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Permalink Reply by Spencer on June 28, 2008 at 1:28pm

Running your own coffee shop requires expertise in many different functional areas: food production and food safety, accounting, management, human resources, purchasing, customer service, maintenance, secutiry, banking/finance, etc....

We would like to believe that one can be succesful with passion, enthusiasm, creativity, and a dream of success. Unfortunatly this is not the case.

Take your time and learn as much as you can about retail operations, foodservice, finance, etc...

Gain knwoledge via training courses, like ABC's or others, attend trade shows, and from working, working, and working. these are great opportunitiies to speed learn from others careers. However only you can detrmine the best learnings for you, what you customers will like, what will work in your market, and how you wish to operate your shop.

Short answer: learn as much as you can to help insure success

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Permalink Reply by Summer on June 28, 2008 at 9:17pm

Obtaining a business degree will benefit you quite a lot. Having a degree in business shows that you are not only interested in running a business but that you have a background and knowledge base for how to keep track of day to day operations. It's a long three years, but it will be well worth the investment, and it will also provide a back up, in the unfortunate (and hopefully very unlikely) event that the business does not take off.

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