Meet Tim LaPrade of Jitters Cafe in Melrose

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim LaPrade.

Tim, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Growing up in Sterling, MA, I started working in the restaurant industry once I could back when I was 15. Starting off in the kitchen as a dishwasher and helping with some prep work for the cooks at the local country club. During college I jumped onto the other side of the fence and began waiting tables, which I would continue to do for the next 10 years. After graduating from the University of Vermont I began my career in the finance/accounting field, yet I’d still wait tables at night as I felt that was my true passion, being around a kitchen and serving people food.

Two months into dating my current wife, I told her there was a place available in her town for a coffee/sandwich shop and that I’d be looking into it, and likely moving in with her if things went well. They did. 5 years later business has increased every year and we have our first child on the way!

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
My main focus every day is to give people something that just makes them say, ‘Wow, this is the best’. I strive to find new things to make returning customers to come back and still get surprised at what we do next. Being a small coffee/sandwich shop, peoples’ reviews and recommendations have a great influence on our success. We are very grateful our customers come in with someone new and say they HAD to bring them to this new place they discovered. Every now and again there’s a bad egg. Either a customer or an employee has been having a bad day.

Online reviews are tough when you’re starting out. If you start off with a handful of bad reviews, others may not even give you the chance. People are ruthless when they’re in front of their computer as they feel the need to crush your business with a 1 star review because they felt you didn’t know how to run a business and you ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. What they don’t realize is that perhaps one or two employees called in sick, and the coffee machine began leaking water all over the floor, and apparently the entire town decided to all come in at the same second to get a late lunch. Things happen. And we’ve been doing our best at handling all situations and being able to provide our customers a reason to keep coming back. Our staff has been great recently at working thru issues that pop up with the main focus of always taking care of the customer. We never want anyone leaving disappointed.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Jitters Cafe story. Tell us more about the business.
Jitters Cafe is a specialty coffee shop with breakfast sandwiches and gourmet Paninis. We don’t own a microwave. All of our breakfast sandwiches are come with eggs we’re cracking and cooking to order. Everything is made to order. Everyone wants something different, but everyone also wants something fresh. So we’re cutting all of the toppings to order, and making all of the salads from scratch when they’re ordered. The Sergeant, named after our German shepherd, is our most famous sandwich. Ham, egg, pepper jack cheese and homemade honey mustard all baked on a croissant. Our lunch menu is providing people more options than the typical pizza joint you’d find in every town. We’re using the best ingredients we can get; from Boar’s Head meats for all of our sandwiches, to our bread being delivered every morning from the local bakeries.

We always look for things to improve on and how to do things that others aren’t doing. Last year when the major coffee companies began pushing Cold Brew coffee and running commercials on it every ten minutes, we decided to go one step further. We found some local companies to help us out and take it one step further. Our coffee roaster, Atomic Cafe (Beverly, MA) teamed up with another local startup, Leanbox, and we’ve all partnered up in getting Cold Brew and Nitro coffee on tap. Atomic Cafe found the best way to provide customers with the freshest Cold Brew and Nitro was to put it into kegs where air won’t enable it to go stale after a day or two. It was an obvious decision to go with them, and the kegs of iced coffee to not only provide our customers with the freshest, best tasting iced coffee, but to also make sure we aren’t running out by 11am like some national coffee shops may do….

Always looking to improve the business, we knew this year we had to jump into the App department. We’ve created a Jitters Cafe app for all of our customers to be able to pre-order. People hate waiting in lines and this was the easiest way to give them the option not to. Users can open our app, place their order and pay for it all from their couch. They can even do it the night before and tell us when they want it ready in the morning on their way to work. When they arrive to the store, they run in, skip the line, and literally grab-and-go. Online ordering has been a great addition and enabled a lot of regulars to easily get in and out when they’re in a rush.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I don’t feel luck has taken too much or a role in Jitters Cafe. From the 100 hour work weeks I was doing for the first 6 months, or my wife, Jenna, jumping in and working 7 days a week as well, we didn’t ‘get lucky’. We worked for it, and we continue to do so. Jenna and I RARELY get a day off, and even when we do, something pops up where we have to take time and fix something. Jenna has her own full-time career in downtown Boston, yet ever since I got those keys, she was helping me every weekend. I had a dream, and we built it. Together. Perhaps I was ‘lucky’ to find someone that would sacrifice all of their time off for my dream. That’s about all the luck there was though. We’ve both sacrificed vacations, days off, come home from weekend getaways early and every other miserable thing you can imagine. That’s what you get when you run a business. It runs you, and you just need to be strong and smart enough to not let it ruin you. Find amazing staff, provide customers with something they can’t get elsewhere, and make sure everyone, employees included, leave with a smile on their face. That’s when success comes and continues.

Contact Info:

• Address: 12 Main Street
  Melrose, MA
• Website: www.jitters-cafe.com
• Phone: 781-605-2578
• Email: tim@jitters-cafe.com
• Instagram: @jitterscafe
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JittersCafeInc/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/jitters-cafe-melrose

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