I'll skip to the end of the cafe story just to tie up that loose end. The longer I worked there the more art and objet d'art I accumulated on the walls and on the shelves. Many were made/found/stolen for me by my lovely customers. Others were made/found/stolen for me by my lovely staff.
As the years passed the space began to more closely resemble the vision I'd had in my head when I'd first bought O'Malley's. Not only did we get better at cooking and making coffee, we also got better at managing the customers. By that I don't simply mean the day-to-day customer relations, I mean using the trust we'd built up with the regulars to lead them.
When we'd first opened we made a fabulous borscht. We put 'borscht' up on the specials board along with some appropriately enthusiastic adjectives. We didn't sell a single serve. So we called it 'Russian borscht' and we sold a couple. Next day it was 'Russian beetroot and tomato borscht'. We sold a few. By the end of the week it was 'tomato and beetroot soup'. We sold out. The moral? We hadn't yet built a relationship with the customers. It was a small town and the people had conservative tastes.
Eventually the customers came to know and trust us. We could put just about anything on the specials board and they'd try it. Even borscht. We were able to use this trust to broaden what we were able to offer. We started to use three coffee grinders: one for the house bean - Calima's espresso blend; one for a locally roasted - by Southern Addictions - decaf; the third we used to showcase specialty coffees from wherever we could source them. We also used this relationship with the customers to take our holidays. We would close for a month at a time and could trust that the customers would be waiting for our return. Eventually I was able to use this strong relationship to radically re-imagine what number9dream could be...
At the beginning of 2010 all of my mainstays had departed, including my brother. Succession planning is all very well, but ultimately it depends on being able to access good and reliable people, people who would buy into my vision just as my previous staff had done. This proved exceedingly difficult, so difficult in fact that it served as the catalyst to substantial changes.
I had always had as much (possibly more) interest in the arts and craft as I had in food and coffee. Certainly my aim with the cafe right from the beginning was about creating a 'space' rather than cooking the best dish or competing in barista championships. An essential part of creating that space was art and craft. Over the five years to 2010 there'd been many queries about buying some of the art, but it was (and is) mine and not for sale...
So, cue 2010. I'm struggling to find staff. I'm conscious of a growing interest in the arts and crafts but no one in South Gippsland is really providing an outlet for handmade wares... I close for a month, ostensibly to re-cover the floor and re-fit the kitchen, but while I'm at it I reduce the number of tables from eight to four. I reduce the number of items on the menu from around 50 to about half that. I want to keep things simple, streamlined. If I can reduce my dependence on food and coffee and spread some of my income stream to retail crafty bits then I will also reduce my reliance on staff. It's a risk, but five years in it seems one worth taking. As with just about everything to do with the cafe (and life generally - I concede) I trusted my gut instinct...
The month itself was bloody hard work. We had to gut the kitchen so that the cabinetmakers could fit the new one. To lay the new floor all of the furniture had to be moved to one side of the cafe, the floor done, the furniture shifted onto the new floor, then the other half of the room was done... It was labourious, messy and time consuming. It also meant that I couldn't work in the cafe without being in the way, so it put off the more creative aspects of the renovation until the last ten days.
As the years passed the space began to more closely resemble the vision I'd had in my head when I'd first bought O'Malley's. Not only did we get better at cooking and making coffee, we also got better at managing the customers. By that I don't simply mean the day-to-day customer relations, I mean using the trust we'd built up with the regulars to lead them.
When we'd first opened we made a fabulous borscht. We put 'borscht' up on the specials board along with some appropriately enthusiastic adjectives. We didn't sell a single serve. So we called it 'Russian borscht' and we sold a couple. Next day it was 'Russian beetroot and tomato borscht'. We sold a few. By the end of the week it was 'tomato and beetroot soup'. We sold out. The moral? We hadn't yet built a relationship with the customers. It was a small town and the people had conservative tastes.
