our business we have lots of people come to us asking us to help.

Friends of a friends pick your brains. I need, like you I think you don't look up shop. Can I have a chat? Can I have a coffee, have a beer? So we had all that and we had probably seen at least one or two people a week at one stage. It was a lot. so We thought actually I'll probably need us to, this is nice.

Then we started doing a little bit of blogging on LinkedIn and we got a fantastic feedback from that actually. And then we thought, actually let's write a book about it. So we just simply, we went on a course, didn't we? Yeah.

We went on a book writing course to be honest with you. And we decided that let's put it down.

Let's think back to how we were when we first started. What would we like to have known? What would we like to have read in a book that would have guided us? So that we didn't make mistakes. And so we wrote it together. Now that doesn't mean to say that we we sat in the same room at the same computer typing Andrew is gets up early.

He likes to rise early so he used to get up at five o'clock and do two hours of tapping away at the computer, and then put it into Dropbox, and then I woke up a bit later on at seven o'clock, and then took over, and then I carried on typing, typing away. So we wrote it together, but we weren't actually physically in the same room typing, and that worked really well, and within six months, we were published.

Yeah,

we put a we put a deadline on it. And I think the target was to do 500 words a day. Obviously we did a, the overview of it. We did a big mind map of what we were going to do and just chunked our way through it. We tried. Not to be too complicated, but we try to cover as many of the things that you don't know, because there are so many of those, in there that people don't even think about.

So we want to make people aware of the stuff but without making it a. I don't know, a textbook, a dry textbook that went on 500, 000 words, it

does have very practical language, but you're right, it's not a dry didactic, instruction manual by any stretch.

And it's interesting you describe this, okay, you start it. I'll complete it. We'll go back and forth. It doesn't have that sort of choppy voice and that's why I was curious as to the sort of writing craftsmanship because I think it all blended together very well.

We've been married for 36 years.

Yeah, we probably morphed into each other.

Or as my wife says we can finish each other sentences anyway so just Start writing the book and let it

flow. Absolutely. Yeah. And we were very lucky. We had a friend of ours who has, a fantastic eye for detail and she offered to be the proofreader.

So she did all proofreading for us. And when she came back with the first proof, I think she wished she hadn't bothered because I'd never seen so many post it notes in a draft, we got through it, went through the it was brilliant. So we're really grateful for that as well, because that was another voice that added to it.

That doesn't make sense. That, all that sort of stuff. So having somebody like that with that real eye for detail helped too. And

you said you had a deadline, but when did you know it was done? You said, okay, this is ready. We're ready to hit the send button.

Send to publish. I think that we got to the point where we probably done seven or eight.

Proof copies and eventually got the point where that actually is done. And got the The proper cover completed which then brought it to life.

And I think when we start, I think we're in my, my, in my heart, we spent a lot of time telling people we were going to write a book. So about six months before we started writing, we would tell him. People, we were going to write the book. Then we were saying to people, we were writing the book.

And then eventually it was like, we've written the book. And I think once we've, once we got that stage that we've written it and it's published and then it, it felt completely different. Can you speak to so many people and say, I'm writing a book or I want to write a book but actually haven't written it.

Published it was a big milestone for us. Yes.

Yes. And then there's always the marketing the dissemination the publicity. You also have a consulting business. So that helps in terms of the dissemination. But what sort of marketing tips could you share with us?

I think you just try and build up a bit of an audience.

I'd already built up a little bit of a following on LinkedIn. We started doing some blogs and started a list of subscribers for our weekly sort of newsletter. So we have, probably five or 600 600. We published it through that. Got a few people again, got a few people, gave.

Gave people some of the advanced copies so they could give us a bit of a critique on it, which is quite helpful. Got a bit of build in there, a bit of build in there. And then I think we looked at, we bought a book called Our First Thousand Copies. Which we were recommended in there, give some real good strategies about how you can market your book.

And we just followed those strategies. So one of the things that we wrote to a few people in our business that we admired and I think it offered them a free copy of the book. And some of those guys have podcasts. Some of them had other sort of media or followings. And a few of them picked it up and, helped us get known a little bit.

We, we appeared on a few podcasts in the very early days of it, five, five years ago, and that, that helped as well. And we've just kept it going and we haven't. We haven't stopped the marketing as such. It's passive. It's quite passive marketing. It's not hard sell. But, we try to gather as many reviews as possible.

I think we've got 538 reviews now on Amazon, which, you know for a small Oh, that's fantastic. Yes. Book is is very good. And that's, and we've always tried to encourage people. If you people say to, I love your book, and we say Alex, do me a favor. Give us a five star review on Amazon.

