7 Steps To Opening Your Own Cat Cafe

by Caroline Vaught | Apr 27, 2019

So, you wanna open a cat cafe?

I think I speak for most cat cafe owners when I say we tend to get a lot of questions from people about how they might go about opening their own cat cafe. And we certainly had those questions ourselves when we first committed to opening Cat & Craft.

Now that we are approaching four months of being in business, I want to share some of what we’ve learned thus far. And even if you don’t have any interest in opening your own cat cafe, you might be interested to know all that goes on behind the scenes throughout the process.

So let’s get started!…

1. Get involved with a rescue or shelter as a volunteer (and give it some time)

Honestly speaking, if Andrew and I had not had the experience we did with feral momma cat Cali while we were back in Atlanta (you can read more about that here), we would not be doing this now.

Before I got involved in volunteer cat rescue work I had no idea the true scale of suffering that can take place when cats are homeless and/or not spayed or neutered. To be even more honest, it would have been easier for us both to just ignore the problem and tell ourselves we couldn’t do anything big enough to help fix it.

Not everyone is called to the same work.

That is why we are all created with different skills, and why each of us has an individual heart that is set on fire by what speaks directly to our souls.

So the first benefit of investing your time volunteering is to determine if this route is really YOUR route.

Your project, your service, your calling.

The second benefit of investing yourself in volunteer work is it naturally enables you to create a relationship with the very shelter or rescue that might need you and your dream to help accomplish their own.

Or, you might be inspired to start your own non-profit, as some cat cafes choose to do. Either way, you’ll get confirmation on whether or not you are on the right path.

2. Do your business homework

Do you need to be classified as a for-profit entity or a 501c3? Depends on what you want to accomplish and how much oversight or control you want to give others.

• What is your value proposition?
• Who are you trying to serve?
• What is your vision?

The long road ahead will be much easier traversed if you have an unwavering vision of your potential and believe in it 1000%.

Do your homework and start compiling potential operating expenses, then determine what resources you need to have access to in order to start up the business and then sustain it.

3. Leverage experts whenever possible

Not to say it hasn’t happened, but I don’t know any cat cafe owners who had an easy time leasing a commercial space for their business.

You may eat/sleep/breathe the cat cafe concept, but I’m here to remind you the vast majority of folks still have no idea what it is. Take time to put together a concise, easy to read presentation with clear visuals. You don’t have to get into your financial details but do give a basic overview of your business plan. Be a professional and offer this to any landlord who is leasing space that you are interested in.

We chose to work with a commercial broker because we had no personal experience with commercial leasing, and I didn’t want to go into any legally binding agreement with blind spots. That said, don’t depend on your broker to look out for all your interests – their job is to help you find property appropriate for your needs and to help get the landlord’s broker to see value in your business proposition (note: you may not need to work with a broker to find the right space, it all depends on where you want to be located and what is most common/acceptable in that area).

Before you enter any contract have an attorney review what you are preparing to agree to and advise you of things you might want to negotiate with the landlord before finalizing your agreement.

For example…

• Is the landlord willing to waive your monthly rent for a period of time while you apply for your building permit to make modifications to the space?
• Does the property have common area management fees and if so, do they increase year over year?
• Are you responsible for anything outside of your leased square footage?
• If something doesn’t go as planned are you allowed to sublease your space, and if so are you still responsible for all associated fees and payments?

Even with a broker and an attorney helping us, we still encountered multiple issues with our lease, and there are quite a few things I would do very differently in this respect if I started all over from scratch.

Same goes for the permitting process with city and state governmental agencies. If you want to serve any food or beverage that is not pre-packaged offsite, you’ll very likely have to deal with your state health department. Want to serve alcohol? There is a permitting process for that too.

Many city building departments won’t agree to review food service plans unless the state health department has either signed off on them, or is simultaneously reviewing them. If there is not currently a cat cafe doing business in your state, you will probably want to take the time to request a meeting with your state’s Environmental Health department.

Even though a cat cafe had already been doing business in downtown San Diego for multiple years, I still requested meetings with the San Diego Department of Environmental Health, as well as the City of Carlsbad, The City of Encinitas, and The City of Vista.

Also keep in mind anytime you submit your plans for formal review with the city or state, you will have to pay a fee – and the fees aren’t cheap. So get your ducks in a row long before you submit for your plan checks.

4. Check your compass

If you’ve made it anywhere near signing a lease and drafting plans for the build-out or remodel of your leased space, take this to heart:

As with most every decision you’ll face in life there are usually a few doors that will present themselves to you. Whichever door you choose will have its own set of consequences.

