How Many Baristas Do You Need to Hire?

How Many Baristas Do You Need to Hire?  

How Many Baristas Do You Need to Hire?

Starting a coffee shop business will likely mean hiring staff, including baristas, cooks, perhaps a coffee roaster, baker, and others. 

Regardless of your coffee business concept, the baristas and staff you bring on board will be the cornerstone of your successful coffee business operation.

In other words, who you hire as a barista really does matter!

Hiring baristas means that your coffee shop will be able to scale up production to turn an even greater profit. Yet, on the other hand, hiring too many baristas may also mean hemorrhaging money and profits.

Therefore, finding the right balance of hiring and scheduling staff is always challenging for new and veteran coffee shop owners. This post will discuss how many baristas you may want to hire and where to find them.

How Many Baristas Do You Need To Hire?

While coffee businesses vary in their number of barista hires, you can find some commonalities among them. Below is a roughly estimated chart of how many baristas you may want to hire:

How many baristas you need to hire depends on your coffee shop concept, the size of your coffee shop business, the volume of sales, and your hours of operation. For example, if you are a high-volume small coffee shop that is open seven days a week, you might need to hire more baristas than a large coffee shop with a low sales volume.

Those concepts that are limited in space may have more limits on how many baristas can work simultaneously. For example, a maximum of one or two baristas may be able to fit in a mobile coffee truck or a drive-thru espresso stand.

Further Reading: How to Start a Coffee Shop (30 Steps)

Determining The Number of Baristas You Need

Hiring For Your Coffee Shop Type:

You'll likely enter two general scenarios when hiring your new coffee business staff.

• You are buying an existing coffee business
• You are starting a new coffee shop from scratch

The number of weekly staff hours can lead to severe costs and break your budget. Therefore, it's essential to examine or forecast your labor budget.

Let's examine both barista labor scenarios below:

Buying an existing coffee shop business:

If you buy an existing coffee shop, you may not find all the answers you are looking for regarding staffing, but at least you'll have an excellent place to start.

You will want to know how many baristas the current coffee shop has on staff. This would include full-time and part-time baristas and other staff members. An existing coffee shop should already have a long history of payroll numbers for you to review.

Your questions to the current owner may be:

• How many staff members do you have?
• How many staff hours do you pay out?
• What does your weekly payroll look like?
• What other wages, benefits, or insurance payments do you have?
• What are your hourly salary ranges?
• What does your weekly schedule look like?
• What are peak and slow hours?

Along with these questions, you will want a Profit & Loss Statement (commonly referred to as P&L). Your barista payroll constitutes a significant weekly expenditure. With this information, you'll see how the existing payroll impacts their profit margins.

Therefore, you want to ask the question – is the business making a profit? If the coffee shop is profitable, can it do better by either:

• Increasing staff hours
• Decreasing staff hours

I should note that it's not always about increasing or decreasing hours. Sometimes, it's about improving employee productivity. This includes morale, having a better tipping policy, training, and, ultimately, your hiring practices.

And yet increasing staff hours might improve your efficiency, customer experience, and quality. The hope is that this improves your coffee shop's profitability.

Increasing staff hours may be a temporary measure while you provide barista training or otherwise increase baristas' efficiency and morale (team buildings, coffee expos, roaster lectures, etc.).

On the other hand, decreasing your barista hours may also improve productivity. By removing poor-performing employees and only keeping positive and productive baristas, the overall morale behind the coffee bar may improve significantly. In addition, the reduction of a few unnecessary shifts per week may save you thousands of dollars over a year.

Further Reading: How to Hire The Best Baristas

Why Hire Baristas In The First Place?

Having a coffee shop business often requires multiple hands working simultaneously from ringing people up, prepping orders, or making coffee.

Baristas and your staff, in general, are needed for several reasons:

• You delegate them your primer task – serving coffee
• They make your coffee operation more efficient
• You can serve more customers
• You can offer a better customer experience

In essence, all of these should help make you more profitable. Therefore, you want to hire baristas who can contribute to these. Therefore, your barista interview questions should be geared to choosing the best possible candidate and making the most of each barista.

Hiring Baristas for Your New Coffee Shop

Hiring baristas for a new coffee shop may be naturally more challenging. After all, you don't know how busy your coffee shop will be, and you may not completely understand what your staff needs will entail.