Yeah. We never miss an opportunity, do we? No. For people to say to ask them to, because we know from restaurant, from our cafe business, how important it was to get reviews. online reviews so that people came to visit us. It was very close to our heart. We used to agonize over any bad reviews we had in the shops, in the coffee shops and, and try and get as many people as you could to give us good reviews.

So we just continued that from the sort of restaurant side to the sort of offline side,

yeah, that's terrific. What's next for you, Andrew and Claire? What what are you working on now? And what do you see over the horizon?

We were talking this morning. We should write another

book.

There you go. I love it. I was hoping you'd say that. I didn't want to put you on the spot. But I think you have a sequel. We

have. We've written for a magazine called Begton's Coffeehouse in the UK for the last five years, and we've got, I think we've probably got 50, 000 words already.

It's just a matter of, Making sure they're in the right sort of order and bound together with something rather than just use the next chapter. So I think we've got a lot of content out there. We've created a lot of content and kept up to date with stuff as well. So I think that's probably our next big project for the winter.

I love that.

You'll love to rewind a little bit about four episodes ago. I spoke with an author who wrote a murder mystery set in a corporate office of a coffee franchisee or franchise. Operation. The blend of her work in coffee shops and this sort of fictional murder mystery. I loved it. I said, No, is none of this is true, right?

She Oh, no, I even changed all the names. Even though it's close and you can definitely guess what she's riffing on.

Yeah yeah, we haven't luckily we haven't had any deaths in our coffee shops. Yes, just, just some really stressful owners. I think that's, we've got to try and stop them.

Heart attacks or nervous breakdowns. That's our main objective in life really. Cause it is, we have seen a lot of people open up, open their dream coffee shop and then fail or. or run away six months to a year later with their tail between their legs never seen again, quite burned by the experience.

And our, the reason we do what we do is You know, prevent people out doing that sort of stuff, because as we said, the very beginning, it's too easy to open a coffee shop.

Yes. Let's take it full circle then to back to the beginning of our conversation, because there are a lot of people who do love hospitality.

They might want to open a coffee shop, but yeah, and you mentioned Shannon Pearson, who has the hospitality rental company, but a lot of people want to open their business. Give us some words of inspiration and encouragement, or at least direction. Of what we need to think about as we launch.

Ooh, I think be very clear on your why, the Simon Sinek stuff. Be very clear on that, what you want to do, what you're going to be famous for. Very clear what your target market is very clear on what makes you happy. And also be clear about what the end game is for you, because there's no point in putting all this hard work into something and after, 10 years of graft be left with nothing to sell or, or nothing to pass down.

So it's, you need to be really clear on what you want to achieve.

And I'd add to that before you start, as you say, get the end game in mind before you start, but to choose the right... business partner. wE've seen so many people hit a problems when they've chosen they pick the wrong business partner.

They, you don't want to clone of yourself. You want a ying and a yang. You want somebody to be. opposite. Andrew and I have got different qualities. That's why we work well together. So choose very well. And before all the emotion starts, before you start, make sure you have a an agreement, a legal agreement that You know what each of you are going to be responsible for.

Yeah, partnership agreement. Yeah, thank you. That's the one I was looking for. You could tell he finishes my sentences, but a partnership agreement so that you don't go into it and expect the same out of it. Even though one person is putting more effort in than the other.

Very good. Very helpful. Listeners, I think we've gathered a lot of great insight from our guests today.

They're authors of the daily grind, how to open and run a coffee shop that makes money. Let's emphasize that because we may be creative, but we all deserve to profit from our creativity. And that's a constant theme on this podcast. It's don't undersell yourself. You've got a lot of value in our creative work.

Andrew, Claire thanks for being on the show. Really enjoyed talking with you and learned a lot.

Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Keep on doing what you're doing. And,

If and when, yeah, if and when I do open that coffee shop and get that guitar player in the corner you'll be the first at the ribbon cutting.

Thanks very much. Yeah we look forward to it. We very much look forward to it. Yeah. Let us help you along the way. Shall we? Oh, yes. Before you sign that lease

agreement. Yeah. That would be helpful. We'll talk to you again, I'm sure. liSteners, come back again next time. We're continuing our Around the World journeys.

We're stamping our creative passports, in all sorts of places to hear from creative practitioners leaders and experts on what we need to do to launch our work out into the world. We'll see you next time. Until then, I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll be unlocking your world of creativity.