Is the success rate of coffee shop entrepreneurship really low?

Almost every once in a while, as short as a few weeks, as long as a month or two, there are one or two articles on the Internet that are painstaking, sincere and heartfelt. The writers either stay out of it and stand in a strategically advantageous position. Or speak in person and measure others by themselves, but they are mostly so-and-so gods and immortals who are pseudonyms or have never been heard of in the coffee industry. Their words are sincere and fluent, they talk about the difficulties of opening a coffee shop, count the sad ending of the small shop, and sigh the hardships and embarrassments of the coffee shop's entrepreneurial journey. Next, this kind of inscription is widely spread in white-collar circles such as Weibo, Wechat and Douban, with the effect of "chicken soup for the soul + business guide + constant words of warning to the world". So, to open a cafe, originally a group of urban white-collar workers, young and promising elites from all walks of life, rich idle people, and people with rich resources bid farewell to the current boring state of life, bravely choose a new way of life, and start a history of urban entrepreneurship with both romantic poetry and the spirit of struggle, gradually degenerated into a "vulgar joke of strangers who avoid the world, burn money, and play with tickets." Under the influence of these divine texts, the success rate of starting a cafe seems to be even more difficult than setting up an Internet company to beat Tencent and Ali. At least from my daily work at Pulan Coffee College, I receive some admired young friends every week to treat their psychological injuries. Without exception, they all want to open a shop, have high personal quality, and have some business or social experience. I also have some savings, but I was obviously frightened too much after collecting relevant materials online, and I felt that opening a cafe was extremely dangerous. It feels like going to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda-not a narrow escape, but a sure death.

Apart from the specific industries and fields, as an entrepreneur, he is essentially a warrior, a strong and brave warrior, who needs reason, ability, fighting spirit, and the courage to cut people when he pulls out a knife. If you accept a flood of negative information in the early stage, but the true and false are mixed, careless and difficult to distinguish, and there is no authoritative statistical analysis of data, it will be impossible to look at the whole picture of things in an all-round way. It's like peeing and paralyzing before you go to war. To make a vulgar analogy, it's like having impotence before going to bed, so what's going on?

For this kind of divine prose, it can not be said to be false, let alone without reason and factual basis, so that people can easily fall into a dilemma if they argue one by one according to its logic, because it is very difficult for us to interpret and understand the whole business environment involved in the case one by one, and once we jump out of its writing logic to examine it rationally as a whole, it is not difficult to find the truth. Is the success rate of coffee shop entrepreneurship really low? Before answering this question, we need to put forward these three conclusions as the premise or background and look forward to reaching a consensus with the viewers. If you can't agree on this, the next questions won't bother you to read on. Once a consensus has been reached, in fact, more than half of the previous questions have been answered.

First, the essence of the coffee shop industry is the catering industry. To run a cafe, whether it is self-employed or an enterprise, you need to apply for an industrial and commercial business license. the former is an individual business license and the latter is an enterprise business license. In any case, it is a legitimate business that has existed all over the world and has a history of hundreds of years. In other words, running a coffee shop is doing business. It is gratifying to make money, but it is a pity to lose money for a long time, and it is shameful to lose money for a long time but still be complacent.

Second, since a coffee shop is a business, setting up a coffee shop from scratch is an entrepreneurial activity. Several years before Coffee, I wrote a book called "the complete Secrets of Cafe Entrepreneurship", which was the first time to explicitly put forward the concept of "Cafe Entrepreneurship". Well, please take a look at the official statistics, entrepreneurial through the ages, various industries, entrepreneurial success rate. Why do so many people choose to become civil servants? because of stability, the future is uncertain and predictable-you can read a newspaper with a cup of tea for several years. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is just the opposite. its charm lies in the great variability and low predictability in the future, and the success or failure of honor or disgrace depends entirely on personal talent and fortune. If starting a business is as easy as making a cup of coffee, is it still called starting a business?

Third, starting a cafe from scratch is an entrepreneurial activity. Then it is obviously destined not to belong to the majority of people, but to some minority people-- have certain financial resources (even if this venture capital is completely lost), have a certain business literacy and social experience, have a certain ability and determination, and have a strong ability to learn and improve while trying. Such as the above four can be said to be the most basic cards for entrepreneurs, I have always thought that fooling those who do not have the above conditions (such as college students who have just graduated and have no money, only rely on romantic vision to fantasize about a new way of life) to blindly join the business is definitely ulterior motives and bad intentions.

For example, I don't know if you agree with the above three points. Is the success rate of coffee shop entrepreneurship really low? Why? We might as well look at this issue rationally. From the perspective of Platinum Coffee College, our point of view is as follows.

First, if the establishment of a coffee shop from scratch is regarded as entrepreneurship, compared with entrepreneurial behavior in other industries, the success rate of coffee shop entrepreneurship is not low, on the contrary, it is relatively high and very high. For small and medium-sized independent coffee shop start-up projects with less than 1 million investment, the lower the rent cost and the relative scarcity of attractive places such as cafes, the higher the probability of success in setting up cafes.

Second, even in the first-tier cities with the greatest rent pressure, fierce competition and the most difficult survival of cafes, such as Beijing and Shanghai, successful start-up, profitable and fast-growing coffee shop brands and coffee shop projects can be found everywhere since 2011. It's just that winners often concentrate on making money and enjoy their mellow life, so they don't have time and it's impossible to share their real business secrets online. It can be said that in today's Chinese Internet world, there are few practical information about the establishment and operation of cafes. To be fair, winners have paid tuition fees and, to some extent, paid the price of blood and tears, and they have to spend money on practical information. If you want to read a few articles on the Internet to guide you to open a store, you may die miserably.

Third, the coffee shop start-up project is welcomed by many white-collar workers, who are strong people on the Internet, and the word-of-mouth communication effect is huge. And since it is impossible for those winners who strive for money to share practical information for free, the Internet is naturally full of complaints from losers, or hearsay and misinformation, and the information shows a serious one-sided tendency and obvious distortion. It's shocking and shuddering.

Fourth, when we talked about the three major prerequisites for consensus, we repeatedly mentioned that cafes need entrepreneurs to show talent, courage and perseverance to operate rationally. I am afraid this process does not take romance as the core. Let's not mention that the outstanding people in the catering industry, such as Huang Taiji pancakes and carved sirloin, are talented marketing experts who work hard day and night. Those who can make cafes unboiled and full of customers are all shrewd businessmen. Emotional jokes such as "I drink coffee by the window on a sunny afternoon" are not all of the cafe, or even very small fragments of them. However, it has attracted a large number of professional players, simple students, artists, writers, philosophers, world avoiders, autistic people and other blind devotion, and even blindly confident that they do not study, investigate, or analyze before investing. As a result, a coffee shop belonging to the catering industry is treated as an art gallery, a laboratory, a network of people, a literary salon, a florist, a private living room, a pet shop, etc., and even from the first day of trial business to the day when it suddenly closed, I haven't really run it for a day. It can be said that the life is vigorous, the death is a dead end. There are really many such shops, especially in the first-tier cities with the greatest intensity of competition. These shops deserve to die without suspense and deserve to die.