Nevertheless, there may be essential factors to consider when estimating how many baristas you need to hire.

If you are starting a coffee shop from scratch, consider the following when deciding on how many baristas to hire:

Examine your concept as a starting point

• Brick-and-mortar coffee shop
• café bookstore
• coffee shop bakery
• mobile coffee truck
• drive-thru espresso stand

Any of these coffee shop concepts will have naturally different staffing needs. For these concepts to work properly and effectively, you may need one, two, or five baristas or staff members or more per day. For example, if you set up a two-sided drive-thru coffee stand, you may need two baristas during the morning rush hour. 

So, consider your concept as a “starting point” in determining how many baristas you'll need to hire.

Your Personal Availability

When starting your coffee shop, will you be among the lead baristas? First, you must contemplate whether you will be available every day, several days out of the week, or playing backup to sick or no-show employees.

Examine your Coffee Shop Menu

Whatever is on your coffee shop menu board will also play a significant role in how many employees you need.

Naturally, the more extensive and complicated the menu, the more baristas and maybe cooks you will need to hire. Additionally, roasting your own coffee beans will require extra equipment, space, time, and employee labor but may make up considerable savings over time.

Examine your Location & Space

Sometimes the physical space and location nearly dictate how many employees we can have. So, it's an important consideration to make when hiring and scheduling your barista shifts. You want to use the existing space as effectively and safely as possible. You don't want your employees to run into each other every time they make coffee. Your workflow should be smooth and fast. When looking for the perfect coffee shop location that meets your essential business needs, keep this in mind.

How Many Baristas Do You Need to Hire?

Estimated Sales

Being able to forecast your coffee shop sales will play an essential role in determining how many sales you potentially can have. A balancing act by managing your staff to serve the maximum number of customers efficiently.

Your estimated sales during the day and week also play an essential role. For example, you should hire and schedule accordingly if you are super busy Monday through Thursday but are entirely dead (that is, have no customers) on the weekends.

Compare & Network

Look at what other are local coffee businesses doing in your area. Do they have a whole staff throughout the week, or do they manage with only one or two baristas per day? Before opening a coffee shop, you might want to count customers in the neighboring businesses. This will give you valuable insight into the customer flow in your desired location.

If you establish friendly relationships with other businesses in your area, you may approach them about their hiring and scheduling practices.

Current Staff Availability

It's also important to consider your existing staff's availability. For example, if you have one or two reliable baristas working full-time, you may not need to hire many other baristas.

You may have several outstanding baristas, but many are in school and can only work one or two days a week. You may, therefore, have to hire several other part-time baristas or a full-time barista.

Think in Shifts, Not Days

Break down your barista hours into shifts. Your shifts may be 4, 6, or 8 hours. If your coffee shop is open 10 to 12 hours a day, consider that you will need to cover two or three shifts. Each of those shifts may require a certain number of baristas or staff to work your coffee shop effectively.

For the sake of simplicity, let's consider:

• Morning shift (opening) = 6 hours
• Afternoon shift (closing) = 6 hours

If you are open for seven days a week, that's 14 shifts that you need to fill – or 84 hours a week. How many baristas will you need to fill in those 14 shifts?

Always Have a Backup Plan

Life is always unpredictable. Your morning barista may get sick over the weekend; what do you do? If this occurs, you can either fill in for them or have a backup barista who can cover extra hours per week.

You might want to foresee such instances in your coffee shop's employee handbook. You might have to pay more for such urgent shifts.

Further Reading: How to Start a Coffee Shop Successfully

The Importance of Hiring Good Baristas

What to look for

I can't emphasize enough how vital your baristas are to the success of your business. Consider that, at times, you will trust a near-stranger with the keys to your coffee shop business, money, coffee equipment, and the health and safety of your customers – the emphasis should be on hiring great people.

Having reliable, honest, and well-communicative staff will be vital for you. It would be best if you aimed high during the interview process. Your coffee business needs more than just a “warm body.” Your business needs an honest and positive individual to help deliver the best products and services to your customer.

What to look for in a barista:

• Honesty
• Reliability
• Integrity
• Punctuality
• Positive attitude

Ask prospective barista candidates to bring references to your barista job interview.

Barista Training

Training your baristas will be a continuous effort. Developing excellence and refining the coffee skills of your employees is a life-long journey that can be fun, team-building, and morale-boosting.

