How Starbucks make the Bigbucks

November 2010 - January 2011

This post is about working for Starbucks, judging them, learning to love coffee and working out to what extent I need coffee to have a successful tea room business in 2011/12. Here is the next instalment in my journey.

The chances are that you are reading this segment of my tea room journey, while drinking a lovely hot beverage. I can confidently make this statement because 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day and with the Worlds population currently estimated at 6.94 billion, that's a lot of coffee!*. As I haven't drunk my quota for the past decade and quite a few people on the globe don't own kettles I feel quite confident that you people out there must be guzzling coffee all day.

Coffee to me is a mystery. Like many people who work in offices I started drinking coffee because everyone else did and it was part of my induction alongside how to operate the photocopier. Unlike most people though my day became shaped by the effects of my morning cuppa, which looked something like this;

9am (9.15am ish) - Arrive at desk log on, emails etc
9.30am - Morning Coffee
11am - Caffeine driven productivity madness ensues
1pm - Lunch
2pm - Afternoon energy crash begins
3pm - Dangerously bored and sleepy now, best to just have another coffee
4pm - Caffeine mania returns productivity goes through the roof
5pm - Final end of day crash, the last 30 minutes drag...
6pm - Pass out

Suffice to say that I stopped drinking coffee in 2006, no real surprise that this is also the year that my career really started moving forward at a pace.

How to Right a Business Plan Wrong - 10 Top Tips

For the regulars visiting this blog you will know that I am in the process of setting up a traditional tea room business in Cardiff, South Wales, that celebrates home made, fair trade, fabulous cake, coffee and loose leaf teas. I started this mission in June last year (2010) and am focussing the next few weeks on bringing you up to date on the story so far as I build up to open in Spring 2012.

August - October 2010 

Anyone can start a business, you see that happening every day. I notice usually when I think that someone is doing a bad job of running a business particularly bad tea rooms, café's and coffee shops. When you sit down to a sticky table, or get told to clear your own tray, or people there to provide a service to you are plain rude, I just think how do you people make any money? I could do that better! Have you ever had the same thought?

Watching Mary Portas giving what seems to me like pure common sense to people in business always ignites the entrepreneurial fire in my belly. Why do these people go into business?

So two interesting points here, anyone can go into business and do it badly and most of those people don't seem to have a passion for what they do. To make my tea room business a success I would need to be thorough in the start up and entirely committed to seeing the vision through.