Skills You Need to Start a Coffee Shop Successfully

Skills You Need to Start a Coffee Shop

What Skills Do I Need to Start My Coffee Shop?

Coffee isn't picky.

People who start coffee shops come from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life.

Whether you are just entering the workforce or being years into your retirement, you can start a profitable coffee business anytime.

That said, having some skills to start a coffee shop is helpful.

But which skills?

In today's post, we will discuss the valuable skills needed to start a coffee shop successfully.

You also might be interested in reading How to Start a Coffee Shop with No Experience.

Experience Counts, But Which Skills Matter Most?

The Skills You Need to Start a Coffee Shop

Everyone brings something to the table. Whether it's a unique skill set, vast experience, or knowledge base, you can transfer it to manage a coffee shop successfully.

While it may be impossible to list every type of skill here, I want to cover the most relevant skills to start a coffee shop business.

The good news is that anyone with determination and the willingness to dedicate time can develop these skills.

Below, we will outline the skills commonly used to start a coffee business.

What Skill Do I Need to Start My Coffee Shop?

Soft Skills Needed to Start a Coffee Shop

Communication Skills:

We all know the value of good communication. This especially matters when running a coffee shop. Communication skills include listening, negotiation, non-verbal communication, presentation skills, public speaking, storytelling, reading body language, and, don't forget, writing skills. Teaching is also essential to communicating and is vital for coffee shop owners as you will have employees to train.

Time-Management Skills:

Managing our time seems like a life-long challenge. But those who get it right are often in a better position to accomplish the goals they set out for themselves.

As a coffee shop owner, everyone wants a piece of their time. So, managing your time wisely will be important daily. Time management may also include skills like saying “No” to time-sucking ventures or activities. It also means having the ability to block out time for various aspects of your personal life, such as children, parents, or other obligations.

Critical Thinking Skills:

The ability to think critically is essential for running any business – including a coffee business where you, as the owner, are often a one-person band.

While much of your time might go to putting out fires, critical thinking allows for innovative ideas to be born. Staying logical and sensible, using common sense at all times, and receiving and giving reasonable feedback, is an essential component of critical thinking.

No doubt, when it comes to running a coffee shop, the ability to problem-solve will be tested nearly every day. The good news is that allowing yourself the time and space to think can make you a more effective coffee shop owner.

Organizational Skills:

Staying organized is arguably among the top skills to start a coffee shop owner. The ability to create systems for efficiency, schedule your work hours, manage inventory, and stay on top of paperwork will be essential. In nearly every profession or background, you can gain organizational skills. Equipped with organization skills, you'll become more effective, efficient, and productive – and less stressed!

Team Work:

If you own a coffee shop, you will have at least a couple of baristas working with you. The ability to work together in unison will prove critical to maximizing the energy of your small staff.

Good teamwork requires the ability to have empathy, accept and give feedback to peers and subordinates, and establish positive professional relationships.

As your coffee shop grows and even expands, you will have to learn to deal with different personalities and sometimes navigate “office politics.” Cultivating a team-centric atmosphere with your coffee shop staff will be vital.

Leadership Skills:

As the owner of a coffee shop, you are responsible for your coffee shop's ultimate direction.

The buck stops with you.

While this may seem obvious, you would be surprised at how many coffee shop owners don't understand this:

As the coffee shop owner, you are the leader.

Your ability to inspire others, mentor your employees, and coach them into being great baristas will generate many good opportunities to grow. This often requires you to know what direction you want your business to go in.

Leadership can also be displayed by managing staff meetings and the execution and facilitation of your business goals.

If you haven't had many leadership opportunities, don't sweat it. You can gain and strengthen your leadership experience in nearly every activity you do. Start thinking about how you can shift into a leadership role in your current job or team. 

A Strong Work Ethic:

Any current or past coffee shop owner will tell you that a solid work ethic is critical to making your business run smoothly. There is no question that owning and running a coffee shop requires dedication, reliability, attentiveness, competitiveness, punctuality, and the ability to meet deadlines.

