New Brewery in Costa Mesa: Get Your Tech Right From Day One

There’s a new brewery pouring pints in Costa Mesa this month. Ambitious Ales, the Long Beach operation that took home gold at the 2024 Great American Beer Festival, is opening its first Orange County location at The LAB Anti-Mall on Randolph Avenue, with a grand opening weekend set for October 24-25.

It’s a good story on its own — a small, independent brewery crossing the county line for the first time. But for us, it’s also a reminder of something every new business in Southern California faces: the moment you open your doors is the one time you get to choose your technology instead of inheriting it.

What Ambitious Ales is doing

Founded in 2012 by a group of friends, Ambitious Ales opened its first taproom in Long Beach’s Bixby Knolls neighborhood in 2019. Its hazy IPA, Professional Human Being, won gold at the 2024 Great American Beer Festival. Now it’s bringing that same small-batch approach to Costa Mesa, joining a stretch of Randolph Avenue that’s already home to several other craft breweries.

The LAB itself is a fitting home. Built in 1993 out of a former military night-vision goggle factory, the open-air center was designed for independent businesses — the name stands for “Little American Business.” It’s the kind of place where a new taproom fits right in.

Why a new opening is the best time to get tech right

Here’s the thing about opening a new location: it’s the one moment you get a clean slate. After that, you’re inheriting whatever the previous tenant left behind, or whatever cheapest consumer plan you signed up for in a hurry.

Most new shops don’t think about it that way. They grab the first internet plan they see, plug in a phone from the office supply store, and figure they’ll sort it out later. Then a year in, the card terminal is dropping during the dinner rush, the phone system can’t handle more than two lines, and “later” turns into a costly, disruptive fix.

For a place like a brewery or taproom, the stakes are concrete:

• A card terminal that goes down means lost sales — and a line of customers who can’t pay.
• An internet connection that can’t handle the point-of-sale system, the music, and customer Wi-Fi all at once means a bad experience for everyone.
• A phone system that can’t route calls to the right person means missed reservations and catering inquiries.

What a new food-and-drink business should set up first

If you’re opening a restaurant, cafe, bar, or any customer-facing shop in SoCal, there are two things worth getting right from day one.

Reliable business internet. Consumer plans aren’t built for a business that runs its whole operation on the connection. Business internet comes with better reliability, faster support, and the bandwidth to handle your point-of-sale system, your customer Wi-Fi, and your back-office work all at once.

Wireless failover. This is the one most people skip, and it’s the one that saves you on the worst day. A cellular backup connection means that if your main internet goes down — a construction crew cuts a line, a storm knocks out service — your card terminal keeps working and you keep selling. For a business where every transaction is a sale, that’s not a luxury.

And if you have more than one location, or you’re planning to grow, a cloud phone system is worth thinking about early. Hosted VoIP means your phones work the same way at every location, you can add lines in minutes, and you’re not tied to a box in a closet that’s already outdated.

Why it’s cheaper to do it right the first time

There’s a common myth that setting up business-grade connectivity and phones is expensive. It usually isn’t — and it’s almost always cheaper than fixing a bad setup later.

Here’s the part that surprises most new business owners: for connectivity, the providers pay us. Northview Telecom Advisors is a carrier-neutral advisory, which means we work for you, not for any single internet or phone company. We compare options across 50-plus carriers, negotiate on your behalf, and you deal with one point of contact for the life of the service. For most businesses, there’s no direct cost to you for the connectivity itself.

That’s the whole point of being carrier-neutral. We’re not trying to sell you one brand’s equipment or lock you into one network. We find what actually fits your business, and we stay in your corner after the install — not just at the sale.

Starting right beats fixing later

Ambitious Ales is doing the hard part — building a business people want to visit, in a space that fits what they do. The technology behind it should get the same care.

If you’re opening a new location anywhere in Los Angeles or Orange County, the smartest move is to spend fifteen minutes on it before you sign anything. A quick, free audit of your connectivity, phone, and IT needs can save you from inheriting someone else’s problems — or from outgrowing your own setup within a year.

Call us at (866) 656-8806 or schedule a free audit. It’s the one thing worth doing before you open your doors.