There are probably smarter ways to spend your money than buying a café.
Nicole Harris – Co-Owner Of My Hometown Café
Actually, there are definitely smarter ways.
You could invest it. Save it. Put it somewhere sensible where it quietly grows and doesn’t wake you up at 2am wondering why cheese suddenly costs the GDP of a small country.
We bought a café.
In September 2025, My Hometown Café became ours.
And if you’re expecting a beautiful story about how we’d always dreamed of owning a little coffee shop, spending our mornings sipping cappuccinos while soft jazz played in the background and happy customers floated through the doors…
That is not quite what happened.
We didn’t buy My Hometown Café because we thought owning a café would be easy.
We bought it because we saw something in it.
Potential, yes. But also a feeling.
There was something about the place that felt like it could become more than somewhere you stop for breakfast.
We wanted it to feel familiar.
The kind of place where the staff eventually know your coffee order.
Where someone can sit alone without feeling awkward.
Where a business meeting can happen at one table, two friends can be catching up at another, and somewhere nearby somebody is absolutely destroying a slice of cake they promised themselves they weren’t going to order.
That was the idea.
Home, without actually being home.
Because at home somebody will probably ask you to do laundry.
We also wanted to build something of our own
There is something terrifying and strangely addictive about creating something that belongs to you.
Not in the possession sense.
In the responsibility sense.
Every good review feels personal.
Every quiet day feels personal.
Every customer who comes back feels like a tiny victory.
And every time you look around an empty café at 2pm and think, Where is everyone? Is there a public holiday nobody told us about?, that feels very personal too.
Running a small business has a way of attaching itself directly to your nervous system.
Some days are wonderful.
Some days you look at the numbers and briefly consider moving to a remote mountain where money doesn’t exist.
Unfortunately, mountains also have rent now.
The truth is, it hasn’t been easy
There’s a version of owning a café that exists on social media.
Cute coffees.
Freshly baked bread.
Perfect little breakfasts.
Laughing staff.
A reel with an upbeat song playing over somebody pouring latte art.
And all of that is real.
But there’s another side too.
There are staff problems.
Supplier prices.
Electricity.
Rent.
Repairs.
Stock.
Waste.
Slow days.
Unexpected expenses.
Marketing.
Equipment deciding that today, specifically, is the day it would like to die.
And then there are the numbers.
Numbers are incredibly rude because they do not care how hard you worked.
They don’t care that you arrived early.
They don’t care that the customers who did come in loved their food.
They don’t care that you spent an entire evening thinking of ways to improve things.
They just sit there looking back at you.
R0 is still R0, even if you tried really hard.
There have been days where we have genuinely wondered whether buying the café was one of the best decisions we ever made or the beginning of a very elaborate nervous breakdown.
Possibly both.
But then someone walks in
And this is the part people don’t always understand about small businesses.
One person matters.
One table matters.
One person choosing your café instead of somewhere else genuinely matters.
Someone tells you they loved the food.
Someone brings their friend back.
A customer starts becoming a regular.
A regular starts feeling a little like part of the furniture.
Someone celebrates a birthday here.
Someone has a first date here.
Someone sits in the corner working for three hours with the same cup of coffee.
And suddenly the whole thing makes sense again.
For a moment, anyway.
Then the fridge makes a strange noise and reality returns.
We bought My Hometown Café because we wanted to create a place people actually cared about
Not a franchise.
Not somewhere anonymous.
Not somewhere you walk into and nobody notices you.
A real neighbourhood café.
A slightly imperfect, constantly evolving, very human one.
A place with personalities behind the counter.
A place where we try things, sometimes get them wrong, change them, laugh about them and try again.
There is an enormous amount of pressure in owning a small business because there is nowhere to hide.
When something works, you did that.
When something doesn’t…
Well.
You also did that.
And that can be brutal.
Would we do it again?
Depending on which day you ask us, you may receive wildly different answers.
Ask us after a busy Saturday and we’ll probably tell you absolutely.
Ask us while something expensive is broken and somebody has just phoned in sick and a supplier invoice has landed in our inbox…
Maybe approach slowly.
But beneath all the stress, the spreadsheets, the staff conversations, the marketing ideas, the endless coffees and the occasional existential crisis, we still believe in what My Hometown Café can be.
That’s why we bought it.
Not because it was perfect.
Not because we thought it would make us rich overnight.
And definitely not because we had some romantic fantasy about café ownership.
We bought it because we believed there was something worth building.
Something local.
Something warm.
Something that could become part of people’s routines and memories.
And right now, we’re still building it.
Some days brick by brick.
Some days crumb by crumb.
Some days entirely powered by caffeine and unreasonable optimism.
But we’re here.
And if you’ve ever walked through our doors, ordered a coffee, shared one of our posts, recommended us to somebody, brought a friend, left a review or simply chosen us when you could have gone somewhere else…
You are part of the reason we keep believing this crazy little café might just become everything we hoped it would be. We love you and thank you so much for making our little dream amazing.