Wyatt Earp's Wisdom
How the Edenic team is decreasing the time it takes to make a smoothie.
“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. In a gun fight, you need to take your time in a hurry.” – Wyatt Earp
From time to time, Ash a I will pause in the smoothie shop and ask each other, “What the heck are we doing?”
These questions aren’t ill intentioned. Even after two years, we simply find it hard to believe that we are… you know… running a smoothie shop. How the heck did we get here?
Edenic really does feel like our own little slice of the Wild West. Neither of us have any service industry experience. Neither of us have any education in regards to owning a food-service business. We have never read, “How to Own and Operate a Smoothie Shop for Dummies” if such a book exists.
Our lives are one big “DIY” video as we learn how to run the shop. From the moment a customer walks through our door, to the moment they take their last sip and even down to the digestion, we want them to love every part of drinking our smoothies. By God’s grace, our smoothies have been voted best in Ventura County and we have 40+ five-star reviews on Yelp. Even so, we know we have a lot of room to improve. Specifically, we know that our wait times for smoothies can be on the longer side. We need to get them out the door quicker than we have been.
Better yet, we need to maintain the quality of our smoothies while also getting them out the door faster. As the famous cowboy, Wyatt Earp so wisely articulated, we need to take our time in a hurry.
While we have trained our staff well and taught them how to be quick, they have only every had two blenders to work with in the kitchen. Yes, you read that right – for the last 8 months, we have literally sold thousands of smoothies using only two blenders. That is mind blowing to me. It is not that we haven’t wanted to buy more. Instead, our tiny kitchen hasn’t had the capacity for another blender. There just hasn’t been anywhere we could fit it.
It’s a simple math problem. Because we only use ingredients found in God’s creation, our smoothies take an average time of 3-4 minutes to prepare. If there are six customers in line, and they each order 2 smoothies, that 6th person in line will have to wait about 21 minutes to receive their smoothie. We need to do better and have already begun to try and solve this problem.
Last weekend, The Jerry-Rigger returned to Ventura to help build a wall in the back room, which effectively created additional storage space. A substantial portion of storage was moved from the kitchen into the new storage room, which allowed us to add both a new freezer and a third blender for our “Smoothistas” to work with. Unfortunately, we did have to remove the piano and the rarely used standing desk, but we feel this is a prudent tradeoff.
Genuinely, we are thankful for every one of our customers. We sincerely hope that when you walk through our front door, you feel as though you are coming home. At the same time, we also understand that you have places you need to be. We want to serve you as best we can, and these renovations are a step towards getting smoothies in your hand faster, so you can spend less of your day waiting and more of it sipping.
We are doing our best to empower our team with the tools and coaching they need to make the best tasting smoothie in Ventura quickly. If we are going to make it in the Wild West, we need to take Earp’s advice. However, instead of slinging guns, we’re slinging smoothies, taking our time in a hurry.
Thank you for reading our story. If you enjoy our work, please do tell your friends and family to visit us in the shop. We can’t wait to see you and serve you. - Ash and Zach