Train your baristas 

Why Coffee Shop Owners Should Train Their Baristas

Starting a coffee shop is a dream for many aspiring coffee shop owners. Many working for someone else may often daydream about starting their own business. Certainly, being a coffee shop owner comes with a lot of perks that make it appealing.

As your own business owner, you can:

• Be your own boss
• Do what you are really passionate about
• Have a flexible schedule
• Enjoy the freedom of decision-making.
• Gain more opportunities to grow
• Generate high profits

 

You may decide to open your coffee shop or open a coffee truck business. Investing in your coffee shop business is a serious endeavor that takes a lot of effort, money, and time. However, if you are really dedicated, the personal and professional benefits of being a coffee shop owner can be advantageous.

Many aspiring coffee shop owners come with a barista background. If you have been a barista before, you should know how important it is to consistently brew awesome coffee and provide great customer service every single time.

If you haven’t worked as a barista before, you probably know that customer service is a cornerstone of any business success. The only way to maintain decent coffee quality and customer service is to get your baristas on the same page. This is through barista training, barista workshops, and coffee tastings. Training your baristas is one of the fundamentals of opening a coffee shop.

It would be best if you had reliable and well-trained baristas on your staff. In fact, training your baristas is one of the best things you can do to be a better coffee shop manager.

Train your baristas

How To Start A Coffee Business With Awesome Baristas

Your baristas are not simply a workforce. They are the heart and soul of your coffee shop. They convey your coffee shop vision and ideals to your customers, promote certain products and loyalty programs, and educate people about espresso drinks, coffee roasting, and coffee flavors. Your baristas are the ambassadors of your coffee shop business concept, and you should invest in their training. The feeling of being valued and appreciated will motivate your baristas to try harder and work better. This will also reduce baristas turnover, which can be very common for many coffee businesses.

We strongly advise you to start looking for potential baristas as soon as possible at the beginning of your coffee shop business planning. This way, you will have the time to nurture and cultivate your baristas and other employees. To do so, you need to understand what you are looking for in a barista. Therefore, you will need to ask the right questions during a barista job interview and know your baristas' responsibilities. You should also be ready to fire baristas that don’t meet your expectations and requirements.

Choosing Personality Over Experience

As a coffee shop owner, you want your baristas to be reliable, honest, and trustworthy. You will be looking for someone friendly and open-minded to talk and serve a variety of customers. These are the qualities that you can’t necessarily teach them.

Therefore, the basic barista traits you should be looking for:

• Enthusiasm about coffee
• Friendly and polite personality
• Reliability
• Responsibility
• Cleanliness
• A team-player
• Flexibility to work in various environments

Any coffee experience in the food industry should be an advantage; however, it’s not necessary. Skills like pulling a great coffee shot or steam milk can be easily taught, while a personality is something you can’t change.  

Your baristas should be ready to perform the following basic duties:

• Utilize an espresso machine
• Prepare coffee and other drinks and snacks
• Dress appropriately and maintain perfect hygiene
• Perform opening and closing duties
• Sales monitoring and inventory management
• Positively engage with coworkers and customers

Where to look for great baristas?

The best place to look for awesome baristas is to attend coffee tastings and local barista throw-downs. These are the events where coffee lovers hang out and talk about coffee. Some of the visitors are already employed, and others are currently looking for a job. Even if you don’t find any potential baristas there, you can be sure that they can recommend you someone who would be interested in barista employment.

Talk to your coffee roasters, who are often in touch with local baristas. They can often suggest some good people to interview.

Utilize your coffee shop website and social media to tell the world that you are looking for baristas. The chances are that you will receive many comments and private messages from potential baristas.

You can always post a barista job advertisement on Craigslist. However, you might uselessly spend a lot of time on random people who are not viewing this job seriously.

Why You Should Train Your Baristas

Opening a coffee shop requires you to multitask. Besides planning your coffee shop budget, acquiring coffee equipment, and signing a coffee shop lease, you should be looking for new baristas and training them to be ready for your coffee shop's grand opening. Your coffee shop's success and profits will greatly depend not only on your quality coffee beans and modern espresso machine but also on your baristas, who cultivate returning customers, boost sales, and create a positive and friendly atmosphere.

Here are a few reasons why training your baristas is important:

Better Tasting Coffee

Since the main product you serve is coffee, your baristas should be extremely effective with operating an espresso machine, dosing coffee, steaming milk, and building drinks with all proportions and recipes in mind. There are so many aspects that a barista should consider (water temperature, coffee age, grind size, espresso flow time, etc.) that all affect the taste of a coffee drink.

Revising espresso extraction fundamentals from time to time will be important to keep your baristas skills sharp. Learning new coffee tricks from coffee educators or coffee roasters will help your baristas to dial in coffee perfectly every single time.

Eliminate Waste

This is an aspect that only a few coffee shop owners consider. If a barista doesn’t know how to dial in coffee, it may lead to excessive waste, bad drinks, and customer requests to remake drinks. This will result in spending twice as much coffee grounds, milk, paper cups, syrups.

Steaming too much milk or leaving milk out of the fridge will lead to throwing this milk away. That’s why it’s important to handle milk right and steam only as much milk as you need for a drink or two.

Moreover, the quality and efficiency of your service will be affected by your coffee bar layout. If it’s planned right, you can expect fewer spills, fewer broken utensils, and fewer potential barista injuries.

Taking Customers' Orders

Taking customer orders correctly and utilizing your coffee shop's POS system will help ensure quick service, fewer mistakes, happy customers, as well as correct revenue coming in. Train your baristas in working with your coffee shop POS system.

Higher Morale (Less Turnover)

Your baristas are a part of your team. And as a leader, you want your teamwork to run smoothly, have less turnover, and need to educate new people repeatedly. When baristas feel empowered, they are happier and more productive.

How can you show your baristas that you appreciate their work and value their labor?

• Listening to their problems and discussing possible solutions.
• Offering bonuses for high sales numbers
• Announcing a seasonal drink contest
• Allowing them to be creative and design a menu board
• Providing regular online and offline barista training

 

Better Customer Service  

Any customer can tell the difference between a trained, happy barista and an apathetic or ignorant one. They will come back to the barista who is genuinely engaged and has a drive. Besides coffee-making skills, your barista training should always focus on communicating with your customers at every touchpoint, from the first look and welcoming words to offering desserts and serving coffee.

Quality coffee, great customer service, and excellent barista skills are important to increasing your coffee shop profits and reaching your break-even point faster than you expected. If you're interested in starting a drive-thru coffee business or setting up a coffee truck, you'll benefit from barista training.

Strengthen Your Branding

Your baristas are the first impression a customer makes when entering your coffee shop. With all the ideas, loyally programs, discounts, special offers, charity auctions, etc., that you have, you should be able to communicate with your customers through your baristas. Of course, you can put posters around and utilize social media, but it is not as effective and real communication.

Your baristas must share the values of your coffee shop. That’s why it’s useful to recite your ideas and values over and over again and ask your baristas’ opinions. All new offers should be instantly communicated to your employees at barista meetings. This will ensure consistency and streamline your coffee shop marketing efforts.

Train your baristas

 

Barista Training Academy

Brought to you by Barista Training Academy, “The Beginning Barista” Your Ultimate Prep Guide to Getting Your First Job as a Barista.” It is an ultimate resource that is available online. It is affordable for anybody who is looking to start a career in the coffee industry. For more information, visit our blog.