A green but intrepid client recently asked of her fledgling business: "so when is the right time to hire new employees"?
Drawing upon life at Kaladi Coffee here, the right answer is always "several weeks before you NEED to hire new employees".
There is a tongue-in-cheek dualism to that answer. On one level, the most obvious level, businesses need to hire in advance of need because there is a training and inculturation period. Once you are in the weeds, having a newbie on board doesn't really help...they're dead weight until they're trained and up to speed.
But there's another reason to hire ahead. In the coffee business, quality is everything. And after quality, speed is everything. (And after that, I guess, hot liquid in a paper cup is everything...and so forth...) A customer who comes in for the first time and has to wait for six minutes in line is unlikely to return. So if your business is growing, and two people working in tandem can cover the bar MOST of the time, well...those new potential customers who arrive when you're at your slowest?
They never come back.
It is a conundrum: either you hire too soon and you waste labor dollars, or you hire too late and you hose your growth.
I'm decidedly in favor of hiring ahead of time and just eating poo on labor for a while. If you've hit a bare-bones level of critical mass, you go back to eating Ramen noodles for another month. My reasoning, as best expressed in vaguely evolutionary terminology, is that nature hates a vacuum. Traditional wisdom dictates "when the market demands, business will accommodate". I believe the contrary: by the time the market demands, it is too late. Being reactive isn't good enough. Be proactive and create capacity.
So long as you can do it without building a lever that works against you, I believe that it is almost always best to create excess capacity in your business. Staff a bar that makes better drinks faster. Build a roasting facility that can do 150% of your expected terminal volume with grace. Overtrain your employees...to the point that they could conceivably strike out on their own. Enable your business to do more big, beautiful, fun and fulfilling things than it has to do.
Nature hates a vacuum: if your business creates a great inviting space, the Universe will fill it with customers who love you.
Hiring in advance is a levelheaded action in coffee business. The assurance of success is what attracts people to venture into it. Who doesn’t love coffee? And with that, every shop owner should always assume that new customers will arrive. New hires, I call them ‘the reserves,’ are important, knowing that good customer service in here is mostly based on speed.
ReplyDelete-- Adina Mauch