Café owners: 3 problems when growing your café business

Owning your own café is exciting. However, running a successful café business and reaping all the gains from it, is tough. You work for close to 80 hours a week, and that’s for pretty much the entire year. (Oh to be a kid again enjoying those school holidays.)

And owning two or three can be even tougher. Not only do you have different people running each one, but chances are they all have different approaches, dreams and aspirations.

So it’s no wonder a lot of café owners have trouble growing their café businesses and running them to the best of their abilities.

We’ve worked with a lot of café owners over the years. More often than not they’re looking for clarity—someone to confide in, and advise them about what they should be doing next. And in that time we’ve noticed three problems stopping a lot of them from taking their café business to the next level.

What stops owners from growing their café business?

1. Working in the business rather than on.

You know how it is. You spend so much time looking after the day-to-day stuff—ordering supplies, rostering staff, doing the books, etc.—that you don’t have any time to work on any strategy, develop partnerships, or develop the product.

Which is a shame, because it’s exactly the kind of thing that could take your café business to the next level.

Start talking to each other, and see what systems you could automate to free up your time. (Here’s a recent blog post we wrote about automation.)

2. Not having the best exit strategy for your business.

One of the most common ways café owners reap the rewards for all their hard work is to have an exit strategy. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t have one that works in their best interest (if they have one at all).

And why not? Because their accountant/advisor has never talked to them about it.

Talk to your accountant or advisor as soon as possible, and find out how to set up and structure your café business to get the best outcome when you decide to sell it. And then start acting on their advice immediately.

3. Not feeling you can maximise your profits.

This is a common feeling among café owners, and you may have similar thoughts. But the good news is that creating the right business structure for your preferred exit strategy can also help you minimise your tax and maximise your profits straight away.

Minimising tax starts with having the most effective business structure in place. However, to maximise profit you’re going to need to do a full review of your budgets and operations.

Need help growing your café business?

In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring the mistakes that lead to café owners having these problems in the first place.

But in the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns about growing your café business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here at Equus Partners.