Dear Red Bulb Team

It has been over a year since you made the decision to pursue your dream of opening up your cafe. Now, with about 6 weeks to go, you are finally arriving at the finishing stretch. You have to bring it home now!

I am sure you are feeling a great deal of anxiety and everyday seems to uncover something new that you have not think about before,  or you have thought about them but have yet to take action. Sometimes you may feel overwhelmed by the number of items you have to handle and that you are running out of time to finish all the necessary tasks. On more than one occasion, you may have thrown your hands up in the air and shout out in frustration.

These are all relevant concerns and they tell me one important thing – you care about the cafe and you want to succeed. As with any new business, they will be hiccups and there will never be enough time, but you need to stay COOL amidst all the chaos.

We should all be like Fonzie from Happy Days!

Draw upon your previous start-up experience, trust your own team members, believe in yourself and your past cafe experience, prioritize your to-do list, work hard, and most importantly, keep a positive and calm mind. You have done your homework and it will translate into great results.

All the best and I look forward to seeing you at the opening!.

your friend

Red Bulb Espresso Bar

so many choices

We visited a few trade shows this show and we have seen some really nice cups and saucers. While a cup is a cup, there are several considerations like:

• volume: we are intrigued to find that 12 oz means different things in North American and the UK, but the lack of standards to sizes. Hence we have a bit of difficulty settling on the correct size for a sit-in beverage, as we don’t have the normal 8, 10, 12 oz to pick from
• function: different beverages require different cups sizes, diameter, height. Eg a latte will require a wider diameter for latte art while brewed coffee can be taller without a saucer.
• colour: the easy option is to pick red but we are considering the aesthetics of the drink and in the end, we decided that white is still the most elegant
• Price: being cheap is not an option but neither is spending on exquisite china. thankfully, we are able to meet some suppliers who are able to provide quality at an affordable price. (Note to self: please try not to break any cups)
• Features: Cups that looks radical may not be user friendly; I for one, like to loop 2 fingers through the handle – form and user-friendliness are also areas we look at.

While Sching was agonizing over the cups, saucers, cutlery, and plates for the last 2 weeks, I am simply confused about our water situation over the last month. Here’s the situation – Stouffville has really hard water with lots of sediments in it; thanks to Steve from Social Coffee, the water here measures a hardness of 400ppm CaCO3 or 23gpg and 420ppm TDS(total dissolved solids). Essentially hard water does serious damage to the pipes and machines because of limescale, and with sensitive equipment like our espresso machines, this is a big no-no. We would also need to consider other things like chlorine and other unwanted particles that will impact the taste of coffee – we all know that 98% of coffee is made up of water and the kind of water that goes into our equipment has a direct impact on the quality of our beverages and food.

It is also not easy to find the right solution out there as there are myriad solutions and companies out there, all touting their greatest technologies out there. Thanks to folks like Steve and Dawson from COAG, I am able to settle on a solution that will give us the right profile of water. Phew!!  One more thing off the list.

The best that money can buy

Trying to get from cherries

to coffee beans in 4 months

After the euphoria of finally locating a home for Red Bulb, it dawned on me that the process of setting up the cafe has finally become a reality. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that we did not manage to secure the first location as we ended up with more time to source out suppliers and also try out more coffee, syrups, tea, and other cafes(including those outside of Toronto). All these preparatory work has really come in useful as we set about building up the cafe.  With a target ETA time of July, this does not leave us with a lot of time.

On a high level, these are what we are looking at:

1. Renovations – Thanks goodness for Sching. With her background and creativity, Red Bulb is in good hands here – the biggest concern is whether we will run into any extended discussions with Town Hall. Hopefully, they can be fair and will not adversely disrupt our timelines.
2. Coffee & stuff – Ahh.. the key ingredients. I am thankful that we had put in a lot of hard work here and we should be able to decide on our coffee. This aspect of the journey has been the most interesting so far, and as I mentioned in my earlier blog entry, there are a lot of impressive folks out there.
3. Equipment – Most of the key beverage equipment(eg, espresso machine, grinders, etc) has been decided, but we need to nail other food-related items like pastry case, baking equipment, coolers etc. This will in turn impact the dimensions on the renovations side.
4. Supplies – It is always the small things that cause the most trouble, and there are a lot of small things in a cafe. From paper cups to napkins, from cleaning supplies to cleaning equipment, from milk pitchers to thermometers – they affects customer experience in some way.
5. Marketing – Getting the word out. Sching’s branding work has kick-started the process and we need to start the communication.  While blogs and facebook are great, we will need to reach out to the rest of the world. We like to have a booth at the Stouffville Strawberry Festival, and will need to map out a continuous plan to convince folks to give us a chance. Friends and fans (that’s you the red movement reading this post) will be critical to our success.
6. Administrative preparation – The boring stuff; but needed to make things happen, stuff including  permits, accounting, payroll, GST/HST, etc. The one interesting exception but also critical, is to make sure all of us(including our baristas) receive the right training to provide the best products and service to our customers. It is no use having the most prominent location if we scald the milk in a latte and be rude to our customers.

Of course, each of these buckets consists of numerous little tasks and inter-dependencies. With this, tax season, and also my current full-time job, I have not been posting as many blog posts as I would have liked. Nonetheless, the blog is Red Bulb’s window to our friends and I will probably give up my weekly dose of ‘24′ and Jack Bauer to provide weekly updates. This has been a plan eight-years in the making and over the next few months, everything that previously existed on paper and in my thoughts will be turned into a tangible 850 sq feet cafe. Scary..obviously! Busy…without a doubt! EXCITING.. I can hardly wait!

p/s: for fans of ‘24′, this is the last season. here are some Jack Bauer jokes for the weekend.