Owning and operating a coffee shop can be challenging. You may have to get up before dawn every morning and be the last one to close up the shop. Additionally, you might have to cover shifts for sick employees when you schedule the day off. You must also demonstrate a strong work ethic to your employees, who will look to you to lead the way.

 Do I Need Hard Skills to Start My Coffee Shop?

Hard Skills Needed to Start a Coffee Shop

Hard skills can be defined by the expertise required to gain knowledge and do a particular job. For example, you can gain hard skills from training, formal education, apprenticeship, or personal practice.

Accounting & Bookkeeping Skills

Staying on top of your financial “books” is essential for a coffee shop owner. Whether you are responsible for delivering quarterly reports to your business partners and investors or paying your taxes, having a good grip on your accounting and bookkeeping will help your business stay afloat.

Not addressing your bookkeeping needs can come back and haunt you. Professional experience in accounting or bookkeeping will give you the edge a coffee shop owner needs.

Financial Skills

Being savvy with financial documents such as sales reports, inventory reports, and tax documents is essential when opening a small business. Often, due to a coffee shop budget, you may not be able to hire a full-time financial expert to review financial documents every month.

Experience in finance can train your eyes to analyze data and expense reports and make better decisions, which is extremely useful for running a coffee shop business.

Legal Expertise

Coffee shop owners with a legal background may benefit from various activities. For example, past legal experience could prove extremely useful – from negotiating your rent and terms of your lease to hiring and firing employees.

Computer Skills

It’s extremely important to have computer skills to run a coffee shop. Whether you need to create a draft agreement or proposal, create a spreadsheet, or work on your business website, having computer skills can be very useful for a coffee shop owner. If you have computer coding skills (analytical skills) or know your way around different programs like Excel, Photoshop, or MS Word, you'll likely be putting those skills to good use as a coffee shop owner.

Social Media Skills

While you are probably familiar with navigating social media accounts, managing business social media requires a little bit of know-how.

Building brand awareness, communicating with your staff or customers, and driving traffic for your online coffee sales – can all be beneficial to a new coffee shop owner with social media experience.

Whether you are formally schooled or have personal experience working with social media, analytics, and content development, it can all help you promote your coffee shop business.

Essential Skills Needed to Start a Coffee Shop

What About the Skill of Brewing Coffee?

When it comes to the skills needed to start a coffee shop, among the most relevant is brewing coffee.

Coffee knowledge, brewing skills, and serving coffee are critically essential for a new coffee shop owner. Fortunately, you can gain these skills relatively quickly.

Let's discuss this skill set in more detail.

Coffee Skills

Knowing how to grind, tamp the coffee, and extract espresso – along with steaming milk properly and building drinks – will be vital to serving your customers.

Obtaining coffee skills should be a priority for you. Take, for example, a wine shop. If you were to start a wine shop business, you'd want to know a bit about wine.

That's exactly how I feel about coffee. If you want to start a coffee shop, then it's imperative to learn as much as you can about coffee. Now you might not need to go to Guatemala or Ethiopia to discover the world's best coffee, but having a good understanding and passion for coffee origin will be beneficial.

Fortunately, there are many good ways to get the knowledge and barista training you need. Start small. There are many good online resources to get your coffee knowledge up to speed and barista training, including our Complete Coffee Shop Startups Kit.

Previous Work Experience at a Coffee Shop

If you have ever worked at a coffee shop, café, or restaurant business that serves espresso, you might have a leg up on the rest of those aspiring coffee shop owners.

Even if you've only worked for six months in a café, you would have a better understanding of the operations required for a smooth-running coffee business.

Previous coffee shop experience can be invaluable to a new coffee shop owner. Working with customers, building drinks, and learning how to work efficiently will prove beneficial.

Even if you aren't great at making latte art, your coffee brewing experience will undoubtedly give you the confidence you need to get started.

What If You Don't Have the Skills Needed to Start a Coffee Shop?

We just listed a few soft and hard skills that would be helpful when starting a coffee shop. But what if you don't have any of these skills?

If this is the case, you have two general options:

• You can either acquire the skills to open a coffee shop
• Or bring in people who are equipped with these skills.

For example, you might want to work as a part-time barista in a local coffee shop. This would give you the coffee shop experience you might need to learn the “ins and outs” of an established coffee business.

