Shows / Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
A coffee podcast providing coffee shop owners and leaders, with insights, inspiration, and the tools you need to grow and advance your coffee business. We learn from experts both in and outside the coffee industry as they deliver specific, practical, and actionable advice about ownership, optimization, profitability, barista work, employee culture, management, scaling, leadership, personal development, and anything else that will help you achieve success in the coffee shop.
Episodes
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! The Mindset of Working Clean
Having a clean cafe and a clean bar is not just a surface level pursuit. The mindset it takes to keep things clean while busy is a discipline that have far…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
602: Renata Henderson | Cxffeeblack | Putting The Heart Back Into Coffee
The success of coffee globally is based on what coffee represents...community. A beverage that facilitates rootedness, growth, and fruiting of relationships…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! "What's Next in Coffee"
The more we ask this question the more we tend to steal time and consideration away from what we have of value in the present. The coffee shop and the larger…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
601: Why Your Cafe Staff Meeting Might Be Doomed To Fail
Meetings can be a very useful part of running a cafe. The way we tend to use them though has become a real problem. In fact, rather than helping, even the most…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
600: Founder Friday w/ Sammy Piccolo of Prado Cafe | Vancouver, BC
The world of specialty coffee today owes a lot of its success to those who helped build movements and create opportunities in earlier years. The times where…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK: Forget Productivity
The hustle of business creates a fear culture where operators worry about their productivity at a near constant rate. We scratch our heads over how to prevent…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
599: How To Raise Your Baseline Coffee Knowledge w/ Dylan Siemens | Head of Coffee Education at Cafe Imports
Coffee education is essential for a professional to not just have knowledge needed for their current job, but to add depth, appreciation, motivation, and to…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! How To Keep Your Customers Excited
We talk a lot about engaging our customers and spend time, money, and effort to try to capture their attention in a crowded market. With so many things…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
598: When To Quit
Quitting a job is a normal part of any career. Problem is that sometimes we don't know when to quit and hang on too long to ours and even the cafe's detriment…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
597: John Gordon: Developing Institutional Wisdom, Efficiencies, and True Expertise in Coffee
Knowledge about coffee is one thing, but wisdom and true expertise? Well, that is quite another. While knowledge is widely and cheaply available and true…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Don't Waste Your Presence
Leaders have authority to make decisions, guide, delegate, affirm, coach, and grow the business and those they serve. The presence of a leader is only a…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK: Making Leadership A Real Process
Leadership and management are things we talk a lot about, but what does it take to actually make them a real process in the cafe? Most of what is in a job…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
596: 7 Reasons Why You Have High Turnover
Employee turnover in specialty coffee shops is the most talked about and difficult issue deal with, it has been for a long time. There are many causes for high…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
595: Founder Friday | Advocating for Independent coffee shops w/ Peter Dore-Smith of Kaffeine London UK
Creating an excellent cafe experience is a work of commitment and dedication to caring for both the staff and the community that you serve. The coffee shop…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Fixing My Face: Why Optics Matter in the Shop
I can hold an average weight business card in the furrow of my brow. Kinda proud of that. However in my career my natural resting face has inspired a lot of…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
ROR #40 w/ Chris Johnson of Purefi Coffee Roasters, Spring Texas : Roasting Excellent Coffee With Purpose
Roasting and brewing creates opportunity for mentorship and relationships that last longer than the sensory experience of the cup. Seriously pursuing technical…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
594: Encore : Don't Get Stuck: Retraining Staff on New Standards
It is easy to become stuck in the ways that you first learned to do things. Especially if those ways have brought some degree of success. We take comfort in…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK: Cupping is Overrated
I love cupping coffee. It is a great way to assess a coffee and learn how to identify defects, attributes, and nuances that allow you to make decisions about…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
593: Why You Should Not Manage Gen Z
The favorite past time of many an owner is to gripe about their younger Gen Z staff. Before them it was millennials. Before them it was Gen X, before…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Become Immune to Fear-Based Coffee Marketing
