NDM Interview Series | Daniel Martin, Store Manager at Heine Brothers’ Coffee

An inside look at real-time communications and company culture in retail and hospitality.

Daniel Martin, a Store Manager at Heine Bros. Coffee, joined the Non-Desk Matters team for lunch to share his perspective and insights as a store manager at a rapidly growing coffee chain in the Midwest.

Topics we discussed:

• His awesome skills dishing out fried fish via drive-thru
• Why someone might leave a high earning retail management position to be a restaurant server
• The unhelpful reality of email overload
• How his team uses real-time mobile communication to manage the store every day
• And more…

Hannah: To kick things off today, what was your very first job?

Daniel: My first job was at Long John Silver’s. I was a drive-thru king. I got people in and out of that line. I worked there for almost two years, from when I was 16 to when I graduated high school. It was a good experience.

I still think about my boss. She was an incredible person, and every time I count change I think about her because she taught me this really quick way to count change. She would just spread every coin out on the table and it was a quick way to count it all.

Hannah: Is she part of why you stayed there for two years?

Daniel: Yeah. She was like a second mother.

Hannah: That’s really cool.

Daniel: She was really sweet.

Hannah: So, how long have you been at Heine Brothers’?

Daniel: I’ve been with Heine Brothers’ since September 2017.

Hannah: Tell me about your job prior to this one.

Daniel: I actually lived in Chicago, and the last half of my time in Chicago, I served at a restaurant. It was an amazing place. We were all like a big family there. I started out there as a barista and moved over to serving because that’s where the money was. We had amazing regulars; it was a booming neighborhood spot. I think we were featured in some show on Food Network. I don’t know which one, but it was a big deal. We did wood-fired pizzas, great cocktails, and hand made pasta at night, and during the day we served Dark Matter Coffee which is a little Chicago coffee roastery, and we did amazing brunch. It a great place.

Hannah: That sounds awesome. Did you transition from working there directly into a management role at Heine Brothers’?

Daniel: I did. I have management experience from my days at American Apparel. I worked there for five years as a district manager for Chicago. I was in charge of seven stores and a little over 200 employees.

Hannah: Was Chicago a pretty big market for American Apparel at the time?

Daniel: It was. All the stores did pretty well. It wasn’t a Los Angeles or New York City, but it was a big deal.

Hannah: Was that a stressful job?

Daniel: It definitely was. I worked 70+ hours a week. I had to know what was going on in each of these stores and all the stores were very different. We had a suburban store that was tucked away in a tiny little storefront right next to a J.C. Penney’s in a mall. So, sales struggled a little bit because it was kind of hidden and so small. But then again, we also had a massive location close to Michigan Ave that was two stories and a really big deal.

Hannah: So you had to manage seven different stores at that time. How did you physically manage that? Were you driving between different locations every day?

Daniel: Yes. Driving all around. I had a store manager at each location and I was in charge of everything else. You could look at me as an operations manager too, even though the official title was District Manager. I would just sneak in [to a store] whenever. A lot of times I would tell them when I was coming; sometimes I wouldn’t, it just depended on who I knew was working at the time and if I felt like I needed to do that.

Hannah: How did you communicate with your store manager in that role?

Daniel: Mainly through email. All the managers had an Outlook account. So it was a lot of e-mails, and no read receipts so I had no idea if people were reading the things they should be reading or not.

Hannah: And there was probably also a lot of other stuff coming in from corporate, and spam, etc.? Probably a lot of noise too.

Daniel: Tons of files. I don’t think I deleted a single e-mail whether it was junk or not I put it in a special folder just in case. If I went two or three days without organizing or cleaning my inbox out, it was a nightmare. I would have to dedicate hours to cleaning out my email if I let it go for even a couple of days.

Hannah: Which was probably not a good use of your time.

So in your job now at Heine Brothers, what are some of the biggest challenges that you have?

Daniel: Since I’m a new manager coming in and taking the place of someone who had been there for years, the biggest challenge is making things my own. I’m a fresh set of eyes, so there are things that I noticed immediately that needed to change. Simple things, like how certain things were merched in the stores, and how certain drinks were made. It can be a challenge to get everybody on the same page because it’s a bigger staff.

Hannah: Was that challenging since the old manager was there for so long? Were people resistant to change?

Daniel: I think most people in that situation that aren’t managers are kind of resistant to change because they don’t know what to expect. I’m sure they were comfortable in their ways. I’m not saying that in a negative way. But I think that a lot of people were receptive to certain things. For example, I came in I’m like, “I want to move this here and I want to paint the store a different color.” They were all for those positive changes.

Hannah: Tell me about how you communicate with your team members.

Daniel: 100 percent Red e App. We don’t e-mail each other. We don’t text each other. Red e App messages come through just as a text message would, but you don’t have to worry about having everybody’s contact information on your phone. If for some reason there’s turnover you don’t want to have all these numbers in your phone.

Hannah: How often are you communicating with your team through Red e App?

Daniel: Several times a day. We use it to fill open shifts. If I see something that I don’t like that needs to change immediately, I’ll take a picture of it and send it out. I send a lot of pictures through Red e App. Sometimes the negative is followed by a positive picture like, “It should look like this instead,” and I will include a description underneath the picture of why this is incorrect and how to do it the right way.

Hannah: What is the best part about working for Heine Brothers?

Daniel: Working for an amazing group of people. Everybody in the company cares for everybody. I feel like it’s so cliche to say it’s a big family, but it really is. Everyone is so accessible, including Mike Mays, the co-founder, and really anybody in the company at any time. And I think that’s pretty amazing. I don’t ever feel like I should be biting my nails, like, “Oh I don’t know if I should contact this person or if they’re really busy.” It’s very relaxed but professional.

Hannah: So, have you worked in environments where that was the case?

Daniel: Absolutely - American Apparel.

Hannah: Not exactly like a family?

Daniel: Complete opposite.

Hannah: I’m sure a lot of people have heard the stories about what that culture was like. It sounds like pretty much the opposite of where you are now. Do you think that that experience made you look for an environment that was more like Heine Brothers?

Daniel: It did, and I think that’s actually why I stuck at the restaurant in Chicago for so long. I went from district manager to serving. The money was good, but it was a big change. It was what I needed at the time.

Hannah: Yeah, come out of that space and detox.

Daniel: Yeah.

Hannah: At American Apparel, when you would get so many emails, how much of that communication was relevant to you?

Daniel: Not all of it. Several e-mails were not relevant to any situation I would be in. Different stores have different needs, and some of those e-mails had nothing to do with any of the stores in Chicago. An email I received might have something to do with the weather in Costa Rica.

Hannah: You were spending time on messages that weren’t even relevant to you. That’s a waste of time for sure.

We were driving over here and we were talking about what happened with Starbucks recently. If you don’t mind sharing, how you guys have talked about that incident and has there been communication throughout Heine Brothers about that?

Daniel: There has. It was sent out as an example of how managers shouldn't jump the gun on calling the police. You should try to take care of it and use your best judgment.

Hannah: So, a message was sent through Red e App addressing the situation and making recommendations of how you guys could handle something like that?

Daniel: Absolutely. There’s always chatter because similar situations will come up. Not relating to the manager, but just people coming in off the street and causing a ruckus of some sort. We communicate with each other and give a heads up to everyone else in case that same person might come into another location.

Hannah: Safety precautions.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Hannah: Last question: If you could trade jobs with anyone in the world, who would you trade jobs with?

Daniel: Oh my gosh, I would be a famous musician, but I don’t know which one. I think I’ve always felt that in me and I will always sing in my car on the way to work. But that is about as close as I am going to get to that.

Thanks for sharing your experience and perspective with us, Daniel!