Having direct coffee shop experience will allow you to see how other coffee shop owners and managers run their coffee business. What are they doing right? What should they be doing differently?

Additionally, you can also get trained as a barista. There are many convenient online barista training opportunities available. You could also hire a coffee educator to get you up to speed.

Bringing the right people in to fill in the skills gap is essential for any business owner.

What Type of Experience Do I Need to Start a Coffee Shop?

People from all walks of life decide to open a coffee shop and do so successfully. That means that many different experiences can be relevant.

Whether you come from the tech world, real-estate industry, fast-food industry, or anywhere in between, your experiences can often transfer to help you successfully start your own coffee business.

Unfortunately, people often reject their own life experiences when starting a coffee shop – or any business. The truth is that your personal or professional work experience can help you start your business.

No matter what you've done or where you are from, your life experiences can help you start a coffee shop business successfully!

Helpful Experience When Starting A Coffee Shop

 Starting a coffee shop with no experience is challenging. Chances are, however, that you have gained some skills or experiences over the course of your life.

Therefore, I want to briefly list some possible experiences you can bring to the table when you start your coffee shop.

Working with People

Having experience working with people will help you run a coffee shop business. You can develop the people skills appropriate for running a coffee shop business in just about any personal or professional setting – in your family, school, or professional life.

Working with Money

Handling money is a valuable experience when you start a coffee shop. Counting money, giving change back to customers, and ensuring that money is secured, accounted for, and deposited is an experience you can have in various jobs.

Working in Retail

 Retail experience is always helpful for coffee shop owners because, during that time, you would have most likely gained knowledge working with customers, ringing up sales, and answering questions, among others.

Working in Customer Service

Serving coffee is customer service! Like working in retail, working in customer service can be a positive experience for opening a coffee shop. You can gain experience in customer service in every industry imaginable.

Working in Coffee (as a Barista or Owner)

As we mentioned earlier, working in coffee may be the essential experience you can get before opening a coffee shop. The skills and knowledge you get working in coffee – pulling espresso shots, brewing coffee, manual brewing, roasting coffee, all are great experiences to have before you set out to open your coffee shop.

Working in Management

Having experience in management can be beneficial. Working with employees, solving conflicts, and trying to get the best out of your employees are things that a manager contends with. As the owner of a coffee shop, you are the default general manager. Hard decisions will come to your desk. Being skilled at being able to “manage” people in a way that benefits your coffee shop business plays a big part in your success.

Working in Marketing

Marketing can play a significant role in a coffee shop's profitability. Marketing experience allows you to be involved with creative projects to help your clients stand out from the competition. Thinking outside the box to grab your potential customer's attention falls at the feet of a coffee shop owner. While working in marketing, you may also have worked in teams and communicated with a diverse group of people – all essential skills needed to start a coffee shop.

Working in the Foodservice Industry

Working in the food service industry can provide the fundamental experience you need as a future coffee shop owner. Whether you have worked as a cook, barista, bartender, hostess, or manager, chances are you have probably gained much of the skills and experience you need to be a successful coffee shop owner.

Inventory Management

If you have previous work experience as an inventory manager or an employee managing inventory, you already know how important it is to make sure your inventory is in check.

Proper inventory management will help you ensure that you aren't generating any losses and maximizing your available cash to purchase the appropriate inventory.

Working in HR

Human resources experience is vital when running and operating a coffee business because you will probably be hiring employees. Being knowledgeable about hiring laws, regulations, and employer obligations will be extremely helpful.

Wrapping Up:

The Skills Need for Starting a Coffee Shop

As you can see, there are plenty of skills that could help start a coffee shop. Remember, you don't need all of these skills or types of experience when starting a coffee shop. However, having a few would be a positive thing for an aspiring coffee shop owner.

If you don't have many of these skills, that's okay. Try to figure out ways and opportunities that you may have to get the skills you need. Whether you decide to take an accounting class or work in a coffee shop, simply start somewhere.

The good news is that many of these skills are all obtainable.

Are You Ready To Get Started?

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Coffee Shop Startups

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.