The Journey Of 3 Small Coffee Shops And How They Got Started – CoffeeTalk

Rachel Nieves, a 19-year-old part-time employee at Armani, dropped out of Fordham University after earning $120,000 a year as a call center representative for an auto business. She worked in the auto industry for about a decade, eventually making $200,000 a year. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, Nieves began questioning her career and decided to start a coffee shop.

Starting a food business can be challenging due to high costs of rent, food, and labor, but coffee businesses are easier to start due to their high profit margins and smaller spaces. Coffee shops can also make themselves known for their specialty drinks and use their menu as a marketing tool.

Nieves and her husband, Taylor Nawrocki, opened Buddies in New York City on December 26, 2020. They paid rent for 110 square feet inside a pool hall and mobile for pop-up events. They bought a used Slayer single-group espresso machine for $7,000 from Craigslist and repurposed skateboards for the cart’s countertop.

Nieves, a born-and-raised New Yorker with a Puerto Rican heritage, offers a popular coquito latte in the shop. The couple made just $80 when Buddies started, but they renegotiated their flat rate to $4,000. Two months later, Buddies was forced to move, and they transformed part of another pool hall into their new coffee shop.

Buddies became profitable in its first year because Nieves and Nawrocki run the shop themselves and don’t deal with hot food. They don’t formally pay themselves a salary, and their everyday activities and expenses are low. On a day-to-day basis, the shop can bring in $1,500 a day, sometimes $3,000.

Nieves taught herself how to roast coffee for the shop using Shared Roasting, and Buddies now sells coffee to seven locations.

Theresa Cashman, a homeschooled woman from Wisconsin Rapids, started working at age 13 by busing tables and later worked in various customer-service-related jobs. She took business classes at a technical college and dabbled in real estate and insurance but didn’t feel those jobs were a good fit. In 2010, she started managing a local coffee shop owned by friends. After a divorce in 2016, Cashman needed to become financially independent and offered to buy her friends’ business around 2020, but they declined. When COVID-19 arrived, she was let go from the shop, which was not full time but flexible.

Cashman formulated a business plan to open her own shop, approaching three banks for loans. One bank lent her $350,000 with her parents as co-signers. She made an offer on a vacant property to build her 1,214-square-foot shop, constructed from a recycled shipping container, and opened Out of the Box Coffee House on Jan. 21, 2021. She utilized every square inch to keep costs down, sealing concrete floors by herself, making menu boards, and testing recipes in a former church basement before opening.

Suzanne Smith, a Canadian mother of four, is the sole proprietor of Biscuits to Baskets, a coffee shop and chocolatier near Toronto. Born in France but now a Canadian, Smith met Colter Smith in 2008 over Facebook’s now defunct Hot or Not app and married in December 2009. Biscuits to Baskets became a front-room store in the Smiths’ home and moved into the garage in November 2018, costing nearly $14,000.

Three years later, the Smiths incorporated coffee into their business. Suzanne Smith’s son Andrew taught Colter Smith and her about coffee, working at Starbucks for 2 1/2 years during college. Last April, Keith Lee, an influential food critic on TikTok with nearly 17 million followers, stopped by and complimented the Smiths on their customer service and food. The business quadrupled its revenue, with people waiting an hour to get their cakes and coffees.

Read More @ Hawaii Tribune Herald