"Don't get left behind!" It feels like every post trying to sell you on a product relies on fear in order to make the sale. The idea of marketing to "pain…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
592: The Criteria For The World's Best Coffee Shop
Ranking the best coffee shops in the world is a task that sounds like a neat idea! That is until you realize the sheer impossibility of such a task not to…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
591: The Problem w/ Focusing On The Numbers vs The Guest Experience
Focusing on numbers above guest experience may actually prevent you from achieving the numbers you need to sustain your business long term. Yet still people…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Please Don't Be THAT Kind of Content Creator
Today we are surrounded by content and it is expected of every customer facing brand to strive to create a brand persona and content to reinforce your values…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
590 : Founder Friday! w/ Patti and Jesse Ventura of Lontra Coffee | Los Angeles, California
When you build a trust through serving people with sincerity and passion, those same people support and uplift you. In the business of the coffee shop, those…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! What We Lose When We Don't Listen
Feedback is all around us. From the customers, staff, and the business itself, we can only make great decisions for the coffee shop when we practice listening…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
589: How Coffee Sets the Stage For Conversation w/ Actor + Director Grant Garry!
Coffee is a connector. I think we all have seen this in our personal lives, our social lives, and in the community we help facilitate through our shops. In the…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Time Management to Beat Overwhelm
It's a common belief that there are not enough hours in the day to do the work that we need to get done in order to run a good coffee shop. The truth of the…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
588: Prioritizing the Right Things as Your Cafe Grows
As a business grows, the relationships in it shift and and evolve. The double edged sword of success and growth in numbers, is a natural pulling away from…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Have We Made Coffee (and ourselves) Miserable?
In our pursuit of optimization, analysis, scientific rigor, and financial success, we may find ourselves wondering, "where is the life in all of this?" Could…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
587: How To Apply Insights To Your Coffee Bar
Coffee shop insights and resources abound! We have innumerable platforms, tools, and ideas that all have a certain amount of value...if only they are adopted…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK: Cafes, We Need To Train Harder
The experience of the customer day-in and day-out is often treated as a given. Something that is expected, but not something that is earned. We work to The…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
586: How to Dial In Your Cafe
When we think about dialing-in, we automatically think about coffee. Changing the grind, the recipe, and other inputs and variables all to obtain an ideal…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
585: Founder Friday! w/ Tara and Martyn Knight of Southsea Coffee in Portsmouth, UK!
This Founder Friday we feature a couple who has been focused on giving their community excellence and warm hospitality for 13 years! Scaling deeper not wider…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! When Changing Things, Pay Attention to the Heart of the Business
Changing things in the cafe tends to focus on image and expression. Maybe we upgrade branding, focus our menu, change lighting, furniture etc. But what is even…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
584: Refining Your Retail w/ Retail Coach Wendy Batten!
In coffee shops, we don't just sell coffee. We sell a variety of retail items that are related to, support, and go with coffee and with our brand. But are we…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Embracing the Meaning of Money
There is far more going on behind the scenes of your numbers than just meeting your metrics. The money that flows in and out of the business is the life blood…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
583: Unifying Teams Across Multiple Cafes
When you have multiple cafes and a distributed staff, getting everyone on the same page in the operations can be very challenging. In fact, it happens to be…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! How to Think About Quality
Quality of the coffee, experience, service, and just about anything else in the cafe will always be something an owner and leader focuses on. These days we…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
582: Maximizing Existing Opportunities in Your Cafe
Making your cafe run better, improving service, increasing profitability, and leveling up quality and value for your guests naturally brings to mind a host of…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Maybe You Are Doing Enough For Your Baristas
It seems like the conversation we have around what can be done for staff to create more value, longevity, etc never gets around to a place where you can look…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
581: Lessons From "America's Best Coffee House"!
