Case Study: Café in the Park
Industry: Hospitality
Location: Ripon, North Yorkshire
Project: Business operations, staff development and customer experience
It started with a very Yorkshire problem… the weather
Café in the Park is an independent, female-owned café in Ripon, North Yorkshire, run by Jane.
Like many hospitality businesses in rural and market-town locations, its customer numbers can change enormously depending on something completely outside the owner’s control: the weather.
On a sunny day, the café can be busy with local customers, regulars and people visiting Ripon. When the weather turns, however, customer numbers can drop – sometimes with very little warning.
Jane mentioned the challenge to me through the Ripon Women Business Network. She wanted to find a better way of managing her team during those quieter periods, without constantly trying to predict something that is, frankly, almost impossible to predict.
Rather than trying to solve the weather, we looked at how the business could make better use of the time it created.
What if a quiet café wasn't wasted time?
For an independent hospitality business, staffing is one of those areas that can be difficult to get exactly right.
You need enough people available when customers arrive, but when trade suddenly goes quiet, it can leave team members without an obvious focus.
Instead of seeing those quieter periods purely as downtime, I suggested turning some of them into informal staff development opportunities.
The aim wasn’t to create lengthy training programmes or pull people away from their day jobs.
It was about creating simple things the team could pick up and work through when the café was quiet – and immediately put into practice when customers came through the door.
Creating training that actually worked in the café
We developed ideas for practical, bite-sized training that could easily fit around the working day.
One of the biggest opportunities was product knowledge. The team could use quieter periods to become more familiar with the café’s menu – understanding ingredients, knowing what was in different dishes and becoming more confident around dietary requirements and customer questions. That knowledge might seem relatively simple, but it has a direct impact on the customer experience. When someone asks a question about an ingredient or dietary requirement, having a member of staff who can answer confidently makes the entire experience feel more professional, reassuring and personal.
We also looked at role-playing different customer service situations. The team could practise how they might respond to common questions, deal with different types of customer interaction or handle situations that required a little more confidence.
Again, nothing overly formal – just useful practice that helped people become more comfortable before they encountered those situations for real.
Preparing for the busy days during the quiet ones
The thinking behind the project was simple: if quieter periods were going to happen anyway, could we use them to make the business stronger?
Rather than staff simply waiting for customers to arrive, Jane now had ways to use that time productively while still keeping the team available to serve.
And because the activities were directly connected to their everyday roles, the training helped staff feel more knowledgeable and confident when the café became busy again.
The result was a stronger customer experience and a team better equipped to look after the people coming through the door.
Why this matters even more in a rural business
Operating an independent café in a place like Ripon brings its own particular mix of opportunities and challenges.
Café in the Park serves local residents and regular customers alongside visitors coming into the city, which means reputation, repeat business and word of mouth all matter. In a rural market, those relationships can be particularly important.
Customers remember how a business makes them feel. They notice when staff know the menu, when they can confidently answer a question and when they receive genuinely good service.
That means developing the people already inside the business can be every bit as important as attracting new customers.
Supporting a female founder with a practical business challenge
This project also came about in exactly the way I believe good business communities should work.
Jane was part of the Ripon Women Business Network and mentioned a genuine challenge she was experiencing in her business. Rather than offering a generic solution, we talked through what was actually happening and found something practical that worked within the realities of running her café.
For female founders, particularly those running independent businesses in rural areas, there often isn’t a large management team sitting behind the scenes working on staffing, training and operations. The owner is doing all of it.
Sometimes the most useful support isn’t another enormous strategy or complicated system. It’s having someone look at the problem with you, spot an opportunity you may not have considered and turn it into something you can actually use.
For Café in the Park, that meant turning unpredictable quiet periods into an opportunity to create a more knowledgeable, confident team, and ultimately a better experience for their customers.
The result: A practical approach to quieter trading periods, more confident staff and an improved customer experience, without adding complicated processes or trying to predict the unpredictable.
