Ask Pat and John Curry about their business, Buona Caffe Artisan Roasted Coffee, and you’ll get an answer that’s suggestive of Forrest Gump’s Bubba – Just reinstate “shrimp” with “coffee.” Mrs. Curry told us, “We have a coffee and espresso bar where we sell cups of coffee, bags of coffee, espresso drinks, and a light lunch menu. We fry coffee for sell and wholesale. We supply coffee to internal restaurants, caterers, coffee shops, and a Governor’s Mansion. We do custom-labeled coffees as corporate gifts. We do coffee fundraisers. We do coffee catering. We also sell a preference of specialty coffee brewing equipment. We’re a play for Wega espresso machines. And we’re a play for Bunn coffee makers, grinders, and brewing equipment.”
So, how did dual coffee aficionados spin their passion for java into a successful and multifaceted business? They recently common their story with us.
From a Back Porch to a Bustling Business
We were reporters by trade. Anybody who’s ever worked in a newsroom knows there’s always a pot of coffee going. Coffee has been a partial of a credentials for a prolonged time. We don’t splash ethanol by choice, so coffee has always been unequivocally amicable for us. We ride towards coffee houses – It’s a form of place we like to hang out.
John found a book on home coffee roasting and started experimenting there. He began roasting a coffee that we drank on a daily basis. We had friends over all a time who said, “Oh, your coffee is so great! Can we buy some?” We never had adequate to sell. So, from there, we bought a one-pound spit and started sampling to see if this was even a viable business to pursue. All a while, we were operative during a newspaper.
The suspicion creatively was that this was going to be a tiny nights and weekends Internet thing. We started out with John roasting coffee on a behind porch. Then, we bought a outrageous coffee grinder, a feverishness sealer, a box of bags, and some labels. We would package on a kitchen opposite and box things adult on a dining room table. Since we wanted to be legal, we rented a tiny space not too prolonged into that and got a business permit and all that kind of stuff.
Before we non-stop a coffee bar, a initial sell plcae was during a Saturday morning farmer’s market. It was unequivocally inexpensive, though it was unequivocally good marketing. It kept a income entrance in and it helped us settle prominence and a following. It was a good low-cost approach to get a business started.
Financing a Company Through Growth
At first, we were especially regulating a money, a savings. We were shopping apparatus used on Craigslist. We put incomparable purchases on a credit label and paid it off. The strange credit label we were regulating was a personal card. When we shaped a company, we non-stop business bank accounts and a credit label for a business, too. We used that extensively for a while to build a company.
When we took out a franchise on a coffee bar, we had a lot of work that indispensable to be finished to make a space usable. To compensate for that, we did a multiple of things. Some of it was income that we had already warranted from a business. We also used some credit label advances for plumbing and electrical on a emporium and bigger-ticket items. Then, we got an SBA loan. John had been by some classes during a internal tiny business expansion center, that was a module of a University of Georgia. The lady who was a executive of that module was only useful to us in assisting us navigate a tiny business loan process. Besides carrying to do a genuine business plan, we had to do projections for a sales and expansion of a company. At each spin they wanted more. We consider we put together about 100 pages of support for a loan, that took weeks! It was somewhat overwhelming!
To assistance with income flow, John set adult a complement so that income automatically transfers from a checking comment to a assets comment to make certain there’s income there to cover payroll and sales tax. Sales taxation can get divided from we if you’re not careful. Most of a exchange during a indicate of sale in a emporium are finished by card, so we also have a complement where that income is automatically deposited in a checking comment each other day. We get that income sincerely quickly, that helps with income flow, too.
For many of a stuff, we compensate upfront. But, we have one coffee retailer we compensate on terms. There are certain coffees we need all a time, though storage ability is apropos an emanate for us as a business grows. To make certain we have a specific coffee we need, we infrequently do a agreement where a retailer will reason it for us and assign a tiny volume per month. It costs us a tiny more, though it’s value it so that coffee doesn’t get away.
Business Benefits and Challenges
Being your possess trainer is a best thing about owning a business. We don’t have anybody else revelation us what to do. But, if we make a mistake, it’s all on us. There’s no one else to blame.
Managing income upsurge is a hardest thing about using a business. Being a tiny business, we’re offered $5 cups of coffee and $11 bags of coffee. We’re not offered a lot of big-ticket items. Cash upsurge was an emanate for a while in that we were doing “just-in-time” ordering. We would start to run out of something and sequence only adequate to get by. As a business has grown, this has turn reduction of an issue. Now, when we need something, we can compensate for it and not worry about watchful until a final second to get something in.
Lessons Learned
We knew that there was going to be a lot of responsibility upfront since we had several large pieces of apparatus we indispensable to purchase. We suspicion that once we had those apparatus purchased, we’d be finished with a big-ticket items. But, it was a warn to us how fast we would need to reinstate those items. For example, we bought an ice builder secondhand when we initial opened, though we’ve transposed it with a unequivocally good one. We started with a home dishwasher that had a blurb cycle, though transposed that with a blurb sanitizer. