Running a profitable coffee shop is an exercise in speed and efficiency. You need speed to keep your customer line moving, efficiency to manage inventory, and a little of both to handle hiccups like equipment repairs.

The faster you can do these things (and do them well), the more product you’ll sell in less time—and without overstaffing. With any luck, you’ll have time leftover for things like planning your next location and keeping up with specialty coffee trends. Maybe even traveling to origin!

Syrup can be tricky. On one hand, you want to serve customers memorable, delicious drinks that bring them back again and again. On the other hand, you want your drinks to be profitable -- and that means keeping ingredient costs, including syrup, under a reasonable threshold.

While balancing cost and quality is a perennial coffee shop problem, every cafe owner can cut syrup costs by applying precision management techniques to their purchase and use. Wondering how? Here are three practical strategies.

A selection of menu items—and knowing how to sell them—are vital to your coffee shop’s success.

The rub at a retail coffee shop: your main product has great gross profit margins, but low overall ticket averages. Since you pay your rent in straight-up dollars—not as a percentage of your profit—bringing your average individual sale well above $3 or $5 is crucial to your success. Cafes with an only (or mostly) coffee strategy can be busy all day, but still not generate enough profit to keep their doors open.

To realize your dream of coffee retail success, you need a “coffee plus” strategy (coffee plus pastry or other food item). Coffee should be no more than 40 percent of your weekly sales—about two item sales per customer transaction.

There is no one set of secrets to making it in the foodservice business. Most success comes down to hard work, extensive experience or luck. 

We recently brought you a few handy hiring tips, and ideas for reducing staff turnover. Then just the other day, we stumbled upon a few more ideas for building your staff that we think are worth adding to the pile. After all, hiring prowess cannot be understated in its value to your restaurant or café. It is nothing if not a fine art, and doing it right will save you loads of time, money and headaches:

Want to know one of the biggest hidden challenges in running any coffee shop or restaurant? Keeping training costs down. Every day spent training means lost productivity or additional labor costs in the form of the trainer him/herself.

Not unlike your clothes, your menu design says a lot about you. Are you clean and polished and easy to read, or disheveled and a bit confused? Keep the following guidelines in mind when creating your menu and you’ll be sure to make a positive first impression: