Getting Cafés Back Online Quickly Through Relationships and Parts Stock
/By Jake Chiavario
For me, stocking parts since day one has been one of the most important pieces to running a successful technician business. This may come from my first customers being some of the highest-volume shops in Nashville, TN. It only takes one or two times of a café owner calling you up in a panic from days of lost revenue to make you understand the importance of stocking parts.
The Morality of Backing a Machine
Every machine we sell, if it's a new market, we immediately reinvest the revenue that the first machine generates into stocking parts for it. In my opinion, when selling a machine, you are morally obligated to fully support it and get your customer back up and running in a reasonable amount of time. Every day that machine is down, the café owner can’t serve drinks and it costs them hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars.
Which Parts to Stock?
Typically I start by reaching out to the manufacturer and ask if they have a “first aid kit” for the machine, and if possible, to outline the most important/common parts of failure. The rest is common sense and based on experience. I know that steam wands fail, solenoid valves fail, and group screens and screws go missing. We start by buying those essentials and stocking more and more as demand for the specific model increases. I’m not saying that once you sell a machine you should buy every nut and bolt. But I do believe that it’s possible for café owners to not be down for longer than 24 hours.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule. If the owner bought some weird one-off machine on some no-name online store or Craigslist, they probably aren’t entitled to that 24-hour turnaround. This can be tied back to the morality of backing the machine point – they didn’t invest in their local technician’s support infrastructure, have no idea or control over what they’re purchasing, and the technician may not even be aware that their machine exists until the work order comes in. In this case, explicitly make the owner aware of the machine situation and the issues/possible complications. Should the machine have a severe breakdown, the technician could never be expected to get it back online within 24 hours.
Organization
This is a hard one. Dedicating time to organization is something all of us technicians can relate to. I’m always interested when visiting other techs to see how they organize. Do you organize by manufacturer? By category? Mobile kits vs shelf stock? I still have yet to perfect this, but I think it's something we all can strive for.
Being organized can save tons of time, and being able to locate the part when it's needed is just as important as having the part in stock. I’ve definitely been there, it's a long day and the fitting you need isn’t in its correct compartment, so you think you're out of them and you're screwed, only to breathe a sigh of relief a few minutes later to find it’s just in the incorrect compartment and you can, in fact, fix the machine! It seems pretty trivial, but when repairing multiple brewing categories, manufacturers, and models, it adds up to be thousands of little pieces, and being able to hone in on the exact one you need in as little time as possible is critical.
In conclusion, having a close relationship with a café owner/roaster and manufacturers as well as having strategically stocked and organized parts can lead to less downtime, which we all know leads to more smiling faces getting their caffeine buzz.