DeAngelo and Alexandra Seay of Keokuk were prepared to have their possess business after several years of operative for other people.
They pondered what would fit their skills. Both had sales experience, and she had worked in catering and he in automobile finance. She has a grade from a University of Northern Iowa and he complicated business government during Kirkwood.
Then scarcely 3 years ago, Alexandra and her mom found themselves relaxing in a Dunn Brothers coffee emporium in Burlington while they brainstormed business ideas.
Her mom is a dentist and her father a commander vital in Rochester, Minnesota, where Alexandra grew up. The relatives were peaceful to be “silent partners” in a new business venture.
“We usually looked around us and it strike us,” Alexandra says. “We were enjoying good coffee and good patron use and we favourite a Dunn Brothers truth of a peculiarity experience.”
Pretty shortly a 4 partners were low into authorization agreements and study intensity flourishing locations. The Seays spent literally months training a ropes by operative in several circuitously shops within a company.
Fast brazen to final week, when a integrate took a mangle from their tasks during their adorned new Dunn Brothers coffee emporium in a distant north finish of Coralville to simulate on how their lives had changed.
“It’s prolonged hours,” DeAngelo says. “One or both of us are here each day. We’ve usually had about dual days off together given we opened, though we adore it.”
“It was a jump of faith for us,” Alexandra adds, “but we overtly don’t feel like we am during work. Every partial of it is fun. we know it sounds cliche, though we feel like I’m vital a dream.”
That dream is a authorization with a association widely famous in a home state of Minnesota. The code has a sum of 80 stores, mostly in a Midwest, though a new Coralville emporium is usually a fourth Dunn Brothers to open in Iowa.
The place is located usually off Highway 965 in a frame mall on Crosspark Road, a stone’s chuck from a North Liberty/Coralville line and confronting a new Hy-Vee megastore to be finished this fall.
“We feel that destiny expansion is all around us and a timing is right,” says DeAngelo. “Locating between Coralville and North Liberty is a best of dual worlds.”
Customers are mostly greeted with a smell of roasting coffee and might spot DeAngelo nearby a front entrance, operative a radiant new San Franciscan code red, bullion and black coffee spit and ready to rivet in conversation. The Seays tell me it’s one of a incomparable roasters in a Dunn Brothers authorization organisation and has modernized record to ideal a craft.
The emporium offers an “All Day” menu that includes an array of breakfast and lunch/dinner sandwiches.
Among a renouned specialty drinks is a “Nitro,” a cold-pressed coffee infused with beverage-grade nitrogen, according to Alexandra. On a food side, she says business infrequently singular out a avocado toast or a Tuscan turkey sandwich. They also offer catering.
The emporium will finish off a square out front with a glow underline this spring, and work on displaying internal design inside. Live party and special events are in a works.
Although a business has been open usually a few weeks, a Seays explain carrying an glorious staff will shortly make it probable for them to spend some-more time compelling their emporium and operative for their church and a community. DeAngelo started a successful “Unity in a Community” multi-church fun day for families in Keokuk, and both attend Life Church in Coralville given relocating here 7 months ago.
Long tenure goals? Build this shop’s patron bottom and cruise adding another Dunn Brothers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City or both, they say.
“We’ve had a good response and some extraordinary reviews so far,” says Alexandra.
“We’re blessed,” concludes DeAngelo. “There’s usually no improved approach to put it.”
Dick Hakes is a semiretired journal editor who lives in North Liberty.