Build a Café That Doesn’t Need You, with Trevor Corlett

It’s a Tuesday in July and you’re nowhere near the shop—beach, kid’s game, dead asleep—and your café is open, slammed, and running clean without you. That’s not luck; it’s infrastructure, built on purpose. This session is about the unglamorous structure that makes it possible: the operations manuals, SOPs, scheduling, and manager development that hold consistency whether or not you’re on the floor. I’ll break down the system I actually run at Madcap—a mashup of EOS (right people in the right seats, documented core processes, quarterly priorities, a real meeting rhythm) and Make Big Happen (getting honest about what you want, what it’ll take, what could get in the way, and how you’ll execute). Whether you’re chasing a vacation, a second location, or just one week without putting out fires, you’ll leave with a framework that builds it. Get it right, and you own a company; skip it, and you’ve just built yourself a job that happens to sell coffee.

Location: Kiva