Eventually the customers came to know and trust us. We could put just about anything on the specials board and they'd try it. Even borscht. We were able to use this trust to broaden what we were able to offer. We started to use three coffee grinders: one for the house bean - Calima's espresso blend; one for a locally roasted - by Southern Addictions - decaf; the third we used to showcase specialty coffees from wherever we could source them. We also used this relationship with the customers to take our holidays. We would close for a month at a time and could trust that the customers would be waiting for our return. Eventually I was able to use this strong relationship to radically re-imagine what number9dream could be...
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| Last day pre-renovations... |
At the beginning of 2010 all of my mainstays had departed, including my brother. Succession planning is all very well, but ultimately it depends on being able to access good and reliable people, people who would buy into my vision just as my previous staff had done. This proved exceedingly difficult, so difficult in fact that it served as the catalyst to substantial changes.
I had always had as much (possibly more) interest in the arts and craft as I had in food and coffee. Certainly my aim with the cafe right from the beginning was about creating a 'space' rather than cooking the best dish or competing in barista championships. An essential part of creating that space was art and craft. Over the five years to 2010 there'd been many queries about buying some of the art, but it was (and is) mine and not for sale...
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| Out with the old (with the best helper in the whole world) and in with the new... |
So, cue 2010. I'm struggling to find staff. I'm conscious of a growing interest in the arts and crafts but no one in South Gippsland is really providing an outlet for handmade wares... I close for a month, ostensibly to re-cover the floor and re-fit the kitchen, but while I'm at it I reduce the number of tables from eight to four. I reduce the number of items on the menu from around 50 to about half that. I want to keep things simple, streamlined. If I can reduce my dependence on food and coffee and spread some of my income stream to retail crafty bits then I will also reduce my reliance on staff. It's a risk, but five years in it seems one worth taking. As with just about everything to do with the cafe (and life generally - I concede) I trusted my gut instinct...
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| That helper again - this time painting chairs |
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| I love Ikea steps/stools way too much! |
The month itself was bloody hard work. We had to gut the kitchen so that the cabinetmakers could fit the new one. To lay the new floor all of the furniture had to be moved to one side of the cafe, the floor done, the furniture shifted onto the new floor, then the other half of the room was done... It was labourious, messy and time consuming. It also meant that I couldn't work in the cafe without being in the way, so it put off the more creative aspects of the renovation until the last ten days.
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| Ink & Spindled stools |
In the meantime my helper and I started to visit all sorts of artists and makers to acquire their wares. We bought all sorts of things - pottery and jewellery, cushions and recycled toys, bags and cards. I also found various bits and bobs from which to make the retail space: old windows and doors, a tumbledown antique cabinet, the toilet seat from the San Remo funfair... Once the floor was done the fun work began!
I used the old kitchen drawers as the base for the large protruding bench, the top of which was a beautiful cedar door with glass panels. The shelves were all old sash windows mounted on brackets. The side shelves were the aforementioned toilet seat and amber glass windows attached to a rickety wooden ladder. I had been thinking about making a communal table from huge glass concertina doors that were being taken down from the old mechanic's building across the road - I asked the blokes who were demolishing the place if I could have them and they said yes...before throwing them into a skip a few days later... Cedar frames, a century of history, twenty-foot glass panes. Sad.
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| Pricing, polishing, etc - minutes before opening... |
Forced to abandon that idea I started looking around for other found objects I could repurpose into a large communal table. While I was browsing at the local secondhand store I stumbled across a huge redgum table. It was commissioned in the early '70s and had cost $2000 back then. The price on it now? $260. Truly. I bought it. It was French polished to the point that I could see my reflection, a detail that the secondhand dealer pointed out repeatedly. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I planned to sand it back and paint it black!
Freshly spruced, painted, furniture tarted up, retail space constructed and stocked, menu halved... The cafe re-opened to a very positive response. (You can read what the ladies from Mookah thought about it if you want a more objective perspective.) It was an exciting and rewarding time. And then...
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