Biz Cafe Report

Keating, Meghan
Introduction
Mountain Brew Coffee Co. is the new coffee shop in Collegetown located Downtown off
Main and 2nd street. We currently offer the choice of a small, medium, or large cup of coffee
along with assorted baked goods, that pair perfectly with your cup of coffee. We at Mountain
Brew Coffee Co. believe in going green to help the Earth, so we have use energy-conserving
lightbulbs and water-conserving toilets to help minimize our use of water and electricity. Our
café has been awarded for having the best satisfaction in the industry. We are always looking to
improve so we leave surveys out for customers to give us suggestions on how to do better. We
also provide free high-speed internet access for our customers so that they can enjoy their cup
of coffee while doing work. A lot of our customers are college students, so we felt providing
free internet was very important.

Major Decisions
Two of the most major decisions we made were to serve assorted bakes goods and to
open up on the weekend. For the baked goods decision, we were given to either purchase an
oven or buy from a bakeshop if we wanted to sell them. In the long run, it would be cheaper to
buy the oven and make them ourselves, so we decided to just buy the oven. Baking the goods
at our café was also more beneficial because it would cause the café to smell like the baked
goods, which would in turn cause customers to want to buy them more.
The second major decision was to open up on the weekend. We decided to open up on
the weekends so that we could get more customers Since making that decision, our weekly
revenue has gone up a lot. By opening on the weekend, we were able to have more customers
and make more coffee sales. We started off with cup sales in the one thousands and in this past
week we hit the three thousands. To track how that decision did, we looked at the capacity for
the Monday through Friday hours and for the Saturday and Sunday hours to get an estimate on
how many potential sales we would have when deciding our hours and whether to open on
weekends. Each day on the weekend has a 400-500 capacity. Each server makes a certain
amount of cups per hour too, which is data we looked at when making hiring decisions and
figuring out how many servers to hire.
While running the coffee shop, I was the most surprised by how many decisions you
have to make every week to manage things. Every week we have to look at how much
inventory we have and figure out how much coffee or cups we need to buy based on the
previous week’s sales. The tricky part was estimating how much coffee we would sell so we
could buy enough pounds of it every week. This was especially hard to do at the beginning of
the simulation because we had no data from the previous week’s sales to use as a reference
when estimating the next week’s sales. After the first week, we were able to use the number of
sales from the previous week and the amount of coffee used to figure out how many pounds to
buy for the next week. Sometimes our sales would go over so we would have to buy emergency
coffee. We also had too much coffee a few times so some of the coffee bought was wasted.
Those decisions taught me a lot about how important it is to estimate sales when buying
weekly supplies because in both of those situations you lose money.
The special decisions have also surprised me because they are things I never thought
you would have to deal with. The energy-conserving lightbulbs and water-conserving toilet
decision is an example of one of the special decisions that I never expected to deal with. We
decided to get both because we could save money from doing so. Another special decision we
had to make was whether we wanted to provide internet access for our customers or not. We
could choose to either provide free low-bandwidth access, free high-speed access, or high-
speed access for a fee. We knew we wanted high-speed access so we chose between those
options. Although we could profit off of having wifi with a fee in order to access it, we decided
that we would benefit more from providing free access to wifi. Since our café is in Collegetown,
a lot of our customers are college students. Providing free wifi will cause more people to want
to come here. People can come here to study and drink a cup of coffee. Sitting at the café for a
while to do work may also cause people to buy more than one cup of coffee, which makes us
sell more coffee and make more profit. If we offered wifi at a fee, I feel like less people would
use it. College students do not have a lot of money to waste as it is so it is not right to charge
them for wifi.
One of the key changes that helped our coffee shop the most was deciding to open on
the weekend. Being open on the weekend allows us to sell even more cups of coffee and make
more money. Ever since deciding to open up on weekends, we have made a much larger
revenue and sold a lot more cups of coffee. Adding different size cups also helped with cup
sales because people had more of a choice and bought the size that suited their needs the
most. Each size is at a different price point too, which helps for some people. Opening on
weekends meant that we had to hire more servers. Hiring more servers benefitted us greatly as
well because it meant we could produce more products. Having additional servers also allowed
the café to function more efficiently. When deciding how many workers we should hire, we
calculated how many hours we were open and tried to have at least 2 servers working per hour.
Having at least 2 per hour made us efficient and being so efficient may have helped with our
customer satisfaction rating. When we first started to put surveys out on the tables in the café
for customers to fill out, some commented on long wait times/long lines. After we saw that
feedback, we hired a few more servers to try and help with the situation. This may have also
played a part in our customer satisfaction rating. Our café has received the award for having
the best satisfaction. I think hiring more servers to decrease the wait time and to increase
efficiency played a big role in us winning that award.
If I had the chance to start over, I would not change my approach. At the beginning, my
team and I may have been a bit clueless as to how to run a café, but this has been a learning
process that we all learned a lot from. We learned the ropes and have been pretty successful
considering we had no idea how it worked before. For most of the categories shown on the
dashboard that show our progress (like revenue, weekly net income, wait time satisfaction,
etc.) we have been above the industry average, so I feel good about our decisions that we
made. If I had to change one thing though, I would probably hire more workers earlier on. If we
hired more in the beginning, we would have been able to make more cups earlier on. The more
servers we have the more sales we can have. Having more servers also makes things more
efficient. It’s not much of a difference but I feel like that would have helped us a lot if we did
that.
This business simulation experience has taught me a lot about what goes into running a
business. I learned about the types of decisions you have to make in order to operate as a
business along with how to manage budgets and spending. When dealing with weekly
purchases, I learned to use the data from previous weeks to estimate cup sales. Doing this
would help us figure out how many pounds of coffee to purchase every week and how many
cups we would need. I also learned how to manage how many workers to hire for the hours we
are open. Along with that, we had to manage their wages and increase them occasionally.
Another essential thing was taking customer’s suggestions from surveys and their satisfaction
rates into account when making decisions. Some feedback from the surveys talked about lines
being too long and the coffee not being that good, so to help fix both we upgraded to high
quality coffee and hired more servers to help produce more coffee and more efficiently.
Overall, this whole simulation experience has taught me a lot about how to run a business and I
will use everything that I have learned in the future when either working for another business
or running my own.