Coffee. Business.

Back to School

Sophia’s school year (she’s a second grader) started August 6.  Needless to say, she doesn’t live in Michigan!  Here we tend to think of “summer” as being bounded by Memorial Day on the front and Labor Day on the back.  (Unless you live in Holland, where, honestly, school might as well end mid-May with Tulip Time).  This traditional take on the summer season is indicative of economies based on the tourist season in the upper Midwest.  It’s tough sledding much before Memorial Day, and by Labor Day the lake is wayyy too cold to swim in with any reliability.  So the rhythm of our year includes these conveniently-placed federal holidays.  By Memorial Day we’re all ready for the school year to end, for the freedom expressed by “school’s out”.  Yet, come September…hey, that would be a good name for a movie…we’re  ready for the return of structure.  Aren’t people funny?  Business, ours, at least, is the same way.

We tend to run a much leaner (and better-tanned) staff during the summer:  we’re trimmed down to twenty or so, and we’re all putting in lots of hours.  By the end of August, we’re still tanned, but we’ve spent way too much time with each other and look forward to the return of far-flung college students and the departure of the “townies” to their respective places of higher learning.  This September we’re in a place we haven’t been for years:  we’re hiring!  Six of our valuled baristas graduated from Hope last spring.  Only one of them is still here.  Additionally, we have folks who’ve been on leave for the summer who are “pursuing other career paths” (read “finding employment in their fields of study”); one is off in Spain for the semester, and others have moved to the big city in search of, well, the big city!  All this is healthy in our view.  We harbor no delusions that being a barista is the career path for most of our gang.  On the contrary, we’re pretty darn proud that when they leave here they go off to do other wonderful things, whether that be staying at home with the children, going to grad school, or building a career in real estate, nursing, teaching or the military.  Long story short, this is a season of Back to School for JP’s.

Bringing on new people is an opportunity to reinforce the systems by which we “live” as a business, to take a hard look at where we need to change, to remind ourselves that the rest of the staff may need a refresher course, and to do it right.  The “Whole Bean Coffee” lecture usually gets newbies off on the right foot.  There’s nothing like having to absorb oodles of hard facts about coffee origins, roasting, blending and flavoring to separate the sheep from the goats.  Next is the back of the house:  where do things go, how do they arrive up front, in what sequence to we do things, how DO those dishes get cleaned and the whipped cream whipped?  When those are mastered we think about helping customers and learning the cash register system (which, fortunately for me, is very user-friendly).  Now GO!

So for half a dozen fortunate souls this will be their school for the next few months.  In the process, those of us who train will also learn, and isn’t that what education is supposed to be about?  Lifelong learning.  Just do it.