From "why" to grand opening, in the order I'd actually do it. By someone who is still behind the counter. Not a consultant, not a guru.
For years I answered one person at a time. For a while I did consulting. I don't have the time anymore. I have four stores, a family, and a phone that doesn't stop.
So I sat down and filmed the whole thing once. Nineteen lessons, start to finish, the same way I'd walk a friend through it. I've given this exact material away to friends and family. This is the same thing, in one place, for the next person who asks.
I'm not a coffee consultant. I'm a coffee shop owner who happens to have written down what he knows.
These are mine. The numbers are real.
On my first location I took the lower bid from a great home builder. The project ran twice as long and twice the quoted budget. Lesson 11 is how to never do that.
Miss five bag sales a day because the shelf isn't where people wait. At $15 a bag that's $28,000 a year, for the life of the lease. Layout is nearly impossible to fix after the walls go up.
100 customers at $8 is $800 a day. Get the ticket to $12 with the right food items and it's $1,200. Get it wrong and you've added a kitchen's worth of overhead for nothing.
If you've already started a project, come with your specific questions ready so we can make the most of the thirty minutes.
Get the course and a callDue to time constraints, I'm not currently offering full build-out walkthroughs. The course covers what I'd walk you through anyway.
It took over a hundred hours and thousands of dollars to put this together, and a lot more years than that to learn it. I've given it away to people I know. For everyone else, this is the price.
It's small next to what one mistake costs. The wrong contractor, the wrong espresso machine, the wrong lease, and you're out tens of thousands before you've sold a latte. If one thing in here saves you from one of those, it has paid for itself many times over.
This isn't my main business, and I'm not going to chase you. If it's useful to you, it's here. Either way, I hope your shop works.
I own and run Tru Bru Organic Coffee: four locations across Orange County, California and Henderson, Nevada, doing a little over five million dollars a year. I'd worked in a coffee shop before I opened one, which helped behind the bar and not at all with the business. That part I learned the expensive way.
I've been the barista, the baker, the plumber, the accountant, and for three years the manager, until I admitted I was bad at managing and hired someone better. That was the year revenue doubled.
I live in Tustin with my family. I still work in the stores.
Mostly, yes. The planning, menu, costing, budgeting, sourcing, hiring, and launch lessons apply to any format. The build-out and store design lessons are about a brick-and-mortar space, though the principles (work backward from the menu, hire builders who've done food service) carry over.
Lifetime. If I update or add lessons, you get those too.
Email within 14 days and I'll refund you. I'd rather you not have it than resent paying for it.
Not right now. The Course + Call tier gets you thirty minutes with me, and that's the most I can offer at the moment. The full build-out tier is listed so you know it exists; it's not available.
I've opened in California and Nevada, so the permit and entity details are U.S.-based. Everything else, the menu, the costing math, location, equipment, hiring, launch, works anywhere.
No. I've helped several people open shops who had never worked a day in coffee, and they did fine. The course assumes nothing. If you have worked in one, you'll move faster through the operational lessons and get more from the business ones.
The four questions that move the number, the four budget line items in the order you build them, real equipment ranges from my own shops, and the mistakes that cost the most. Five pages. No pitch inside it.