What a café CFO told a Brooklyn shop fighting for its block

Loud Baby is 125 square feet on Flatbush Avenue, and Maritza has been there for nine years.

She and her sister Veronica grew up in the south of Ecuador, where some of the best coffee in the world is grown, and they came to the business as artists rather than restaurateurs. Maritza is a fashion designer. The shop carries baby clothing she makes, and a tiny room they call the clubhouse has held everything from meditation to language gatherings. When they opened, they were one of the first coffee shops on that stretch of Flatbush, building a following on a block that had nothing like it yet. The name is about the artist in you, the part that stays no matter what anyone tells you to be.

Nine years in, the block looks different. New cafés have filled in around her, several of them larger and on more visible corners, and the cost of nearly everything, coffee most of all, keeps climbing. Maritza is doing the math every café owner eventually does, on quality, on costs, on how long you hold the line. That is what brought her to a call with Travis Wolf.

Travis built the finance function at La La Land Kind Café from nothing and helped scale it from a handful of shops to 30 across four states, after an earlier run as the first finance hire at a space company, where he helped raise more than $350 million and watched it grow from 20 people to 700. So you would expect a CFO to open with costs. He didn't. He spent most of the call on why people walk into one coffee shop and not the one a block away.

The first thing, he said, is that the product has to be built to be seen. At La La Land the most important question in making almost anything was how it would look on a phone. He gave the example of their layered drinks, poured so the colors sit in clean stripes, even though you have to stir it to actually drink it, because for a Gen Z and millennial crowd the photograph is half the point. A café that demographic loves is one they share. Part of Maritza's challenge is simple visibility: the newer shops sit on loud, prominent corners while Loud Baby is tucked away, easy to walk past if you do not already know it. Leaning into a product people want to photograph and share is, to Travis, the first thing to work on, before anything on the cost side.

The second thing is that trendy, seasonal drinks are how strangers try you for the first time. A new drink is a reason to walk in, social media spreads it, and the work after that is turning a first visit into a habit. The third is having a reason to come that has nothing to do with the coffee. At La La Land that started as a mission, hiring foster youth who had aged out of the system. It was operationally hard and it faded over the years, but early on it gave people a reason to show up that they felt good about and told their friends about. Loud Baby already has its own version of that, the Ecuadorian roots, the artists, nine years of being a room the neighborhood grew up around. The real question, Travis said, is how you make the new people moving in feel a story they have never heard.

Only then did the finance come out, and even there his instinct was not to cut. He thought she had room to raise prices. At La La Land they pushed prices up seven to eight percent in California and saw no real drop in volume, and he pointed out that milk, of all things, was one of their biggest cost drivers on cold drinks. You do not sacrifice the quality, he told her, you communicate it so people understand what they are paying for, and you remember that everyone is feeling the same inflation, so "this is expensive" is rarely really about your shop. The newer, less price-sensitive residents moving in give her more room than she thinks.

She is also weighing an after-hours events idea, mocktails only. Here Travis cut against the careful instinct. Don't tiptoe into it, he said. Make a splash. A real event pulls people in, there will be hiccups, and that is fine as long as the core of it is right.

The strange thing about spending half an hour with a café CFO is how little of it is about the coffee. Afterward, Maritza put it simply: "There is so much to learn from someone who has seen these decisions before."

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Travis Wolf is the former CFO of La La Land Kind Café. Through DoneThat, he speaks with food and beverage owners working through decisions on growth, margins, positioning, and new operating models.