Valuable Tips On Starting An Independent Café

Posted on Jul 26 2016 - 8:25am by Editorial Staff

Cafe

Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in every country on earth, and as a result the café business is massive. Right now, countless people are looking around for somewhere to grab their favourite hot drink and catch up with friends. If you’re thinking of starting your own café, it’s certainly not the worst business model you could have settled on! Here’s some valuable advice for pursuing your plan.

Seen as you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance that you already have some experience in the café business. If this isn’t the case though, I strongly recommend you gain some. A lot of people falsely believe that café work is easy. If you start yours with this attitude, then you’ll quickly hit a wall. Working in a café, let alone managing one, is very demanding. It’s important that you get a taste for this before you jump headlong into your own business venture. Furthermore, working in a café will give you some valuable insights into how these operations work, and why customers choose one name over another. At the very least, you could start frequenting a successful café and study how it’s all run.

The next big tip I can offer is to focus on your identity. It’s true that everyone loves coffee, but that doesn’t mean you can slack off on the marketing. Before you start thinking about suppliers, or where to buy cafe blinds, you need to look for ways you can make your café stand out from its competitors. I hate to break it to you, but you can’t take on any of the big high-street coffee shops. All the most well-known chains have their niche pretty well covered, and you probably don’t have the capital to make your products as cheap as theirs. Because of this, it’s essential to give your café a distinct identity that your customers will appreciate and remember. My advice is to go for a more rustic, homely interior, rather than the stark, sterile mien of a chain café.

Finally, try your best to look for a prime location. I’m sure it’s pretty rare that you go out of your way just to go to a particular café. The large majority of people grab coffees to go when they’re on their way somewhere else. Clearly, it’s essential to set up your premises in a location that gets a large concentration of foot traffic. As you can imagine, these kinds of properties are significantly more expensive than others. The next best thing is to found your café somewhere fairly rural with very little competitors. As the high-street becomes more and more saturated with chains, many consumers are taking trips to more rural areas simply to find independent businesses. By and large though, it’s always best to set up next to Starbucks, Nero, and other big brands.

I hope that this advice brings you a little closer to realising your dream and setting up your independent café. Managing a small business is tough work, but it’s certainly not impossible!

Image: Pixabay

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Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.