Passion & Technology: The Secret to St. Judes Cafe’s 10-year Success

For nearly ten years, St. Judes has been serving delectable coffee and breakfasts to the people of Redfern.

As a popular local haunt, with a swathe of loyal customers that grows each year, St Judes is the ideal place for a morning coffee or long weekend breakfast. The secret to their success? A dedicated team that is passionate about delivering consistently good experiences, powered by a POS that makes it easy for the business to thrive.

We sat down with Adam Celestino, owner of St. Judes, to chat about the challenges he faces as a business owner and how Lightspeed has been instrumental in helping his business grow.

Passion and challenge

For many of us in hospitality, we’re in it for the love of the industry and the passion it drives within us, and the same goes for Adam.

Having started working in a pizza shop at age 14, Adam never really left the industry and now owns four venues across Sydney, including St. Judes. 

“It’s been a lot of hard work,” comments Adam. “Especially over the last couple of years… you really have to learn on your feet, and you go through all the problems of hospitality that everybody goes through.” 

While working in hospitality is often a career of passion, it’s not always the easiest industry to work in – especially when you’re an owner juggling multiple tasks.

“A lot of owners don’t really realise how much of a struggle it is at the start, especially while you’re building.”

Managing costs and margins

One of Adam’s biggest challenges is the ever-changing face of his costs and margins. 

“[It’s difficult], with margins changing daily and cost changing daily.” 

With inflation and supply chain disruptions continually impacting costs, keeping on top of these numbers can be a demanding and time-consuming process.

“Hospitality is ever-changing. Margins change quickly. Suppliers will put prices up very fast without you knowing.  CPI increases. You’ve just got so much to worry about. So you need real-time data.”

In the past, Adam had to manually trawl through emails, invoices and delivery dockets to collate his costs and calculate his margins.

“10 years ago, you had to search in a lot of places to find all this data about what’s going on, where your margins are. You had to go through emails and actually check physical invoices because that’s how it used to come through.” 

Now, Lightspeed does all this for him – saving precious hours that he can reinvest into the business.

“This is a big thing about Lightspeed… now you can run the whole business [from the platform].”

Intuitive tech drives an efficient business

For Adam, it’s imperative to have an easy-to-use system that his staff can pick up quickly to perform their jobs efficiently.

“Lightspeed, I feel, is like an iOS, it’s like using an iPhone almost. The way it works, it’s so intuitive… Everyone can use it straight away. It’s so easy to use.”

Thanks to Lightspeed’s intuitive, user-friendly interface, it’s quick and easy for new staff to familiarise themselves with the platform – which means less training time, boosting productivity.

“It’s massive not having to train staff. Pretty much new staff can come in, and if they know how to use an iPhone, they’ll figure out how to use this. It’s so intuitive and so easy and very user-friendly.”

Accurate, embedded payments save time and money

In hospitality, time is money, and every second that can be saved or optimised means more cash for your bottom line. 

As a busy cafe, St. Judes needs to quickly processes transactions to keep queues short and minimise customer wait times.

With their old payments system, the team were spending unnecessary time having to manually punch in the price of each order into their payment terminal. Not only was this time-consuming, but it was also prone to human error, creating variances.

With Lightspeed’s embedded payment system, St. Judes has overcome all of these issues.

“We’ve had Lightspeed payments now for a month, and it’s saved us double the time because you only input into Lightspeed and boom, the payments are there for the customer.” 

“It’s all [embedded] through the POS system properly now. So yeah, we’re saving heaps of time.”

Not only has Lightspeed Payments saved time, but it also ensures accuracy, minimising variances and making reconciliation a breeze for the team at St. Judes.

“Variances just don’t exist anymore because everything runs through the POS… it’s just made it so much easier.” 

“We get the reports every single day about what’s come through, and it’s just brought everything into one bit of software, one spot for us to see everything that we want.”

The tools to grow

For Adam (and countless other hospitality owners), it often feels like there’s never enough time in the day. You’re constantly juggling multiple tasks and wearing several hats – from team management to accounting and business analysis. 

However, with the help of Lightspeed, Adam no longer has to be on-site to conduct time-consuming, manual tasks – he can leave his team to it and focus on growing the business.

“As an owner of a business, you used to have to be on-site a lot of the time to check everything. Now that we’re very cashless, you can actually pretty successfully run a business if you have good staff and managers from a bit of a distance and let them do their thing without being there every day.”

With many of his usual time-consuming tasks now automated through Lightspeed, Adam is empowered to reinvest his time in focusing on the growth of St. Judes.

“It makes it so much easier to grow because, as an owner, your time is taken up doing a lot of tasks that now are just completely automated that you don’t even have to do. Barely have to be on-site to look at a lot of things.”

“Having Lightspeed, I don’t know why everyone’s not using it, to be honest, because it’s great.”