If your team is asking the same questions day after day — or delivering inconsistent service — it's not a people problem. It’s a systems problem.

At Dad and the Frog Café, we built our Barista and Front-of-House (FOH) manuals not to micromanage, but to empower. These guides are the backbone of our customer experience — helping us deliver high standards without relying on memory or guesswork.

Here’s exactly what’s inside our manuals, and why you need one too.

How to Create Simple, Effective SOPs for Your Team

As a café owner, your days are full. But when something starts to slip — a KPI, customer experience, food costs — the question isn’t “What’s wrong?” It’s “Where’s the system?”

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) aren’t just a formality — they’re your most powerful tool to identify problems, correct them, and grow sustainably.

Here’s how we do it at Dad and the Frog Café.

You Will Always Be the Bottleneck — Until You Choose Not To Be

That’s the hard truth. If you don’t believe your leadership, strategy, and vision are valuable, no one else will. Your team will follow your energy. Your growth will match your belief in yourself.

Systemising your café isn’t just about checklists or training manuals — it starts with mindset. It starts with understanding that your job is to build something that doesn’t rely on you.

If you're always on the floor, you're not building a business — you're building a job. And chances are, it's a job you're underpaying yourself for.

Running a café means more than just serving stellar coffee, delicious breakfast, and lazy brunch in a cosy Surry Hills setting. It means managing real human moments—like when someone walks through your doors already having a rough day, or when something doesn’t meet their expectations.

At Dad and the Frog Café, we know that even the best cafes will, from time to time, face complaints. And here’s the truth: while the customer isn’t always right, how you respond is always your responsibility.

Running a café is more than great coffee and tasty brunch—it’s people, systems, and knowing when to pause and reassess. At Dad and the Frog, we’re in that in-between phase that a lot of small, scaling businesses hit:

• The seats are filling.

• The coffee orders are flowing.

• But behind the scenes, we’re stretched.

We’re not quite big enough to hire a whole new team member, but we’re too busy for business-as-usual. So how do we manage it?