Early hires were trained directly by the founders, but as more baristas and store managers came on board, it became harder to preserve a culture based on presence and personal attention to each guest.

“When Max and I started this, we were behind the counter ourselves. Every single new barista that we trained, we personally showed them how to engage with customers, how to make the different drinks, how to handle problems in the store,” Cheng says. “But then as we scaled, it was getting more difficult to embed that same culture in the new hires.”

As Plex expanded, two problems surfaced: fragmented knowledge sharing and inconsistent training. With part-time staff rotating shifts, routine questions exploded in WhatsApp groups: where to find certain items, details on a given process. “We were struggling increasingly with knowledge sharing and that resulted in a bombardment in WhatsApp…store managers were just drawn out of focus time,” Cheng explains.

Training also became harder to standardize. As the staff grew, store managers had less time to coach new hires on culture and customer experience. Cheng had tried distributing a 25-page handbook, but “nobody was really engaging with it.”