Learn From These Four Mistakes To Make Your Juice Bar a Success
I want to share a unfortunate but true story with you…
A few years into running my business, I hired one of LA’s most experienced juice bar consultants to work at one of my stores. This is someone who helped many local juice bars launch.
He was a great guy with a lot of experience. He had done almost everything,...BUT own a Juice Bar.
So naturally, from his perspective he felt he was ready to start his own store and take things to the next level.
Sadly, he didn’t realize the limitations of his experience and his knowledge. I feel that many of us, myself included, suffer from this unfortunate reality.
We know what we know.
We may even know what we don’t know.
But we can never know what we don’t know, that we don’t know…and these are the things that usually destroy us.
In this article I want to share a number of key things that this former employee didn’t do right that ultimately lead to his juice bar going in and out of business in less than 6 months.
There are a few major mistakes that he made and I want explore these mistakes as a case study.
The First Mistake
The first mistake he made was with his location. He chose a spot that was in very close proximity to a very successful restaurant. This might sound like a good thing, but this restaurant also severed a lot of the same items like juices and smoothies, that were on his menu. I cannot stress enough how important a good location is for this business. The more convenient it is for people to get to your juice bar, the better.
The Second Mistake
The second mistake he made was thinking that his product was going to be the token to his success. In the world of business it’s not always that the best products that sell the most, but rather the products with the best marketing.
If you don’t get peoples attention, they may never know how great your product really is.
It’s great to have an amazing product–it’s essential–but it is not necessarily going to be the thing that brings you success.
The Third Mistake
The third mistake he made was not being on top of his finances. It’s very important to manage your income and expenses and keep good track of everything. If this isn’t something you are good at then you may want to hire someone to take care of this and provide you with reports.
The cashflow in your business is heartbeat of a business.
If you are in the hospital, one of the first thing they do is make sure they have you connected to a heart rate monitor. This is because if something goes wrong in this area, it will be fatal.
Your cash flow is the life or death of your business.
The Fourth Mistake
The fourth mistake my former employee made–and perhaps the most important thing to think about within this conversation–is that he never made the transition from being a manager, to being an entrepreneur. When he was working at my juice bar he was running things within the store and doing a really great job.
Running a business is much different than simply managing. At the base level of the business you have people making juice and working the register. Then you have the managers overseeing these processes. An entrepreneur is the one who is making all of the processes and steering the ship.
This isn’t just a fancy title, but it actually requires having a good perspective on everything going on. Because the decisions you make are going to effect everything and everyone.
It’s important to have a more broad approach when you are running your own business. You don’t want to get caught in the trap of spending a lot of time working in your business, as opposed to working on your business.
In this way being an entrepreneur is a totally different mindset. There is a great book about this called the E-myth and highly suggest it for anyone looking to understand this idea in greater depth.
Looking to take your juice bar knowledge to the next level? In my online course I provide everything you could ever need to get your juice bar concept off the ground.