1! Year of Tetherball
Good Morning! I can’t believe it’s been a year already. This has been the longest and shortest year of my life. Thinking about every day so critically for a year is exhausting haha. AAAAAA. I’m drinking a brown sugar honey oat milk latte, listening to Tom Misch (sort of a modern jazz, guy) and i’m at work on bar. I’m sure I’ve expressed this before but blogging is really hard now that i’m in this! Anytime I touch a computer I feel like I’ve got more important things to be doing, and the more I know the less I feel confident in writing down!
BUT! The point of this blog is to share my business experience honestly, and give some perspective to those doing something similar. Now is a good time to do that, in that way. I’ve heard from several people that this blog has been helpful to them, and I’ve been able to help people in person too. A lot of people want to know what to expect in the first year, so here’s what I saw.
Goals for the 1st year
My goals were mainly to work hard and work cheap, to go as skinny as possible year 1 and build a strong foundation. I was hoping to build a community spot that did volume long term, but in the short term I knew it would be more efficient to work solo. Working solo would let me talk to everyone and think critically about inefficiencies. Save on labor, make every interaction count, keep the place clean and establish systems. I wasn’t opposed to hiring people, but only if I felt like it was creating a poor customer experience.
Despite wanting minimal help I did want to host events, to involve the community and keep employees engaged. I had a few events in mind like latte art throwdowns that were huge in other cities, and bake-offs that i’d seen do well at other cafes in Jacksonville like Vagabond many years ago. I was especially driven to do this because I felt like it was largely missing in Jax, covid or otherwise.
As for what we were trying to achieve as a coffee shop concept. We wanted to do a fun simple shop. Low key, high quality. DIY simple build out, great drinks. So that was a short menu with easy to read descriptions, real ingredients and sometimes complicated execution; Such as homemade whipped cream, shake every iced latte so there are no warm spots and they taste the same top to bottom, buy real caramel and honey instead of the corn syrup based stuff. I wanted a bright and colorful shop that would be a positive place to work and to visit, that had nostalgic and cheery colors, sticking to a brand bible we created around that idea early on.
I was inspired by shops like field day coffee, and others that at the time were just clean carts with a simple menu and a pop of personality. It kind of blew my mind that everything on the menu could be so exciting and I really wanted to have a simple striking menu too.
You might hear this a lot from modern mission statements in 3rd wave coffee, but we wanted to '“make good coffee easy and accessible.” Peoples idea of “good” and “accessible” varies shop to shop. Nonetheless, that’s it : )
Expectations for this year
This is my first business solo, and for all the books I read and continue to read, for all the people I talk to who have similar businesses, you just don’t know man. You need to make some mental leaps on how things will pan out when you open doors. I’m exaggerating a little here in the next paragraph but not by much.
You hear constantly that food/beverage businesses won’t turn a profit in the first year, or they may even go out of business. Naturally I’m thinking, well right after that first year you will be making money. Profit progression is a straight line, and that in month 1 I’ll be making nothing, and that in month 13 I would be hitting my goal gross income. I’d also read that your rent should be 10% of your gross sales, and so with that logic I took out 6 months of revenue to compensate for the slow beginnings.
I was expecting people to like the menu, and order things straight off it as they are displayed. I thought we’d sell some banana bread and I didn’t buy forks. I thought we’d catch a lot of people on the way to work and school. Yea!
Reality of this year
I did work hard and skinny oh man, when we opened I was still working two jobs! Thankfully after about a month I was able to quit my second job and hire someone for peak hours who I met at that job. I learned pretty quickly that working essentially 17 hour days 6 days a week (anywhere from 90-102 hours) was not going to work. I had this boundless enthusiasm because I loved what I was doing and was stoked to be there, but I was a zombie! This needed to be my only job for the foreseeable future.
Events began with our hugely successful grand opening latte art throwdown, which we did again in spring. We had our first craft market in October for Halloween, but that quickly became a monthly staple as our vendor waiting list piled up; It’s now evolved to be kind of a mini farmers market, which filled a local want. We made some shirts for halloween and merch soon became another arm of what we do. Essentially we tried to do one piece of merch per season, and one event a month, but sometimes we bit off more than we could chew and by the end of year 1 we had an event every week of july along with a merch drop, plus my birthday, and the shops birthday. That proved to be too much, we didn’t have space to effectively advertise everything or keep up with the workload! SO now we have 1 market a month with a market manager who organizes it, and one shop event per month based on employee sentiment. I’d say we’re still figuring this all out.
