Open a coffee shop: the ideal is sexy, the reality is very skinny

Although I was only one of the owners of Dayin Cafe, this identity at least brought me from an outsider drinking coffee to a small circle of cafes. From winter to spring, my favorite thing about this industry, from love to love, is to "pretend" as a guest there and stay quietly for a day.

At my age, a cafe owner is definitely not a childhood ideal. In the era of Root Red Miao Zheng, teachers, PLA and scientists should be the professions with the highest click rate and the highest exposure rate in propositional essays. I really want to open a coffee shop after I have been in someone else's coffee shop for four or five years. For professional reasons, the code word makes a living. The coffee shop has become my second office and stays for at least four or five hours a day.

In other words, everyone who loves writing, reading, traveling, and even moaning without illness has a dream of "opening a coffee shop of his own". However, there are not many cafes that can really "open up." there are even fewer cafes that can "survive", so "coffee is risky, so you need to be careful when entering the market." This is my experience and advice after the cafe has been operating steadily for more than a year.

Many years ago, as a senior "drinker", I summarized the reasons why guests fell in love with the cafe into three points: 1, the environment is very good, the drink is delicious, the boss or the boss's wife looks very beautiful.

In fact, the decision to open a coffee shop to find a partner, the location is to go to these three. Therefore, the friend who has opened a coffee shop for 10 years has naturally become the first choice. His professional and "handsome", let me have the courage to open a shop to the end.

Our location is too risky, and in order to consider the operation and let the cafe "live well", rent has become the main factor determining success or failure, so we chose a storefront that was in a messy street and formerly a waste collection station. as the beginning of our dream. Several close friends accompanied us to "step on the spot", all doubting: "this hellhole, let's see how you guys turn decay into magic." An indoor cafe of more than 100 square meters will pick up the place in August and open in January the following year, which should refresh the decoration time of many small shops in Guiyang City, right? The reasons are really ups and downs, and I can't repeat them. I often sum up in a nutshell: "Kaida Yin, I have done all the things that I have not asked for in the past 30 years and have never done in my life."

Our ideal before opening the shop: make a lounge, seats all use sofa, soft lean, do not turn over the stage, just want comfort.

Here comes the problem: guests like it and can sit, but the overturning rate is really low. over the past year, our sofas need to be replaced one after another because of leaking brick roofs and insufficient care. This is a very real cost problem. Our prediction before opening the store: on the premise of adhering to the ideal and quality, strive to recover the cost within three years. In fact: under the premise of serious management, we have been extending the payback period.

Our vision before opening the store: bring a replicable team to let the staff grow with our store. No matter what the business situation is, the security we can give our employees and their income will never be discounted.

The truth is: after a year, dozens of children work here, and we get a store manager. Employees leave for a variety of reasons, the most interesting one is: "Sister Wang, I want to find an administrative class, the salary can be low, better than the waiter …"... "

Although he thinks he is doing a very "literary" business, there is a huge contradiction between the "sexy" ideal and the "bony" reality on the one hand, and it is difficult to reconcile them. More than a year later, on the day the cafe was one year old, several of our shareholders took a group photo at the door again, holding the word in everyone's hand on the opening day, with the name of the child, the hope that the cafe would be prosperous, and the hope for the coming year. After a year of painstaking management, I have mixed feelings.

The ideal still exists, but the reality is more real. In fact, this is more like a few like-minded friends, a few small business businessmen, the annual life "summary", different from the previous grand narrative and ready to move the "coffee dream", really landed, considering the daily revenue, the recruitment of waiters, guest service, summer heat dissipation and winter heating, water and electricity bills. The room is full of romance, romantic and moonlit nights have gone to one side, in fact, we just opened an ordinary cafe, in the back street, but the guests like it, this is the sweetest thing of the year.

After staying in our own cafe for a long time, we became familiar, and regular customers liked to come over and said amicably, "Boss, your shop is comfortable, open another one, and the place is easy to find." in fact, we all want to stick to our ideals to the end, so, guests, allow us time, and when we recover, we have the strength, and the team will be light. I believe we will win if we persist.

All right, no complaints, no encouragement. Insert an advertisement: "Dayin, the beauty of the four seasons." If this advertisement is to be given a time limit, I hope it will be at least ten years. When I'm old and my eyebrows droop, I still have dreams, and we have cafes.

