Digitising Operations for The Caffeine Experience

From WhatsApp threads and paper checklists to one operating system three outlets actually run on.

Client overview

The client is The Caffeine Experience, a social enterprise and café that helps former offenders find employment and restart their lives. Founder Matthew Poh built it on a simple premise: work that is easy to learn, stable, and dignified. The business grew to several cafés and a large population of resident cats.

Growth created an operations problem. Three trading locations, plus a kitchen, an events pipeline, and a rotating team of managers, all coordinated by WhatsApp messages, handwritten closing sheets, and spreadsheets that only the person who built them understood.

The brief was not "install Notion". It was: give a manager who has never used a project tool a single page that tells them what to do today, and give the founder a reliable view of what actually happened yesterday.

"I could start another interior design firm, but the ex-offenders wouldn't be able to do the job, given the technicalities. I needed something easy to learn." — Matthew Poh, Founder

Challenges

• Daily performance lived in chat — sales, ticket counts, and staffing were typed into WhatsApp and lost within a week.
• Reporting was inconsistent across outlets. Each location used its own closing format, so nothing could be compared.
• No shared task record. Verbal handovers meant repeated work and dropped follow-ups on suppliers, permits, and equipment returns.
• Projects had no owner or end state. Reviews, closures, and handovers ran for months with no visible completion.
• Events and catering bookings sat in a manager's head and personal calendar, with pricing and pax counts scattered across messages.
• Staff wellbeing was invisible. Nobody could see that the same manager had closed several nights running in a poor state.
• Onboarding depended on one person explaining everything verbally, which does not scale in a team with high turnover by design.

Solution: one manager's dashboard

Everything a manager needs sits on a single numbered page, in the order they use it. Nine sections, one screen, no training deck.

1. Announcement board. Founder-level instructions pinned at the top: start the day with the report, plan the day, close the day with the report. Date-stamped so the team knows it is current.
2. Events calendar. One database for bookings, redemptions, corporate catering, and renovation windows. Pricing and pax detail live on the record, not in a chat thread. Dozens of events were captured in the first cycle, including recurring cat therapy sessions for a client.
3. Weekly staff schedule. Rosters generated week by week with a date-ending property, so the current week is always the first thing a manager sees.
4. Routine reports. The core of the system. A daily report per outlet, due by 4pm, capturing sales, tickets, staff on shift, morning check-in, evening checkout, and points reported. Filing held up across every outlet through the first quarter of use.
5. Projects. Timed initiatives with an owner, a date range, a status, and a rolled-up completion percentage. Several live projects at handover, from an outlet performance review to a seasonal redemption campaign.
6. Task list. Ad-hoc work assigned to a named person with a due date, linked back to its project where one exists.
7. Personal notes. A private space per manager so working notes stop landing in group chats.
8. Daily form. Structured intake so the daily numbers arrive clean, without free-text drift between outlets.
9. Directory. Staff documents, meeting notes, and reference material connected to the people and projects they belong to.

How the system holds itself together

• Relations do the admin. Tasks connect to projects, projects connect to documents, documents connect to staff, so the same fact is entered once.
• Rollups replace status meetings. Project completion is calculated from linked tasks instead of being reported verbally.
• Templates enforce the format. Daily reports, meeting notes, and weekly schedules are duplicated from a template, so structure survives staff changes.
• Views replace instructions. Each manager sees only their outlet, their week, and their open tasks.
• Reports are dated on submission, which makes late filing visible without anyone having to police it.
• Checkout mood is a first-class field, turning wellbeing into data the founder can act on.

Results

Founder's perspective

Conclusion

The Caffeine Experience did not need a sophisticated system. It needed a legible one — built for a team that changes often, learns on the job, and cannot afford tooling that requires a specialist. One dashboard, nine sections, three outlets on the same daily rhythm.

The social mission is the point of the business. The operating system is what gives it room to grow.