Our general concept really came in to it’s own over the year, we picked up this idea of “florida-core” from our feature on sprudge magazine and tried to embody it alongside our DIY aesthetic. We swapped out our plants for real plants, tried to incorporate FL/local produce on our menu, and embraced our colors doing more light woods pinks and blues. We also found ourselves doing more in house, the crazy rise in prices, and ridiculous waste of all those tiny boxes had us making our own oat milk. We constantly had syrup bottles breaking on delivery or running out of stock, and we had nowhere to store all that heavy glass, so we started making syrups too.
By finding our own footing we also found some relationships didn’t work. The baker we opened with was out of our budget, wasn’t able to provide us with items that made sense or sold, and wasn’t supporting us in person or online. They were also the only traditional bakery on this side of town. We thought we didn’t have a choice, but we found a local baker on Instagram who ended up being a much better fit and who was similarly creative simple and excellent.
As for money, we’ve had a pretty steady year because of how and where we opened. We’re just about where we need to be to pay our bills, month to month we’re 70-90% of the 10x rent mentioned above. We’re doing a specialty shop in the suburbs though, and almost all other shops like this are downtown. So as we slowly find our audience locally during the week, weekdays improve. On weekends new people come to visit and we’re super busy. Over time less new people are visiting and more locals are coming back. Which is good because our slow days are less slow and our busy days are less crazy random.
I should also mention that new shops have a honeymoon period where everyone is checking them out, and they’ll be abnormally busy the first couple months, then slow down. I read about this, I’ve seen it at other places, and it was true for us too. We met a lot of people who’ve been coming back since, and a lot of people who haven’t. A lot of people gave us big giant tips to support us early on, and that was awesome but it doesn’t last. Thankfully I knew about this and did not hire a bunch of employees then find out the hard way.
To summarize, we’ve learned a lot this year and did a good job of planting roots. I’d say it was a success. Because I took out loans to get here, it’ll probably be another year or two before I can pay those off and have money to hire staff in my place. The lease on this building was for three years so my intent was to give this a really hard 3 years and hope for the best, then go ahead and do that if this is for me. So far, I think it is : )
Other thoughts
We’re not a crazy line out the door busy shop, usually. You can attribute some of our slower traffic to us being tucked away and not directly off the highway in sight, we don’t have a drive through and we aren’t a restaurant. I think any of these things would have made us more immediately viable, but that’s okay. it wouldn’t be this concept if it was something else, and I like this concept.
Speaking of food, we’ll probably never be making soup or sandwiches back here. When we were new people would come in and tell us “oh you need to have X” or “you know you’re not busy because you don’t do X.” To this day our only 1 star review is about just that. I like to think that these comments come from a place of wanting to help, but I say to myself, “only do what you can do well.” Tetherball will never be a fancy french restaurant any more than it will sell used tires.
There are a lot of things people don’t understand about what we do now on our tiny menu, “tea latte” and “spro” are ones I get questions about every week. I decided I would give it a year before making changes, so it’s about time. I used our seasonal drinks to test ideas and get a feel for how people read menus. Some things I discovered:
fewer drinks are better, after three seasonals people stop reading and either ask you what’s good or order the first item
have a manly man coffee, a sweet latte, and a kids item.
involve other ingredient creators be they farmers or breweries, to share your menu your audience and your enthusiasm.
even if a drink has many ingredients, keep descriptions brief
if you don’t list prices, people ordering specials don’t really seem to mind. Meaning you can get creative and price fairly.
choose fun concise names or you’ll get tired of them quickly.
We chose to paint this place white, use fabric chairs, and have a “dress bright” dress-code. It’s been fine. As long as you keep up with it, things only get stained every few months and stains can come out. Keep a primer bucket, magic eraser, and bottle of shout on hand. I think it’s worth the struggle. People comment all the time and enjoy the cleanliness of the space.
Goals for next year.
I’d like to update the menu, add more substantial (but still simple!) food items, make some aesthetic tweaks, add more chairs. I’d like to do some delivery or pickup options, so we can advertise and get drinks out to greater jax. I want to keep doing markets, keep doing events, maybe another throwdown.
I want to grow enough that we can hire another employee and I can have another day off. I want to improve at everything I’m doing from inventory to taxes.
I want to have a great year 2! Can’t wait! Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!
