Top Tips For Opening Your Dream Cafe

Running a cafe is a dream job for many, offering the chance to turn your passion into a viable and profitable business, meet new people and share your culinary delights with your patrons. However, making a cafe successful can be pretty demanding due to the immense amount of competition and the amount of money that needs to be spent on equipment, facilities, furnishings and personnel before you start seeing a return. It is said that 60% of cafes close within the first 12 months. Any Kent-based cafe will have some tough competition against the top rated cafes.

There are some vital things you need to do to maximize your chances of success, and there are many café checklist for success online that can help you to ensure that you don’t forget anything critical. Our top tips are designed to make you stand out from the crowd and turn your customers into regulars.

Menu

To set yourself apart from the competition, your menu needs to be better than theirs. Yes, everyone loves a coffee and a brownie, but if you’re going to poach customers to your patch, they need something a bit special to entice them away.

This may be spectacular new flavors, innovative new dishes, or embracing an ethos that people can buy into, such as only serving seasonal or locally produced dishes, reducing food miles and supporting local producers.

Whatever way you go with the menu, it needs to be something that you genuinely care about and believe in. You will need to promote it heavily and the general public will notice if you are only paying lip service, so ensure that you are pushing your passion. Once you recruit staff, you will also need to make sure that they share your vision and are able demonstrate their knowledge to customers.

Online Presence

Recent research has highlighted that nearly half the American public use social media to decide where to eat out, so making sure that you have an active online presence that is representative of your business ethos and showcases your menu in the best possible light is essential for any cafe.

It is no longer enough to just have a Google listing or a static website – modern consumers like to engage with a business, to share in their successes, to see their processes and to feel a part of the business. They need to buy into the ethos of the cafe, to know the people behind the business and to be entertained.

Social media offers a great opportunity to build real digital presence, showcasing new products and the best of your produce in engaging reels or subtle advertisements. You can show some behind-the-scenes footage, collate interviews with your team and customers, engage with the public on branding and promote your loyalty programs.

Hashtags can drive engagement by up to 50%, so clever use of them can really increase your reach and drive audience participation, particularly where you tag popular trends such as Dalgona coffee. Don’t forget the importance of responding to customer comments and feedback on social media – they not only make that person feel good but will engage the algorithms within the systems to make your posts go further.

Technology

As with social media, showing the public what you have to offer is a great way of enticing them into your cafe. Digital signage is a powerful tool which should be exploited by businesses that are located in high footfall areas – they can distract customers from their task of getting from A-B by appealing to their taste buds and encouraging them in. They will also make your business stand out as modern and on-trend, encouraging new customers to come and see what you stand for.

Summary

Yes, getting your financials right and remembering to file your tax returns is essential to running any business, but to truly make your cafe a success, you need to set yourself apart from the competition. Ensuring that you are offering a stunning and high-quality menu, served by staff who have a passion for delivering your vision, and that you are promoting yourself in the best possible way using modern tools and techniques will certainly make you stand out from the crowd, and attract the right sort of attention.