Mosh Café soft opening today

The café, named Mosh Cafe by the Café Studies students at Guilford Young College (GYC), had its ‘soft opening’ today, with invited family and friends attending. Rita was amongst the lucky invited customers.

The café is one of the many Young Achievement Australia (YAA) businesses run within schools and colleges round Australia.

The idea is that any school or college think up a do-able and viable business which some students are interested in participating in, hands-on, and which will make money. The students learn the intricacies of writing a Business Plan; naming and registering the business; establishing the business’ bank account and learning about what is involved in financial transactions relevant to businesses; marketing their business; team work, as they get the business planned and started; selling shares in the business to family and friends; running their weekly board meeting, and the list goes on.

Normally, food-related ventures are not encouraged, but as GYC already had the construction of a commercial kitchen onsite underway, this café venture was permitted, so the students have been working their butts off, training to run all aspects of their café, from front of house, to kitchen, to administration.

All 16 students in the class have varying degrees of enthusiasm, talent and skills. Rita was invited, at the outset, to mentor the class, so has attended their class every week for the past 4 months.

The culmination was todays ‘soft opening’. Rita was so tense, and itching to jump up and help out, but that would defeat the whole purpose of it being a training exercise for these up and coming young entrepreneurs, so she sat very firmly on her hands and watched intently as they went about their business.

They kicked arse! I was so proud of them. I know I‘m not their mum, but I felt today like all 16 of my kids were being put through their paces.

Naturally there were many glitches, but they were minor in the scheme of things. Overall these kids did SO well.

The café will open every Thursday lunch time, for the students and their families, if they want to come along. It will be wound up in October, and all will then be deconstructed.

The nett result will be a group of young people extremely well versed in most aspects of business, and specifically hospitality. They should have the right attitude for work in the industry, and be well aware of the reasons why we do many of the things we do in hospitality. They will be aware of customer service. They are already looking at restaurants and cafes they go to through totally different eyes.

Last weekend, their teacher Aaron took them to Melbourne. They lunched at Fifteen (the Jamie Oliver restaurant), they dinnered at Vue de Monde. They experienced many sights that many of us will never get round to experiencing. They had a wow of a time. That’s what I call a REAL Café Studies class!

These are young people anyone should be proud to have on staff. I would employ any of them.