If you want your restaurant or café to reach its full potential, you need to sweat the small stuff. We’re not talking about micromanagement, but a healthy dose of obsession in restaurant management. It takes total situational awareness of your operation—when a place setting is missing on a table, the mirror in the bathroom is dirty, or a staff member seems preoccupied or down—to create a great business.

It’s hard to hold other people accountable if you don’t hold yourself accountable. Great leaders understand that culture is the result the behavior they themselves exhibit. Your team will imitate the behavior they see from you.

Many restaurants and coffeehouses rise to the level of “good,” but not many are truly great. Great ones don’t tend to fail—and open communication with and among your staff can make you one of the great ones.

You'd think that with the national economy humming along, adaptable leadership wouldn't be all that necessary for business success. It’s easier than it was 10 years ago to make a profit in the coffee or restaurant business. Yet many cities are reaching a point of market saturation, where it doesn’t take much for a restaurant to go unnoticed for a while, or get abandoned by former regulars if service or food quality slips.

This saturation also means people are being hired and promoted into management roles that they’re not trained for, or don’t have the personality to be successful in. And when the economy slows again (as it inevitably will), more restaurants will struggle to stay open.

Incorporating a robust recycling program in your establishment is a great start to achieving "green goals" for your coffeeshop. 

But while you can recycle some plastics, the best option is to not generate plastic waste in the first place. Recycling takes energy of its own, and plastics are not endlessly recyclable—unlike glass and metal which can be recycled over and over. After a few recycles, plastic becomes toxic landfill that leaches into soil and takes thousands of years to decompose—or ends up in waterways, killing marine life.

The first step to achieving your "green goals" as a coffee shop is conducting an energy audit -- but what comes after that? If an energy audit uncovers expensive fixes—perhaps a need for Energy Star appliances or a new H-VAC system (not easy tasks), don’t worry. You can do those things in phases, and in the meantime add implement green restaurant methods that won’t break the bank:

Restaurants are some of the most energy-intensive businesses around, using five to seven times more energy per square foot than most other commercial buildings—and producing huge piles of garbage. Yet when looking for ways to cut costs, even owners who see the value in “green restaurant” status often focus on staffing or food-related costs—and ignore energy consumption.