The unprofitable catering industry (Ying Teng)

Throughout all the entrepreneurial projects, only catering will never be out of date, as if someone will always come to eat and watch the boom, it is an excellent entrepreneurial project. Do you make money by eating and drinking? On the one hand, people in the industry complain about "the boss who didn't work hard when he was young", complaining that the cost of the catering industry is high and making less money, while there are still so many laymen complaining that food and beverage profits can reach 50%, and frantically looking for projects to open restaurants.

The most puzzling and typical case is that last year, more than 300 Chongqing hot pot stores opened in Guiyang, and there are still no less than 5 Chongqing hot pot decoration ready to open. However, the market is so big, Guiyang people's love of Chongqing hot pot is not inseparable to the point, I am left and right do not understand, what do these investors think?

When I was a child, my teacher asked me, what is your dream? At that time, the smell of fried potato came from the school snack bar, so I swallowed and said, I want to open a fried potato shop. The class roared with laughter. So far, I have been in the process of implementing this project. The potato shop I imagined is like this, it doesn't matter whether you make money or not, but it must be your favorite style, take care of and design it bit by bit, and your taste must be your favorite. The reason for opening a restaurant is very simple. I can eat it in the right name and call it a trial dish. Customers like it, which is the recognition of themselves on the other hand.

However, I was very happy in my dream and woke up in bed. After I wrote an ambitious plan for the project to be stationed in the mall, and confidently introduced my project to the person in charge of the investment department, the person in charge of the investment department silently took out a calculator, clattered down a pile of numbers, and then began to analyze the cost and profit of the project. mall people flow, mall business hours, the amount of daily sales, and then put aside the rent and labor …... Don't ask me what happened in the end. I use naked reality to verify that it is impossible not to make money by eating and dreaming.

I couldn't start my own business, so I learned to watch others start their own business. As a result, I learned how to tell whether a new restaurant is successful or not, that is, whether it can run for three months. If the business of the store is not good after three months, but it is still open, then there are four most likely reasons:

1, the shop carries his dream 2, there are other main (deputy) industry support 3, open to play, anyway, the facade is their own 4, waiting for land acquisition, waiting for demolition 5, do not explain, money laundering, you know

People who don't like coffee (Dragon Whirlpool)

Coffee, known as one of the three largest drinks in the world, is an out-and-out foreign-style drink. The first time I knew about coffee was Nestl é, which I saw at my grandfather's house when I was seven or eight years old. I needed to match it with companion powder and use square sugar very formally. Grandpa is a fashionable person and has a high acceptance of Western-style things, but the young me did not like this bitter drink only from the taste experience.

When I was in junior high school, canned coffee became more and more popular among my classmates. If anyone hadn't drunk it, it would be a little old-fashioned. In the year of the senior high school entrance examination, I almost had a bottle of canned coffee every day, not because I liked it, nor did I follow the fashion. I just heard that coffee relieves fatigue, which is very helpful for junior high school students who go to bed late and get up early every day. It's just that every time I drink it, I pour it down like a traditional Chinese medicine.

After going abroad, I know a new term, STARBUCKS, this popular coffee brand in the world has also swept the land of China. Although I never understood the charm of this bitter liquid, the paper cups with green soles and crowned girls everywhere on the road kept telling me that I was the weirdo. Young people have a fondness for coffee, spending a lot of money, holding cups of coffee, seems to be in action to prove that the post-80s and post-90s can absolutely eat "bitterness".

For those who love coffee, drinking coffee is a kind of pleasure in bitterness, while for those who do not like coffee, drinking coffee is miserable. Coffee lovers drink when they get up early, when they are tired, when they eat, when they are in adversity, and when they are smooth sailing. There are many reasons to drink coffee, perhaps at first it was just to inject a stimulant into the spirit, but now coffee also acts as a symbol of tasteful life. As for people like me who don't like coffee, there's only one reason-we're self-willed, we just don't drink it. "Don't follow the crowd" is the most common word used by coffee lovers represented by me to reject this drink. For things that people love to pursue, we weirdos can always quickly find alternatives to keep their own maverick. Refusing coffee is also a kind of "processing" life. Although coffee has many functions, if it is not through the processing of coffee beans, many functions of coffee may be difficult to achieve. People who do not like coffee like making tea and fruit juices. Love a natural and light way of life. Getting spiritual pleasure briefly after too much processing sometimes hurts the meaning of life itself, which may also represent the life philosophy of people who do not like coffee.