Understanding by Doing

Colleen and I feel strongly about knowing and understanding how to do each part of our business. I’m not a baker by trade, but I’ve learned to do one of the overnight bakes and make our twice-baked croissants every day. Colleen hasn’t had a marketing career but leans into creating content and responding to customers on Instagram. Neither of us has done five-year projections in this level of detail, but here we are!

But more importantly, we both work alongside our employees, be it in the cafe slingin’ lattes and making sandwiches and doing dishes, at the farmers market setting up and breaking down and handling a super long line in between, or in the kitchen baking and mixing and garnishing. And, of course, doing the wholesale deliveries!

While there might be a day when we can no longer be this hands-on, it feels crucial for us in this early—but quickly growing—stage of our business. How we work now, and the employee experience we are building, will be the foundation for what we build in the future.

So, need to understand each person’s work experience, not just from them telling us about it, but by actually putting ourselves in their position. This allows us to problem-solve with the employees in a way that feels incredibly collaborative, understanding, empathetic, and trusting.

But this understanding goes both ways, to a degree. As team members grow and take on more responsibility and leadership (with higher wages and spot bonuses of course), our people need to understand the general flavor of our current financial situation—including expenses and the numbers we need to hit to cover them.

This could look like developing our barista training program, building our weekly par sheets, placing the Barista Underground or Webstaurant orders, or buying produce for upcoming products at the weekend farmers markets. Whenever we need to figure out a better way to do something, our team knows to look for solutions that balance cost-effectiveness, quality, and sustainability, but not at the expense of a diminished experience. In short, the solution can’t make a process suck for employees or customers.

One example of how this shows up day-to-day: we have to rearrange our sandwich-making flow in the incubator kitchen where we have our weekly pop-up since it’s a tight space and we are becoming very busy. A good problem to have, but it is still a problem! We bump into each other all the time, and it’s taking too long to get sandwiches out when we have a rush.

So, our challenge was to find a creative, up-to-code, and non-permanent (since we’re in a shared kitchen) solution that brings our prep items closer to the oven, rather than up by the register in a low boy that is also under the espresso machine?

A few Saturdays ago, Colleen and I were working with the team in the cafe, we kicked around some ideas and landed on a solution we are going to test. The brainstorm felt fun, energizing, and generative because we all knew firsthand the pain points of the current experience. And, importantly, our employees knew that we knew. They also knew that we trusted them and would take their ideas suggestions and ideas seriously because we have done so consistently.

So, we are going to get something like this til we move to our new space later this year, but test out the flow with an ice bath and hotel pans first. I’ll let you know how it goes!