Hey Teams, I hope you all are doing well and feeling well in the midst of this weird smoke situation we’ve been experiencing – probably one of the more odd weather phenomena I’ve ever lived through. Hoping everything clears up here in the next few days so we can get back to patios, SummerFest, hiking, biking and things of that nature.
As we progress through summer, I wanted to pass along an update on some of the bigger things happening around the company right now.
Pay & Performance Reviews – This next cycle of our tri-annual pay and performance reviews will start this week. As a reminder, an employee’s performance level, performance goals, pay level, and pay goals should all be discussed. As an employee, if you do not feel like you’ve been treated fairly or given clear goals during your P & P, then please reach out to us at teams@stonecreekcoffee.com. We know how important these moments are to provide you with clarity, and we will work to support you and your manager until that clarity is achieved.
We also plan to do something a little bit different in the October workshops where we’ll spend the bulk of our collective time doing some detailed training and communication on a team by team basis regarding pay & performance reviews and expectations.
Projects Update – With any large build project, there tends to be big hurdles that you don’t necessarily foresee at the outset. We’ve encountered a few of those in Whitefish Bay, but we continue to make progress here. Our current opening timeline is now the holiday season, though. We may be able to get open in November, but if that looks less likely as the work rolls on, then we will slide it to January. At this point it’s very much out of our hands and dependent on the timeliness of our contractors.
In the Tosa Bluemound cafe, all of the messy work in the bathroom build is done. In a little over a week we should have a nice, functional bathroom always available to our employees and guests! Thanks so much to the cafe staff for being flexible during this build.
At the Factory, architectural drawings for the bakery expansion are being finalized this week. We hope to schedule meetings with contractors here next week so we can begin the bidding process and start the work very soon. Our goal is to have this space updated and equipped in time to onboard the additional bakery volume that will be associated with the opening of the Whitefish Bay cafe.
Seasonal Flavors – It was great to get feedback from so many of you through the workshop and Employee Satisfaction survey. As we work on the Fall Drinks we’re planning on flavors that should be just a bit more accessible but still bring the quality of ingredients and flavor complexity. We’ve got some great flavors we’re currently testing, and we’ll be creating written and video explanations of these flavor ways that we’ll include in our newsletters and on our YouTube channel to prepare you well for the launch in late August!
Side Note: Don’t forget to stop by our youtube channel to stay up to speed on our latest coffee launches. We try to have a tasting video posted for each new coffee by the it’s launch date. Also, if you want to rewatch the Employee Trip video, you can check that out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKizV_bUVlU&t=28s. We will be promoting that publicly through social media and our customer newsletters in the next couple weeks.
Busy Cafes – As we watch customer count metrics, we see that many of our cafes are as busy or busier than they’ve ever been. This is great to see, but we also know that it can introduce new challenges into our operations. In some of the learning workshops we heard about some of these challenges and work is underway to address them. I did want to challenge each team and let you all know that it’s totally appropriate to ask for a team meeting outside of our workshop schedule to focus on these operational challenges and needs. On the cafe teams we have the coaches, master coaches, and our retail director who can address the feedback and needs of the cafe teams in a more time sensitive way when speak-ups happen. So, as a coach or a team-member, please speak-up if you think a meeting (or series of meetings) of this nature would be beneficial to your team, particularly in the busy seasons.
Thanks again for all of the speak-ups and feedback over the last few weeks. We had our first review meeting this week and will continue with the work next week. As usual, never hesitate to reach out to us at teams@stonecreekcoffee.com or to me directly at dpond@stonecreekcoffee.com. Have a great 4th of July weekend!
Drew Pond
Director of Development; Co-Owner
dpond@stonecreekcoffee.com, 940-733-1414