See you tomorrow at 5am
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Simplify
I first met Dan Land, one of the co-founders of the coffeeshop chain Coco di Mama, at the end of his first day as an entrepreneur. I was having a beer after work in the pub next door and along came Dan handing out leftover sandwiches1 to the drinkers, telling them to come to Coco for coffee the next morning. And so that first Coco di Mama on Fleet Street became my go-to coffee stop on the way to work throughout 2011 and 2012. It was the place Katie and I would plot the early course of 9others for a couple of hours before heading to our respective day-jobs.
Getting to know Dan and seeing Coco thrive was a joy. He would tell me about how he’d hang around Prêt-à-Manger stores to observe the best staff and try to poach them. I also have a great work-ethic-to-exit story for another time (Dan and his co-founder Jeremy grew Coco to 20-odd stores and exited to private equity in 2017).
Today I wanted to share the clever way Dan would filter then select new staff members.
Without fail, how to hire the best people comes up at meals with 9others every single time. As we discuss these hiring challenges the solutions often become more and more complicated — added steps, filters, tests, opinions. However, anyone can add things — what if you removed nearly every part of the hiring process?
Onto the Coco di Mama hiring hack:
Typically people who want to work in coffee shops walk in, CV in hand, and ask if there are any job vacancies.
Without fail Dan would always say yes and chat to the candidate for a minute or two.
Simply by asking where they'd worked before, what they thought of Coco and what they might add to the team would give him a good enough gut feel to know immediately if he wanted to go to the next stage.
The next stage was Dan saying, “OK, great — come back at 5am tomorrow — that’s when we start work”.
And so with that, they were ‘hired’.
What this actually did was a couple of things:
If the candidate showed up at 4:55am, was well presented and ready to go then that was a great sign. If they didn't show up then the ‘sunk cost’ for Dan was just that minute or two the day before, and not hours of CV reading, interviewing, pondering and discussion with his Co-founder.
Coco coffeeshops opened at 6am and always got very busy very quickly — that first one was right opposite Goldman Sachs and the folks there love an early start. So by 7am at the latest Dan would know whether the person was going to be worth keeping — he could see how they talked to his staff and customers plus he’d get a sense about whether they could be trained to make a decent flat white. All being well the new member of staff would last the whole morning shift and would want to sign a contract. Job done.
A lot of time is wasted talking and deliberating when hiring. I know tech startups might need more a slightly more rigorous hiring process with all the ML, AI and all the rest involved but since hearing Dan’s story I always encourage the startups I meet and invest in to try and get as close to Dan’s hiring hack as they can.
Incidentally: Kudos to Unplugged (one of my portfolio) for going with a no-CV, two-question hiring approach, here. It was Hector’s post, here, that reminded me of Dan’s ‘See you at 5am’ hack — subscribe to Hector’s SubStack and I’m sure he’ll update us in due course…
Important: None of these posts are investment advice. If you are thinking about investing you should seek the advice of a suitably qualified independent advisor.
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I actually have a sneaky suspicion those ‘left-over sandwiches’ were a very deliberate marketing ploy made just for us drinkers — I’ll have to remember to ask Dan next time I see him.