Many years ago in 2012, myself and a small team of people along with Coffee Fest Trade Shows had the pleasure of developing and running a competition called…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! How to Have Healthy Communication Between your Cafe's Departments
It could be roasting, kitchen, drive thru, bakery, or any other area of where special focus is required or different systems and staff work all under the same…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
580: Four Cafe Leadership Mindsets to Adopt in the New Year
Entering the New Year is always seen as a time to make good on our intentions that got put on the back burner. Many of those intentions, if acted upon, would…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! The Difference Between Numbers and Quality Numbers in The Cafe
We all want to see positive growth and good numbers in our cafe. We also want to see the ROI for the effort we put in to generate those numbers. For many, to…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
579: How to Really Care For People in the Cafe
How we care for people through our work should be the primary focus. From healthy and strong relationships and systems the help support them, we get healthy…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! New Things are Overrated
Do you feel the pull, the itch, the compulsion to add more, buy more, and create specials and new things for your customers all the time? You are not alone…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
578: Founder Friday w/ Matt and Elise Higgins of Origin Coffee Bar, Savannah, GA
I love an origin story where the pluck, confidence, and unwavering belief of the founders for each other and their idea is met with the support, enthusiasm…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
577: What You Need to Know About Rural vs Urban Coffee Shops
A listener asked me a question recently about how to approach operating a coffee shop in a rural setting versus a larger city. After a short exchange over…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Identifying Values on Shift
The life of your business is going to be determined by how easily and frequently you and your staff can identify, during the workday, behaviors and events that…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
576: Financial Stability Using Profit First for Coffee Businesses w/ Kim Logsdon of Caffeinate Your Cash
Many owners struggle to make a profit and to pay themselves. This inevitably will lead to burn out and disillusionment and sadly for many closing down the shop…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Is Anyone Else Slow Today?
You read this kind of question mostly from nervous owners who are glued to their screen and anxiously review every data point with bloodshot eyes. Like a…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
575: Celebrating Barista Culture w/ Steve Moloney of The Barista League!
For the last 10 years The Barista League has been putting on competition/events that tap into the culture of the working barista and offers a fun environment…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
574: Founder Friday! w/ Mackenzie Cohen of Kittitas Cafe in Kittitas, WA!
If you want to run a great coffee shop, loving people is one of the most important things to have at the foundation of all you do. It is also sometimes the…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! What Thankfulness Should Lead To: Thoughts on How Beliefs Inspire Action in the Shop
It is that time of year here in the U.S. where many will reflect on what they are thankful for. In this current age where bad news and reasons to despair…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
573: Myths Baristas Believe Part 2
And we are back with the second part of our exploration of common barista myths! I have to say, the main point for both the owner and barista episodes is to…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! The Urgent Need for Training in Today's Coffee Shop
I was invited to speak recently to a group of coffee professionals on the state of the industry based on what I have experienced through my consulting, career…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
572 : Understanding Water For Coffee w/ Maxwell Dashwood
Water for coffee. This is the biggest area of quality control focus that we must always monitor and check to provide constantly excellent coffee. Learning…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
Special Announcement From Chris: New Webinar "Principles for Cafe Success" launching Novemeber 5th
Here is why I am thrilled to be launching this live webinar called "The Keys to the Shop: Principles for Cafe Success". The more conversations and exchanges we…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
SHIFT BREAK! Get Your Cafe to Stand Out Without Losing Your Footing
If you listen to every well meaning linkedIn post or biz hack YouTube video you can stand out so much that you actually lose touch with he foundation of your…
- Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders
Special! Interviews From Coffee Fest Orlando 2025! w/ Claudio Martinez (Golden Bush Coffee), Vanessa Jaramillo (Florida Coffee Culture), Maria Esther Thome-Lopez (Coffee Flock), and Katherine Morris (Cherry Coffee Shop)
Time for our last installment of live interviews from Coffee Fest 2025. This time from Orlando, FL USA! We are talking with four awesome professionals about…