dealing with seasonality in a coffeehouse

managing seasonality

Koffee? is located just off the Yale campus in New Haven, CT.  A good portion of sales comes from Yale: the students and staff.  Thus, when the students are there studying away, business is good.  The moment they leave (for summer break, winter break, Easter, etc.) business drops by 20-30%.  This is a real pain in the backside (how DARE they leave campus and inconvenience me!!) because suddenly the shop is overstaffed for the amount of business we are doing. We are making too many muffins, over-ordering milk, etc., etc. In other words, you lose a ton of money (to waste) if you do not manage your seasonal transition carefully.

For years, I would wait with gritted teeth as the school year ended, then watch as all my carefully calibrated production numbers and staffing hours were blown apart.  I would wait a week to see if the seasonality continued, and then I would start working on all those things that needed fixing - chaos.

Now, I've come up with a better system.

First, I've started using my calendar more effectively.  I've gone back through my old sales to uncover when sales seem to dip each year.   From those data, I now know when to expect sales’ peaks and troughs -

Now I can anticipate and plan ahead.

If you have not heard of Boomerang, now is the time to get it.  Boomerang is a Gmail add-on which costs about $5.00 per month to use. It allows you to write an email now, and it will send the email out at some point in the future determined by you.  So, if I know that from November 22-30, we are going to be at 70% of peak sales (and right now is the middle of June), then I will write an email now to my staff:

- bakery staff: telling them to cut production by 25% for Nov 22-30 - and set Boomerang to send the email out on November 18th.

- counter staff - telling them the shift hours are changing next week, so to check the schedule for the new hours - and set Boomerang to send it out on November 15th.

- to the staff member responsible for ordering materials, tell her to drop the ordering by 20% for that week - and have Boomerang send it to her on November 19th.

- to our vendors (with which we have an automatic order: cupcakes, baguettes (for sandwiches), and bagels: and tell them to drop the order by 25% for that week... and schedule Boomerang to send out the email a week before.

I use Google Calendars for scheduling my staff.  If you have not used this before, check it out.  It is awesome.  With a Gmail account, you can set up as many google calendars as you want.   So, I set up one calendar for each of my employees.  Then I add in blocks of time when they are working.  I then give each employee access to their calendar (read only) and to the rest of the staff's calendars.  This way, at any time, an employee can just logon to their Gmail account and see when they are scheduled to work, who they will be working with, and when other people are working.  

When I schedule shifts for my employees, I try to schedule them according to when business is high and low during the course of the day.   So, when things are slow, I only have one person behind the counter. Then I schedule up to 3 behind the counter when we anticipate strong business.

As you can see from this schedule, from 7-8:30, there is just one person working.  From 8:30-2:30, there are two people on shift; from 2:30-3:30, we have three people on shift; from 3:30 to 10:00, we’re back to two people, and one person is on deck from 10pm-11pm when we close.

This is a reflection of when business is highest (early afternoon) and slowest (when we first open and an hour before closing).

So, when I know that business is going to be slower, I'll cut back on the third person crossover and have the 2nd shift Espresso person (EP) go home at 8pm instead of 10pm.    That may not seem like a big change, but it makes a substantial difference to your expenses.    This translates to about 3 hours less per day in payroll.  Three hours x $13 per hour (once you factor in payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and all the other expenses) = $39 per day.  One week of this adjustment equals $273!!!  That is money in your pocket.

Now that I know when business is going to be slower, I can make these adjustments to the calendar well in advance, and it is automatically executed without my having to think about it.

I'd recommend setting this up every 3 months or so in advance (so 4 times per year).  Employees come and go, availability changes, responsibilities change, etc., so if you do it too far in advance, it won’t be right.  So, just add it to your calendar every 3 months to set up the seasonality.