American Latino Magazine Food and Beverage Issue | Page 16

¿Tomas Cafe?

“A Family Business”
especially on the weekends. After
about a year there, that’s when we
started building this place. It took
us about a year to build it up and we
opened it in February 2001.
I was very fortunate that I had moreor-less a blank check during that first
year of the business. The whole family
helped out. That first year we didn’t
really have a big overhead - no rent or
employees. The first year we were in
business it was more or less coffee and
pastries. We kept it that way for the
first five or six years. It was a coffeehouse experience with a very simple
menu. But it worked, people came
in, it was fast.
Tom Garcia

Even our family, we would end up
going somewhere to eat.

We started to learn little by little.
Whether we knew it or not, we were
doing things right and keeping it
simple. People liked it. You only have
a very short time to really wow your
customers, to really grab their attention. Even so, that first year was very
hard. That time is very crucial, when
you only have so much money to keep
going. We worked a lot of hours. It’s
easy to fail, so it’s good to do as much
homework as you can before. You
really need to study your business and
other businesses. It’s important to not
fall in love with an idea just because
you see another business doing it. You
have to decide if it fits the market you
have - what’s selling in your area.

Before that, we had a friend that
owned some coffee houses in downtown Ventura that needed some help.
So when I was 20 years old I went to
work for her and I got the experience
of working in a coffeehouse. I was
a nighttime manager. It was a great
place to learn, right next to the movie
theater downtown. It was a busy place,

I went to Le Cordon Bleu and finished
in 2006. Around 2008, we decided to
expand our menu. We did it pretty
much overnight. We used to have
different groups use the area and renting out offices. When one of our big
groups left, I realized I could expand
our restaurant area by taking out
some walls and rearranging things,

M

y father was always a
big influence in my life
and he had envisioned
having a coffee house,
more or less, tied to his mortuary. A
place where people come in, drink
coffee and relax. He ended up buying
this building. It was pretty run down.
At first the idea was to renovate it and
rent out offices. But at the time, there
was really no place close by for people
to come and hang out after the service, especially at night.

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AMERICAN LATINO MAGAZINE • BRINGING PEOPLE, BUSINESS AND CULTURE TOGETHER

then I could open for breakfast. After
a while, the former owner of Uncle
Herb’s came in and helped us out for
a year. Once we started doing breakfast, I limited the hours and we started
opening on weekends. That whole
year, we were open seven days a week.
We were very busy and we had a great
business.
When the recession hit, we limited
our hours and started closing on
Tuesdays. We made some changes to
sharpen the business up a little bit.
And that’s where we are now, recovering from that time. Business is starting to build back up, but the weekends
have stayed busy pretty much the
entire time. Now we’re revisiting the
idea of going back to the original intent of being open later at night. That
does work, the coffeehouse, fast food
model.
As a business owner, when I see a
need, I try to fill it. We used to go to
Uncle Herb’s for breakfast all the time
and when it closed down, I felt I could
do the same thing. Breakfast is more
profitable than dinner.
Right now, I do see a need in the
downtown area for a coffeehouse. So
I’m looking for a way to bring back
that part of my business. I also think
that we need to do a better job of promoting the positive changes in
Oxnard. Focus on the good things
that Oxnard has like the beautiful
beaches, great climate, clean, safe
streets and a good business environment. In the last 5 to 10 years, I think
Oxnard has really turned the corner
in changing how they are perceived.

Every year, every six months, you
got to look at what’s trending out
there. See what works and what
doesn’t work. Take action, make
that happen. Here we’ve made
a lot of changes, we’ve grown,
adapted.
It’s very important to act.
What would you tell someone that
wants to start their own business?
First of all, I would congratulate them
on taking that risk. Then, I would suggest that they work for someone to try
to get the experience. Learn about the
business. Know your clientele, what
they want, know how much they are
able to spend in a certain area. Make
sure the space you want works for
your bus