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Permalink Reply by Bryan Wray on October 20, 2010 at 4:34am

This question is kind of impossible to answer with the details you have given.

Hours? Projected volume? Do you plan to have table service or just counter service? Is everything going to be done by the cup or are you going to use airpots for large batch brewing?

Start with the very general rule of thumb that you'll need one barista for register and one for machine for each hour that you are open, plus one barista 30 minutes before open and one barista 30-60 minutes after close.

If you are brewing by the cup and expect to have a semi-regular customer flow you'll want a barista for that as well, so now you have 3 on during busy hours.

If you plan to have table service you'll want 2 waiters/waitresses that rotate between taking orders, busing tables and doing dishes.

Now you're up to 5 during busy hours.

HTH
-bry

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Permalink Reply by Jay Caragay on October 20, 2010 at 6:03am

Twenty covers? For the entire day? Perhaps our terminology is not in agreement, but when you say "20 covers" it means 20 people the entire service period. Maybe 20 seats? 20 tables?

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Wray on October 20, 2010 at 12:44pm

Jay Caragay said:

Twenty covers? For the entire day? Perhaps our terminology is not in agreement, but when you say "20 covers" it means 20 people the entire service period. Maybe 20 seats? 20 tables?

Jay, I literally googled the different definitions of covers and one of them refers to tables, so I'm guessing that's what the OP is referring to.

"A table setting for one person: Covers were laid for ten."

But yeah, I did the same thing, lol.

-bry

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Permalink Reply by Dav on October 20, 2010 at 2:11pm

Sorry ladies and gents. What I meant was that we have 20 seats in the coffee shop. So 10 tables. Hopefully they be "turned over" regularly.

Cheers,

Dav (from England) :-)

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Cash on October 20, 2010 at 8:42pm

This is hard to answer in terms of a raw number so I would sit down and play with numbers. What is the traffic flow of your market and the similar places around you? More than likely you're not going to be as busy as them in the beginning unless you're great at marketing, which would be fantastic! The question you may really want to ask is how much do you expect to make a day? and break it down by hours or shifts... Typically you want your labor costs to be around the 30% range and your costs of goods + labor to not go over 65%. Your labor costs will be much higher in the beginning but I think by month 6 you'll have everything figured out.

So be realistic about this and try to figure out your customer and revenue flow and get your labor cost to 30% revenue....for example say you predict 25 customers between 9-10am and the average transaction is $4, that's $100 of revenue that hour. 30% of that is $30 and if you divide that out you could have 3 employees at $10/hr or 4 at $7.5 (I bet you would get more out of the 3 at $10).

To me this can be the fun part of the coffee business...go sit and take notes of traffic flow at other places; how many people do they see from 7-8am, at 12-1, 5-6pm. Pick an hour each day and watch the customer flow and make a spreadsheet. Yeah it's stalking kinda but its stuff you want to know and can be very helpful moving forward.

goodluck.

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Permalink Reply by Brady on October 21, 2010 at 5:11am

Bryan Wray said:

This question is kind of impossible to answer with the details you have given.

Hours? Projected volume? Do you plan to have table service or just counter service? Is everything going to be done by the cup or are you going to use airpots for large batch brewing?

Start with the very general rule of thumb that you'll need one barista for register and one for machine for each hour that you are open, plus one barista 30 minutes before open and one barista 30-60 minutes after close.

If you are brewing by the cup and expect to have a semi-regular customer flow you'll want a barista for that as well, so now you have 3 on during busy hours.

If you plan to have table service you'll want 2 waiters/waitresses that rotate between taking orders, busing tables and doing dishes.

Now you're up to 5 during busy hours.

HTH
-bry

This captures it pretty well for me. I'd add only two things.

If you have a prep-intensive food program (make-to-order sandwiches, etc) you ought to plan a body to cover that during peak times. You might be able to float someone to cover though.

In times of low traffic (no more than one group at a time) you might get away with running just a single barista - that's the standard approach for afternoons in my area. Proceed that way with caution, though, because you will considerably increase wait time for the second group of customers to come in the door.

Hope this helps you out.

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Permalink Reply by John P on October 21, 2010 at 6:58am

Store design, staff ability, and staff efficiency all come into play. It also depends if you are creating a laid back atmosphere or something hectic.

Two is the minimum... but I would say 4 (or 5 depending on atmosphere) until you get the hang of it. In the beginning, it's better to have too many than not enough. Depending on your previous experience and your ability to have all staff proficient in every aspect, you can operate well with a small staff.

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Permalink Reply by Jared Rutledge on October 21, 2010 at 8:43am

we have one person all the time. in the last couple weeks i think i've had two people walk out cause of the wait? and that was only because a group of 4-5 had just walked in and they immediately walked in behind the group, without waiting to see how fast it would move. i float on saturday mornings sometimes, cause that's when it's busiest. other than that, it's handleable - i can handle about $50 worth of business per hour myself, and we need $24 an hour to break even.

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Permalink Reply by Benza Lance on October 21, 2010 at 11:11am

I'm simply going to echo the comments made by Jared. Generally, at Temple we try to keep it around $50-60 an hour for one person. This might seem like a lot, but we spend a generous amount of time training, specifically for clean/efficiency, and it pays off. For every $50 an hour, you add a person. For example, on the weekends at the 2nd cafe, we run 3 (soon to be 4) baristas, were we average about $200-250 per hour. This is at the point where we're adding an extra person this next weekend.
With all that being said, I would definitely run with no less than two baristas at a time. Not only does this play it safe, but it also allows some flexibility for when sometime out-of-the-ordinary occurs, like injuries on the job, for example. Like Andrew said above, you can do the math and figure it out more efficiently when you're actually open... just remember to allot some $$ for those payroll taxes.

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Permalink Reply by Dav on October 21, 2010 at 12:32pm

Folks,

Thanks very much for the very concise answers. Its very useful to have a formula to play around with. By the way this "average transaction is $4". What does that get you over there in the States. A coffee and a muffin?

I'll be bombarding this site with more questions over the next few weeks. Some trivial, some not so trivial.

Cheers

Dav

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Wray on October 21, 2010 at 1:17pm

Dav said:

Folks,

Thanks very much for the very concise answers. Its very useful to have a formula to play around with. By the way this "average transaction is $4". What does that get you over there in the States. A coffee and a muffin?

I'll be bombarding this site with more questions over the next few weeks. Some trivial, some not so trivial.

Cheers

Dav

Depends on where you are and what you're being served. Depending on the coffee, there are times when I wouldn't find it strange to pay $4 for a double shot or an 8oz brewed coffee.

At the same time, I would say $4 for a "medium" latte is about average, or a small coffee and a muffin... that's about right I guess.

-bry

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Permalink Reply by Marek on October 21, 2010 at 6:57pm

Many good comments here. In our case, we are two per shift. Our day being 15 hours... just so happens shift change is around lunch time (busiest time of the day) so we overlap.

We go from 2 to 3...from 3 to 4... then down to 4, then down to 2... works perfectly for us.

Example... Shift ONE 6:30 to 2:00PM = 7.5 hrs.. shift TWO 1:00 PM to 9 PM = 8 hours... but from 1-2 I have four people on.

Handy little setup for us... because I have four shops, we also have a runner for deliveries and he is on call to any shop all day for unplanned super busy spikes...

Marek
Cafe del Sol
Cayman Islands

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