Saturday, November 30, 2013

Secrets of Success - Javawocky


 Mark and Colleen Balderston

Folks familiar with the poem the Jabberwocky by Louis Carroll, recognize that Javawocky is simply a play on words and the name of one of the most popular coffee shops on the downtown waterfront. Over the years it has become the guide post to the waterfront. Coffee lovers flock to this java stop for the great locally roasted beans, delightful lunches and of course, location, location, location.  All day long, all year long, you will find tourists and regulars, including numerous doggies enjoying a break at one of the outdoor cafĂ© tables. This week, Mark and Colleen Balderston, co-owners with Marc Pessin, took time to talk to us about their secrets of success.

DNBIA: How long have you been in business?
Mark & Colleen: The shop has been here since 1993 when the mall was built. It was bought by Marc Pessin in 2004 and we became co-owners in 2006.

DNBIA: Can you give us a short description of your business?
Mark & Colleen:  We serve great coffee with the best view in town.

DNBIA: What sets your business aside from others in the field?
Mark & Colleen: We do everything locally. Our coffee is roasted locally by Coyotes. All the baristas are great at coffee art. We source as many of our products locally as possible to support other local businesses. Our meat comes from Pipers and Nesvogs. We buy all of our produce fresh from Thrifty Foods downtown. Our bread is all made by Bunsmasters Bakery, and Jim and Roxanne Gains prepare all of our daily soups. We keep it simple here because of our size; we don’t have room to do a lot of cooking, so we offer two soups a day , along with sandwiches, espresso and drip coffees.  We are very proud of that and what we do provide because when you are small you just have to deliver a little bit of what you do but do it very well.

DNBIA: What are your hours of operation?
Mark & Colleen: We are open seven days a week. In the summer our hours are 7am to 9 pm and in the winter, we are open from 7am to 4:30pm on weekdays and 8am to 4:30 pm on weekends.


DNBIA: How many employees do you have?
Mark & Colleen:  We have five part-time and one full-time employees. They are all Vancouver Island University students, many of whom have been with us for four or five years.  We do their schedules, but they will move them around to accommodate their schooling needs and they do a superb job and we just let them do it.  We give the staff a lot of trust, we try not to micro manage them, and they are all perfectly capable of supervising. We try to be fair and allow them to be independent and we get it all back. We couldn’t run this place without them; they are the backbone of the operation.  We work here fulltime and on our days off, we still come by and stock the shop, fix things up, of course when you own your own business you never fully relax.  But the staff is so great; they hardly call us at all – only if they are on fire.

DNBIA: What motivated you to start this business?
Mark & Colleen: I came to Nanaimo eighteen years ago; Colleen is third generation Nanaimo. We were community support workers working with challenged adults. I had owned a business in England before coming to Canada, but Colleen had never owned a business prior to this, in fact she never even drank coffee. We were friends with Marc Pessin and we decided to become co-owners and the rest is history. We are very hands on business owners. In the slower periods over the winter we do all the renovation work ourselves. We are always working at creating a warm friendly atmosphere.

DNBIA: Tell us something about yourselves that a customer may not know.
Mark: I hold the record for washing the most cloth diapers in England. My former wife and I started the very first cloth diaper service in England called Ducky Diapers and we turned it into a franchise. We understood early on how important the environment was and how great it would be to keep the nappies out of the landfill and we made up a bunch of information based on statistics we saw in America, because at that time England didn’t have stats, and before we knew it university students were quoting our advertising as fact. We thought that was pretty interesting.

DNBIA: What advice would you give to a new business starting up downtown?
Mark & Colleen: Obviously it depends on what type of business it is, but location is important. You have to try to learn as much as you can and spend as little as you can. It’s not always about the money. What we do is buy time. When business is going ok, we will buy a girl’s time to come in for a day, and give ourselves a day off. We keep our home life small so that we can do that. You have to invest a lot of time taking care of your customers. Some of our regulars like Agnes, Mal and Wes have been coming here for twenty years. Look after your staff they are everything, and look after your suppliers; you need them. Make sure you pay them on time. There will be difficult times.  In 2008 the Harbour was dead. Then we had two years of bad weather. Like everyone we have taken some hits over the years, but we don’t have lousy days anymore because we have so much local support. We saw the boaters from the US starting to come back this summer. The holiday people are wonderful, but it’s the regulars who make it work. It’s really about the locals.

allvoices

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