In the Press
Coffee Bean Counters
My Business Magazine
January 1, 2003
It took 18 months for Brenda Burkhartsmeier to hire her first employees. By then, the president of Mountain Mudd, LLC, a drive-through espresso kiosk business in Billings, Mont., knew she didn’t want to work so hard.
Hiring an employee meant that Burkhartsmeier and her sister-in-law, her former business partner, could promote the business rather than keeping it afloat. “It freed us for the task of building the company,” says Burkhartsmeier, who was working 18-hour days.
In hindsight, Burkhartsmeier believes she should have hired sooner. “When you’re training yourself for every job, it’s not very effective,” she says. But she also thinks that 18 months of doing it all gave her a concrete way to grow the business. Familiar with every position, Burkhartsmeier transferred her knowledge into a training manual, and created a training department to implement her procedures.
By doing that, she had the energy to expand the business from a single location to 30 espresso kiosk locations. In time, the now-$3.5 million business grew to include a turnkey manufacturing division and a distribution and supply company that sells, services and supplies espresso kiosks nationwide.
With franchising on the horizon, Burkhartsmeier educates others about expansion, management, hiring and training based on her systems. In fact, what she learned about delegating made all the difference.
“We thought our product was the key to our success, but we realized that it was our systems and management,” says Burkhartsmeier. “It’s how you train and how you delegate that is most difficult to do. It’s also what any startup company needs in order to get to any reasonable size. If you don’t have systems in place, you can’t produce a good cup of coffee.”
