Gocha’s Breakfast Bar

Restaurant Name: Gocha’s Breakfast Bar

Employees: 65

Owner: Gocha Hawkins

Location: Decatur, GA

Gocha’s breakfast bar is the dream of Gocha (pronounced Go-Shay) to create a breakfast/lunch inspired restaurant. Gocha was bothered that her Southwest Atlanta community, Cascade, had limited dining options whenever she wanted breakfast. The owner of Gocha’s Hair Salon, paid close attention to the influx of fast food chains in the area, noticing the lack of upscale places to eat that serve locally sourced food and savory signature cocktails. So she set out to make her dream her reality and started her own place.

It’s all been her, from the beginning, developing the recipes, creating the brand, and building a business. She oversees a staff of over 60 people, and has two locations and a food truck. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Problem is, things are always going wrong and she’s not sure why. It also seems that there’s a big difference between the quality of the service and food when she is there vs when she isn’t. That’s a big disconnect and a big problem for a business owner who wants to scale up.  

Because she can’t oversee that many people by herself, Gocha has promoted her friend, Shanteria, to her director of operations. However, she’s suspicious Shanteria isn’t properly training the new hires. That means if middle management is poorly training managers, that trickles down to servers, expediters, prep cook, bussers, etc. Food will be late. It will be incorrect. And not to mention, she’s become aware of behavior that’s unacceptable and offensive that could cost her BIG time. She’s been aware of employees drinking on the job. Smoking cigarettes and not washing their hands between shifts. Putting expired ingredients in with fresh ingredients. If the food inspector does an inspection they’re not up to code, it could mean Gocha shutting down the business. This is Gocha’s entire world and as a single, female entrepreneur she’s living her dream. She just needs it to survive.

Additionally, Gocha is dealing with poor reviews regarding her food and drinks, which is sad and unfortunate because these are Gocha’s personal, hand-made and hand-tested recipes. She takes bad-reviews personally. And because everything is fresh and made to order, there is more room for error as it relates to executing Gocha’s hand-crafted recipes. And because the restaurant runs on a limited scheduled (they’re only open for breakfast and lunch) they ONLY have a rush crowd. Every minute counts when you’re not open all the time. On any given weekend there are long wait times, a backed up kitchen, cold food and frustrated guests. Gocha knows that she has a great product and a great concept, but if she wants to scale and expand in the way that she’s hoping to, she’ll need some real help- from the inside out!