What a Great Friday!

This has been a really great Friday...
First of all, Tracy and I were on the local Mike Boyle Show. He is the leading restaurant critic for the Denver and Colorado Springs Metropolitan area. He has a television show, as well as numerous radio shows throughout Colorado. We went to the studio today and filmed a segment for Nemo's Coffee, which will be shown on TV in two weeks. Mike was a very charismatic, charming person, if not a little bit ornery! Filming the show was a lot of fun and we look forward to seeing it when it airs. This is the first time Mike has ever done a show for a coffee shop, and he has been doing this for 14 years. We feel very honored and blessed to get this kind of free promotional advertising. We could not afford to do a television commercial, let alone a 20 minute feature on a local television program!

We also have set a new record today for the most customers in a day, and we are still seeing significant growth from day to day. I have been basing our % Sustaining Revenue performance on our total needs and we are averaging about 30% over the first two weeks of operations. I negotiated free rent from November through August when we signed our lease, and I also included $1000 per month in our expenses for AFC (Allowance for Change - in other words, unknowns). If I take out the rent and AFC line items, we are actually achieving about 45% of our needed revenues. That looks much better, but we begin paying rent in September. I don't want to feel like we are doing better than we really are when the rent payments hit...

Our average ticket yesterday was $4.31 and is $4.24 so far today. Our goal is anything over $4.00, so we are very happy with the results. We expected it to not exceed $3.50 until we develop some whole bean coffee regular buyers. We are over $4 without much bulk coffee sales! Woo Hoo!!!

I went to High Rise Coffee Roasters here in town today to pick up some more Chai concentrate. We don't get our coffee there, but he is a distributor for other products we use. The owner's name is Andrew Anderson!! That was interesting (my family in Indiana call me Andy, and my name was supposed to be Andrew Dean Anderson instead of James Dean Anderson II). He has a really cool looking shop, with burlap bags of coffee from all over the world surrounding his coffee roasting equipment. I want to hang some 'coffee' art in the store, meaning I want to get some really cool photos of coffee industry related products and equipment. Andrew agreed to have me come back with studio lights and take some shots in his shop, both of the decor/product and of him operating the roaster. I'm not sure when I will have time to do it, but I'm looking forward to it. I get some cool photos, and he gets free professional promotional photography.

Gotta run... Hope you are all doing well!
JD