For the purpose of this post I’ll refer to these doors as follows:

1. The Easy Way
2. The Cheap Way
3. The Right Way

The “Easy” way might be cheap, and the “Cheap” way might be easy, but neither may be the “Right” way. As we got further and further into the process of drafting our food service plans (once again, you probably want to work with an expert here if you plan to face your health department and haven’t opened a cafe or restaurant before), and working with a general contractor to price out the work and materials specified by the plans, I suddenly began paying attention to ALL SORTS of other businesses and what they apparently did – or didn’t do – during their permitting and building process.

I started to get really frustrated that we were spending so much time and money to follow “the rules”, when other businesses seemed to have gotten away with not following them (a fun game for those of you in San Diego County – start tracking how many coffee shops actually have the required sneeze guards around their espresso machine and bean grinders).

So all of this to say, prepare yourself for what you are going to do if you face these doors. In our case, we felt it was important to do things by the book even if that meant sacrificing more money or something else that we had wanted, because the potential consequence of not getting our building permit, or delaying our opening date, or worse – running the risk of being shut down during future inspections – was too much of a jeopardy to our overall cause.

5. There will be delays

The sooner you accept this, the less sleep, hair, and overall well-being you will have to say goodbye to. I don’t remember how many delays we encountered, but I do remember touring something like 24 properties in four different city jurisdictions, making offers on six properties and moving to negotiations on two during an 11 month time period.

We signed our lease in May of 2018, and architectural / food service plans weren’t complete until July. Plan check with the health department took two weeks, and we had to resubmit a 2nd time because they wanted to know more about the exhaust fans we selected for the restrooms.

City plan check took six weeks, and we had to resubmit to them too because of our 2nd submission to the health department. We started demolition in July but couldn’t put in a single piece of pipe or new plywood until we had our building permit from the city, which happened in September.

Then we went through 5 or 6 construction schedule revisions because materials were delayed, subcontractors didn’t measure correctly the first time, or something specified on the plans – once built in actuality – had to be re-configured. We got so down-to-the-wire that we literally opened our doors two days after passing our final health inspection and receiving our temporary occupancy permit from the City of Vista. We were sooo not prepared but we were out of time and money – rent had to be paid and more importantly cats were waiting for homes – so off to the races we went with our fingers crossed and pants afire!

6. Cats are not widgets

An espresso machine is fairly predictable. It works exactly how it’s supposed to when you take proper care of it and follow directions (unless you have a really fancy, really expensive, sports car of an espresso machine).

Cats, no matter how closely you follow the very best practices of care, will never ever behave in a way that is totally predictable. You will spend the vast majority of your time playing ‘wack-a-mole’ with various unplanned circumstances regarding the health and well being of the cats (as you should if your heart is in it for them).

Just like all living, breathing creatures, even when all controllable variables are the same, each and every day is different. One day everyone is happy and chill, the next day three kiddos are vomiting, one keeps picking a fight with the new guy, and another has suddenly decided to pee on the new rug you got.

Each time a cat is adopted out and a new foster moves in, the whole scene resets to “God Only Knows What’s Next”. It may sound funny but if you are not prepared for this it can be a very real drain on time and attention that might be needed elsewhere in your business to keep things running properly. Which leads me to…

7. You’ll need good people

Unless you can accomplish 3 – 5 things at once, have eyes in all sides of your head, and can be in two places simultaneously, you will need a team of people to support you.

We often get questions from people asking if they can volunteer for us. Whether or not you hire employees or recruit volunteers is a decision you will need to make based on your organization’s classification / license and state requirements.

For example, in California the state can issue you a monetary fine if it finds you have non-compensated workers doing a job that paid laborers could equally effectively do. Personally, I feel better providing compensation to people who I depend on to execute our mission, because it keeps agreements clear and everyone on equal footing.

We are so lucky to have amazing employees both behind our coffee bar and in the cat lounge (you can meets some of them here and here). They bought into our vision at the start, and they value being a part of the mission. Without each and every one of them we would not be able to provide the experience we want to give to the cats in our care and the guests who support us.

Bonus: Ready fire aim

I’ll wrap up with this: Timing will never be perfect. Conditions will never be perfect.

Like the Nike slogan says, ‘Just do it!’

Sometimes you just have to start the work and course-correct along the way. We’re very grateful for the support of our families, our team, our vendors, our rescue partner and all who have contributed work towards our vision.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or find myself or Andrew at the cafe during your next visit.