Friday is coming.
Your café needs one plan.

Situation

A student influencer just messaged the café: "Happy to post tonight. What's the offer?" Most of their followers are students who will be at the festival. Even if only a few of them come, Friday could be the café's busiest day of the month.

But the café has one coffee machine, a manager who is out sick, and a coffee delivery that might be late. Say yes with no limits, and the café could get more customers than it can handle and lose money on the discount. Say no, and the café misses its best chance to get new customers. There is a middle path: say yes, but with rules. Pick a clear offer, limit how many people can use it, and choose a time window that avoids the busiest hours.

This choice shapes every task after it. The number of customers you expect here is the number the team will plan around for workers, prices, and coffee orders. If this number is off, the rest of the plan will be off too.

Bring four facts to the table: how many people the post can reach (Marketing), how many drinks the machine can make (Operations), who is working Friday (Human Resources), and how much the café earns on each cup after the discount (Finance). Then ask two questions. How many extra customers can the café serve well? Which offer brings in about that many?

What is at stake: More customers is not always better. If the promotion causes long lines, empty shelves, worn-out workers, or a discount that loses money, the café ends up worse off.

Should the café accept, change, or reject the influencer's promotion?

Situation

Friday will not be busy all day. Festival crowds come in waves: a slow morning, a big lunch rush, a quiet stretch, and another rush late in the afternoon. During a rush, more people may want coffee than the café can make.

Two things limit how many customers you can serve. The coffee machine can only make so many drinks an hour. The workers can only take orders, make drinks, and hand them out so fast, and there are fewer workers in the afternoon. The smaller of these two numbers is your real limit. Go past it, and lines get long and mistakes happen.

Take the low, base, and high customer estimates from Task 1 and think about when those people will show up. Then compare your two limits: how many drinks the machine can make and how many customers the workers can serve during a rush. The smaller number is the most customers your café should plan to serve.

That number matters for every task after this one. It tells you how many workers you need, what to charge, how much coffee to order, and how big your promotion can be.

What is at stake: The café can only serve as many customers as its weakest link allows. A fast machine does not help if there are not enough workers to run it.

How many customers might come, and how many can the café serve without long waits or worn-out workers?

Situation

Ana was supposed to run the café on Friday, but she is sick. Malik can open and lead the morning, but he has to leave before the afternoon rush, when the smaller crew faces the second crowd. From the moment he leaves until closing, someone must be in charge. That person approves refunds, pauses the offer, sends workers on break, and calls the emergency supplier if needed.

Priya is an experienced server who can step up as the afternoon lead, but she will need to be paid extra. Other choices are bringing in someone else, closing early, offering a smaller menu, or mixing a few of these. Each choice helps with some problems and creates others.

Turn the customer number from Task 2 into a real schedule with names. Who is in charge each hour? Who takes orders, who makes drinks, who hands them out? When does each person get a break, and who covers for them? What happens at the moment Malik leaves?

This schedule becomes the labor cost in Task 4 and the employee instructions in Task 7. Test it against the busiest hour: if three things go wrong at once, who decides what to do?

What is at stake: A schedule is not finished just because it has enough names. It also needs someone in charge at every moment, cover for breaks, and enough people during the rush.

How should the café run safely and smoothly with one manager out?

Situation

The team now has an offer, a customer number, and a staffing plan. Each one costs money. The discount lowers what the café earns on every promo cup. The afternoon lead gets extra pay. Backup coffee costs more than normal. Refunds and remade drinks come out of Friday's earnings too.

The owner has one firm rule: the café's savings are off limits. A busy Friday that ends with less money than a normal day is a failure, no matter how many customers came. So set the limits now: the price, the most extra money you will spend, the least you are willing to earn, and the signal that would make the team stop.

Start with one cup. What the café charges, minus the discount, minus the cost of the coffee and the cup. What is left is what the café keeps on each cup. Multiply that by the customer numbers from Task 2, subtract the worker costs from Task 3, and you have a rough guess of Friday's result for each scenario.

Then write down the limits that Tasks 5, 6, and 7 must follow and Task 8 will check: a cap on extra spending, savings untouched, the number of customers needed to break even, and a stop rule. Write them clearly enough that a teammate could follow them without you.

What is at stake: More sales can still mean less money if the discount and rush costs grow faster than what the café keeps on each cup.

