What a London Cafe Owner Taught Me About Operational Excellence
One advice that stuck with me recently came from a conversation with a café owner in London.
Before you open a café, you need to decide which route you want to take:
This is a labor of love between husband and wife. You want to make coffee, bake cakes, and create a cozy place for people to gather.
Or, you want to build a business that can scale.
Neither approach is wrong. But they require completely different ways of thinking from day one.
I’ve always been curious about different business models, not necessarily because I want to start my own business, but because I grew up with parents who are entrepreneurs at heart. Over the years, I’ve also realised that if you truly want to solve a business problem or a customer problem, one of the first things you need to understand is: how does this business actually make money?
Recently, through a mutual connection, I spoke with someone who left banking 10 years ago and has since built 7 cafés across London, with ambitions to grow to 15 - all through personal investment and funding.
I have deep respect for people who build businesses from scratch. It’s hard enough to open one successful location. Scaling multiple locations while maintaining quality and execution is a completely different challenge.
What fascinated me most during our conversation wasn’t actually the coffee business itself. It was how operationally disciplined he was.
He talked about:
His central kitchen setup
Logistics optimisation
Supply chain management
Process standardisation
Cost control
Operational efficiency
Every part of the business had been carefully designed so he could deliver high-quality products at a price competitors struggled to match.
And that reminded me of something my previous manager used to say all the time:
If you want to scale successfully, you need the structure and systems to support growth.
He called it the “blueprint.”
He was obsessed with operational rigor:
Building repeatable processes
Creating clear foundations
Documenting best practices
Designing systems that could scale beyond individuals
At the time, I thought he was overly process-oriented. Later, I realised he was thinking like a builder.
Whether you are running a café, managing a sales team, or leading a vendor organisation, growth becomes chaotic without strong foundations. That’s probably my first advice to any new manager I coach:
Don’t just think about today’s performance. Start thinking about the systems, structure, and operating foundations that will support your team as it grows.
Because that’s where the real magic starts.
In a future post, I’ll share more about how to actually build those systems in practice.
