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The New Village Coffee
Shop in Codsall
We
are keen to bring you up to date information from coffee shop
entrepreneurs, and coffee shop owner Ian Grantham has been in
touch with us recently.
Ian
with architect Paul Simkin
Ian
purchased a copy of “How
to set up a Coffee Shop”
in
March 2008 whilst planning his new business in
the Staffordshire town of Codsall. He emailed us to say how
helpful he had found the book, and thanked us for subsequent
emails and newsletters. With a background as a buyer of chilled
foods for a chain of supermarkets, Ian, together with his wife
Veronica (who is also a qualified patissiere) opened for
business on 6th
October, in the town’s former post office.
Ian
and Veronica (Ronnie) have produced a very informative blog
describing the process of setting up the shop, from negotiating
with the local council, to sourcing organic bacon, and detailing
how they found some of their suppliers via the Café Culture
trade show which took place in May 2008 in London.
You
can read of their experiences of selecting coffee machines,
undergoing training and how they approached the very important
task of marketing their shop before the opening day.
As
Ian reports on the October entry, the shop was in great demand
on their opening day, with lunchtime customers queuing out of
the door. And rather than burn out his staff, for the time
being they are reducing their opening hours to 10 am to 5 pm
whilst they seek extra staff to help assist with high levels of
business. As Ian says, “We seriously do not want to open hours
which burn out our team and lead to poor service and poor
quality products”.
Ian
is obviously a wise man, who has learnt the truth of Don
Clarke’s advice that “your staff should come first; if they are
happy, your customers will be happy”.
Ian
also advises that he and Ronnie learned another very valuable
lesson from Don Clarke’s book relating to the size of their
shop. He says:
“We
had originally planned to lease a smaller unit, but when we did
the numbers realised that there is no way we could have made a
living from this nor generated the volume we needed. Our shop
currently has 36 covers but we will quickly expand to 48 to
ensure we can meet demand during peak lunch and afternoon
trading hours, so building in capacity for expansion was a
critical part of our plan”.
To follow events
at Village Coffee,
Click on the
following link:
Village Coffee blogspot
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