What price, spending limit, savings rule, and minimum result should guide Friday's decisions?

Situation

Tonight's count is done. The café has some coffee and some logo cups on the shelf. The regular delivery is due Friday morning, but it may be late, and nobody knows by how much. An emergency supplier can bring coffee Friday morning at a higher price, and plain cups can be bought nearby for more than usual.

Coffee and cups are different. Cups keep, so extra cups just get used next week. Coffee does not keep, so every extra pound is wasted. But running out of either means turning away customers on the busiest day of the semester, the very people the influencer sent.

Start from the customer number in Task 2, not the raw demand, because the café will never serve more than that. Use the recipe from Operations to turn customers into pounds of coffee. Compare what Friday needs against what is on the shelf. The difference is your order.

Then set a backup rule, not a purchase: at what point Friday morning, and based on what, does the café call the emergency supplier? It should be something Malik can check during setup and act on by himself. This sets the supply cost for Task 8 and the shortage response for Task 7.

What is at stake: Coffee and cups are not the same. Extra coffee goes stale and is wasted. Extra cups just get used next week.

How much coffee and how many cups should the café get, and when should the backup plan kick in?

Situation

The influencer is waiting for the final wording. Since Task 1, the team has learned how many customers the café can serve, who is working, what the budget allows, and how much coffee there is. The offer that seemed right at the start may need to change.

Whatever the team sends will be public within the hour. Customers will show up with the post on their phones, and workers will have to apply it at the register while a line waits. The offer needs a value, a limit, a time window, and a simple answer to the question every customer will ask once the limit is reached: "So what do I get now?"

This is Task 1 again, with everything the team now knows. Check the offer against four limits: the customer number from Task 2, the staffing from Task 3, the budget from Task 4, and the supply from Task 5. If any one of them says the offer is too generous, tighten it before it goes public.

Write it the way the influencer will post it and the way a worker will explain it. If those two versions do not match, it is not ready. This wording becomes the customer script in Task 7 and the promise Task 8 approves.

What is at stake: A promotion is not ready until you know how many people can use it, who can use it, when, and what customers hear after the limit is reached.

What exactly should the café promise customers on Friday?

Situation

The workers arriving Friday morning were not in this room. They do not know what the team decided or why. They need one page that answers the questions they will actually have: Where do I stand? Who do I ask? When is my break? What do I say when the line is out the door? What if the coffee runs out? What if a customer is angry?

Every decision from Tasks 1 through 6 has to become instructions a tired student can follow at two in the afternoon with twenty people in line. If two workers could read the plan and do different things in the same situation, it is not finished.

Write for a worker who has never seen the other seven tasks. Give them the shape of the day, their station, their leader, their break, and the signals that change what they do: the line-too-long rule from Task 2, the supply rule from Task 5, the offer limit from Task 6, and the spending limit from Task 4.

The pre-shift briefing at the end is the whole plan boiled down to what Malik says at setup. If it takes more than a minute to say out loud, cut it down.

What is at stake: A plan is not ready if two workers could read it and do opposite things in the same situation.

What do workers need to know and do to carry out the Friday plan?

Situation

Seven decisions are on the table. Each one was made with the best information at the time. The last job is to read them as one plan and ask whether they fit together. Does the Task 6 offer match the Task 2 customer number? Does the Task 3 staffing cover the busiest hour? Does the spending in Tasks 3, 5, and 7 stay under the Task 4 limit? Does Task 7 include every rule the earlier tasks set?

Then make the call the owner would make: go ahead, go ahead with specific changes, or drop the promotion and run a normal Friday. Dropping it is a fair choice if the plan does not hold together. Going ahead is only fair if all four roles are willing to put their names on it.

The evaluator looks for contradictions between tasks before it looks at good writing. Lay the seven answers side by side and look for numbers that disagree: an offer limit that changed between Tasks 1 and 6, a customer number that changed between Tasks 2 and 5, spending that quietly went over the Task 4 limit. Fix them here and say what you fixed.

Find the weakest guess in the plan, the one that would cause the most damage if it is wrong. Say what sign on Friday morning would tell you it is wrong and what you would do about it. Then write the final recommendation as if the owner reads only this task.

What is at stake: The final plan is only as strong as its weakest match between tasks. Nice writing does not fix numbers that disagree.

Should the café go ahead, go ahead with changes, or drop the promotion?