Invest in your employees. Paying them a competitive wage and providing them with ongoing barista training will pay off in more ways than you can count.

Fortunately, there are a few places you can look to get in-person barista training or online-barista training.

Future Reading: Why Is Barista Training Important?

Tools to Monitor Your Barista Hourly Schedule

As the owner and manager of your coffee shop, you will likely be the one to set your barista schedules. (Of course, you can have a supervisor and manager help build out the schedules as well) Nevertheless, constant monitoring of your barista schedule will help you better utilize your hours to maximize production and minimize your costs.

The Power of Observation

It's always important to observe what your schedule looks like. Of course, there's one thing to sit down and carve out your schedule on paper – but how does it translate to the real-world coffee bar setting?

• Are there too many people behind the bar?
• Are your baristas running into each other?
• Do your baristas look bored? Are they sitting around scrolling on social media?
• Do your employees clearly understand what is expected and needed from them?

Your observations are continuous, and they need to be incorporated constantly every week with your schedule.

Coffee Shop POS System

Your chosen point-of-sale system will be your ultimate data collector. Your coffee shop POS system can aggregate all the information for the days, weeks, and months to help you determine your busiest times and days. Likewise, it will also tell you when you are at your slowest. Naturally, you will want to adjust your barista shifts accordingly.

Coffee Shop Customer Feedback

Your customer feedback will also tell you how good your staff is. For example, if you constantly hear negative feedback on how long your line is taking (or how fast your coffee bar is), you'll be able to plan accordingly.

Sometimes, your customers won't straight out and tell you, but they will send you signals. For example, they may look at their watch or check the time on their phone. They might signal through their body language or in discussions with others that they are waiting too long for your coffee service.

Keep Emotions in Check

The reality is that hiring and scheduling decisions can often be rooted in emotions. You might understand that your employees need the hours to make ends meet. It's essential to value your employees, pay them well, and offer any additional benefits you can afford. But continuously overscheduling will bleed your business financially dry – and that's not good for anyone.

Playing nice may end up costing you thousands of dollars. So keep your emotions in check when scheduling your baristas.

Making Painful Decisions

As a coffee shop owner, the buck stops with you. You may need to make tough decisions, such as firing unproductive baristas or shuffling responsibilities. The quicker you recognize and make changes, the better it will be for the overall health of your business. Unproductive employees can lead to loss of money and customers, and they can infect the attitudes of other baristas.

How Many Baristas Do You Need to Hire?

Related questions:

Where do I find great baristas for my coffee shop?

Everyone with a positive attitude and willingness to learn has the potential to be a great barista. You can find potential baristas everywhere, including among your customers.

Of course, you can go with the traditional route and post ads and make an announcement on your social media accounts and your website.

The chances are that your coffee shop business will be small enough to feel the impact of new hires. This includes their attitude, their energy, personality, and productivity. Therefore, hiring your baristas should be a process of feeling them out. How will they fit in with the rest of your staff?

For more information, read our post, How to Hire Amazing Baristas for Your Coffee Shop.

Will a mobile coffee truck cost me less in barista labor costs?

A mobile coffee business will often have less physical space when compared with an average-sized coffee shop. Therefore, the chances are that you'll be physically limited to hiring only one or two people to work your coffee truck at one time.

If you also plan to work, you'll likely need to hire at least an additional staff member. Another barista will help with serving more people and with practical things like covering you while you need to use the restroom, check the water supply, or step away for a moment.

How much should I pay my baristas?

Your baristas play an essential role in the success of your business. At a minimum, you should pay them minimum wage. But if you can afford it, paying them a little bit above minimum wage may be well worth it. You might offer your barista bonuses for serving more coffee or reaching other established goals. You may also want to have an equitable gratuity (tipping) policy. Research your laws and regulations regarding salary, wages, insurance, and other employer responsibilities.

Are You Ready To Get Started?

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Based in Seattle, Washington, USA, Coffee Shop Startups is dedicated to providing you with the most relevant information on how to start a coffee shop business successfully. Over the last 11 years, we've helped thousands of aspiring coffee business owners worldwide. We harness the experience, wisdom, and knowledge of many successful coffee shop owners to help you increase your chances of success and profits. We support business owners who want to start a coffee business by providing them with valuable information on starting their coffee business successfully.