Would your employees cringe if you told them a coffee shop team building exercise was in their future?

Remember that game, “Pass the Orange”? The embarrassing one where you use your neck and chin to pass an orange to a friend, relay-race style? Employees can feel like 11-year-olds at summer camp when coerced into shenanigans like this. A recent Wakefield Research study found that almost a third of U.S. office workers dislike team building activities. That likely goes for hourly restaurant and café workers, too.

There's no question that laptop users are increasingly soaking up wireless connections and electrical outlets at coffee shops around the world, along with their lattes. Their presence creates a challenge for owners who want to have a wi-fi policy that maintains a welcoming atmosphere but also want to encourage the necessary customer turnover for a profitable business.

In today’s corporate environment, career-minded go getters are chasing productivity and creativity as much as they seek healthy salaries and competitive benefits. The hardest of these to maintain are creativity and productivity, and the surprising solution can be spending time away from coworkers at relatively noisy public places.

Cafe management isn't all coffee and pastries. Whether you’re an owner-operator or you employ a full-time front-of-the-house manager, people are the core of your business. You need to know how to engage them, motivate them, and teach them.

Coffee shop marketing should be a constant in your business. Besides your inviting location, highly visible signage and killer espresso, how do you attract customers to your coffeehouse? Drink specials or coupons? Co-marketing with other businesses? Live music? All of these approaches have their merits and potential upticks in sales.

Business owners are known to dread creating a formal coffee business plan, and many especially avoid revisiting an old one. But a truly valuable business plan is a living document. By keeping it up to date, you are forced to step back from the chaos and make sure the big picture still makes sense. And if it doesn’t, you can take corrective action instead of burying your head in the sand.

As a small business owner, you wear many hats and have a plethora of tasks to complete throughout the day. It can be hard to find time to do everything, so you have to be efficient wherever possible. By making small changes to your inventory management system, you can save hours.