Are you ready to make your hobby a side hustle? Start your own business? Or work on taking your business to the next level?
The "Small Business and Side Hustles" Library U newsletter connects you to Library and community resources and programs to help you start or build your business!
With October comes cooler temperatures and thoughts of pumpkin spice pancakes and muffins! It's fitting then, that this month, we were able to speak with the owners of Cool Moose Café, a Riverside staple since the summer of 1998. They talk about what it's like owning a business and what advice they'd give to their fellow entrepreneurs.
Interview with Local Business Owners
- A business book you would recommend or a book you wish you had when you started your business. Lead Like It Matters by Craig Groeschel. This book is excellent for leaders of organizations that are looking to have intentional forward momentum.
- What advice would you give someone starting a business in Jacksonville? Take care of yourself! Entrepreneurship can be demanding, both mentally and physically. It’s important that leaders of organizations intentionally create healthy boundaries to prevent burnout. Give it your all for a set period of time, and then strive to rest to equip your mind and body to continue the journey of building up your company. This is not a sprint, but a marathon.
- What advice do you have on staffing, marketing, and choosing a location? In full transparency, the Cool Moose Cafe has slowed down in our marketing efforts due to the challenges of the past three years. But when we are on our A game with marketing we will always be our authentic selves. We know our brand identity is Amazing Food, Wonderful Coffee, and Great People. Knowing our brand identity allows us to build trust with our guests, establish guest loyalty, and have a consistent product.
From their website: "From the beginning, we desired to deliver the Riverside neighborhood friendly service, excellent food, and coffee. Cool Moose Café has become a popular place for locals and their friends to gather and eat delicious breakfast and lunch. The staff personifies the ideals of a family-run business knowing everyone who walks through the door - whether growing up on the same block or becoming friends as customers of the café. This really is a place where ‘everyone’ knows your name."
Life Lit Workshops
Have you checked out the FREE workshops in our entrepreneurial Life Lit series with EY, the Library's newest community partner? Bridging the digital divide is an EY commitment. They believe that together, we can build a better working world and become more conscious consumers by supporting all people with the opportunity to fully participate in modern education, the economy, and society.
Conscious Consumption: Are you a conscious consumer? Are you more aware of how your consumer choices affect the environment? This one-hour workshop will cover the idea behind being a conscious consumer as well as ways to go from a make-take-dispose mindset to developing more rethink-redesign-reuse habits.
Join us at the University Park Library on Tuesday, October 24 at 6:30 p.m.
Entrepreneurship Basics: Are you ready to become an entrepreneur? Do you want to measure your entrepreneurial mindset? This one-hour workshop will cover the basics of entrepreneurship and help you activate your inner entrepreneur! No need to bring anything but yourself to participate!
Join us at the West Branch Library on Tuesday, November 7 at 6 p.m.
Books We Recommend
Restaurant Success by the Numbers: A Money Guy's Guide to Opening the Next Hot Spot by Roger Fields
Fields shows how a restaurant can survive its first year and keep diners coming back for years. Featuring real-life start-up stories, he walks readers through the logistics of opening a restaurant: concept, location, menu, ambiance, staff, and, most importantly, profit. This edition has been updated to address current trends such as food trucks and to tackle online opportunities (and pitfalls!) including Groupon, Yelp, and Twitter.
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
Organizations that create environments in which trust and cooperation thrive vastly outperform their competition. And, not coincidentally, their employees love working there. But "truly human" cultures don't just happen; they are intentionally created by great leaders. Leaders who, in hard times, would sooner sacrifice their numbers to protect their people, rather than sacrifice people to protect their numbers, are rewarded with deeply loyal teams that consistently contribute their best efforts, ideas, and passion.
The Underground Culinary Tour by Damien Mogavero
A behind-the-scenes narrative about how the restaurant industry is being transformed by the use of data. Seventeen years ago, entrepreneur Damian Mogavero brought together an unlikely mix of experts--chefs and code writers-- to empower restaurateurs. By embracing data and adapting to the new trends, these innovative chefs and owners can do everything more nimbly and efficiently--from the recipes they create to the wines and craft beers they stock--making their restaurants more popular and profitable than ever before.
How to Open and Operate a Restaurant by Authur L. Meyer
The restaurant business is both an established field and an evolving one. With over 80 combined years of experience, Meyer and Vann have seen the trials of opening and running restaurants. With the advent of the celebrity chef, many people are interested in trying new and different foods. The globalization of food distribution also allows people to become familiar with ingredients never before available. Dining out, then, becomes entertainment as well as nourishment.
Lead Like It Matters by Craig Goerschel
Discover the secret to igniting a life-giving, soul-transforming, people-inspiring movement in your organization, church, or ministry--and the trick to keeping the momentum going. Using the leadership skills he's mastered as the founder and senior pastor of Life Church, New York Times bestselling author Craig Groeschel shares the transformative insights he's learned about how to effectively build a thriving, enduring ministry and organization.
Learn FREE with LinkedIn Learning
Try out LinkedIn Learning, a leading online learning platform that helps anyone learn business, software, technology, and creative skills to achieve their goals. All you need is your library card and PIN to enjoy unlimited FREE access to 16,000+ on-demand courses.
Using the LinkedIn Learning mobile app?
The Library ID (case sensitive) is: jaxpubliclibrary.
Courses We Recommend
Eat Their Lunch by Anthony Iannarino
Explore simple sales strategies to grow your market share and scale your business by winning customers from the competition and offering them a better vision of the future. From sales and leadership expert Anthony Iannarino, the author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need and The Lost Art of Closing, comes the first-ever playbook for B2B sales, in this audio-only course. Get tips and techniques that you can put to use throughout the sales process, from the early stages of assessing your prospective customers, all the way to winning them over and closing a deal.
Discover the leadership lessons presented in The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, an inspirational business novel by popular business author Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller, training and development vice president of the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain. This short, nicely written parable on the meaning of leadership features the fictional, motivational story of Debbie Brewster, a new manager for a corporate client services division. Her business unit is the company’s worst and she’s failing miserably as a leader —until the firm’s president becomes her mentor and gives her a crash course on leadership.
