Sketchnotes: Red Rocket Coffee, Toronto Public Library Small Business Network meetup

Posted on May 8th, 2012 by Sacha Chua

Click on the image for a large version. Want an even better version for printing out? Contact me. Feel free to reuse or share this image under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

We heard from Pamela MacDonald, Liako Dertilis, and Billy Dertilis of Red Rocket Coffee at today’s Small Business Network meetup at the Toronto Reference Library. They shared hard-won lessons from building a coffee shop business that now has three locations.

The small business network meetup at the Toronto Reference Library happens on the second Tuesday of every month. You can view my sketchnotes from past meetups:

The Shy Entrepreneur (me) – April 2012
Sal Sloan of Fetching! – March 2012
Kristina Chau of notyouraverageparty – February 2012

View more sketchnotes, read my notes about business, or browse around my blog!

Here’s the text from the image to make it easier to search for:

redrocketcoffee.com
RED ROCKET COFFEE
Pamela MacDonald Liako Dertilis Billy Dertilis

Small Business Network Meetup
Toronto Reference Library
May 8, 2012
Notes by Sacha Chua, @sachac, LivingAnAwesomeLife.com

Make sure you have enough money to live for a year.

You always have to be “on”, even at the grocery store.

Be adaptable, but watch out for over-adapting. You can’t please everybody.

Book recommendations:
-Setting the table: the transforming power of hospitality in business
-The little black book of entrepreneurship

Be prepared to wear a lot of hats.

Take care of yourself. Give yourself time to recharge.

Soft opening: work out kinks

The smartest thing an entrepreneur can do is learn when to let go.

#1: Good relationships
clients suppliers neighbours…

Hire a Lawyer. Any kind of contract, any kind of lease

Organization is important!
Suppliers etc. make mistakes, bill you twice…

Reassess success.
Had to buy out partner. Have partnership agreement!

Dedicate time to schmooze.
Customers can become suppliers!
Building relationships with people who understand

Trust your instincts.
Build a team you can delegate to.

Knowing WHO to ask & WHEN
Made up recipes
Passion!

We don’t micromanage. We’re very very careful about hiring, and we let them run the show. We let the store develop its own personality.
self-employment benefits

More posts about: business, sketchnotes // 2 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/23368

http://www.jimsjournal.com Jim

I just have to say (in response to your entire blog, not just this entry) that I find your work to be absolutely fascinating, informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Thanks.
- http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua
  
  You’re welcome! How can I make it even more useful for you? What would you like to learn more about?

On This Day...

2013: Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way — Leo Babauta wrote about the power of writing daily, sharing what he’s learned from about five years of daily writing. [...]
2012: Gardening with herbs and exercising the senses — W- and I spent Sunday afternoon gardening. We dug up the boxes, amended the raised beds with nine bags of [...]
2011: Condensing requirements into use cases — (From April 23:) I’m helping out with a proposal at work. The team asked me to condense a 250+-page requirements document [...]
2010: May 2010: Remember and declutter — My project for May 2010 is to get better at remembering and decluttering. I want to reclaim the time and [...]
2008: Geek: How to use offlineimap and the dovecot mail server to read your Gmail in Emacs efficiently — Make sure you’ve set up Postfix or some other mail server that can send mail. I’m not going to cover [...]
2008: Gen Y Growing Up: — Holly Hoffman is another Gen Y blogger writing at worklovelife.com. I came across her blog on a short list of [...]
2007: Boo! Skype unlimited, limited — Skype Unlimited offers 12 months of unlimited calling for US$29.95 a year… but it’s only for US and Canada. Sigh. Random Emacs symbol: [...]
2006: Welcome to the blogosphere, Winston! – OSS entrepreneurship in the Philippines — Check out Winston Damarillo‘s blog and talk about open source entrepreneurship in the Philippines. =) Random Japanese sentence: Ã§ÂŒÂ«Ã£ÂÂ¯Ã¥Â¤ÂœÃ£ÂÂ®Ã£ÂÂ»Ã£ÂÂ†Ã£ÂÂŒÃ£ÂÂ¯Ã£Â‚Â‹Ã£ÂÂ‹Ã£ÂÂ«Ã£Â‚ÂˆÃ£ÂÂÃ¨Â¦Â‹Ã£ÂÂˆÃ£Â‚Â‹Ã£Â€Â‚ A cat can see [...]
2006: Connecting people — Revisiting a website comment from Francis, I realized that I should get him plugged into our cool geek network in the [...]
2006: Full day! — I woke up early to check if anyone I knew was online, and I had a nice chat with Marcelle. I [...]
2005: How I use my Hipster PDA — After all my experiments with wearable computing using a one-handed chording keyboard and a speech synthesizer, I’ve found that the most portable [...]
2004: Multiplayer Nethack — Hilarious. You should probably watch Monty Python in order to get the references. BBspot – DevTeam Releasing Multiplayer Nethack and Counter-Hack [...]
2004: My classes next sem — CS21A B MW 8:30 – 9:30 F 7:30 – 9:30 F-227 CS21A F MWF 10:30 – 11:30 F-228 CS110 A TTh 9:00 – 10:30 F-227 CS 139.3 A MWF 1:30 – 2:30 M 1:30 [...]
2004: NLP conference — The De La Salle University – College of Computer Studies (DLSU-CCS) cordially invites you to The 2nd National Natural Language Processing (NLP) [...]
2003: The Mathematics of the 3D Rotation Matrix — Diana Gruber http://www.makegames.com/3drotation/ The set of special orthogonal matrices is a closed set. What does that mean, and why do we care? A [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life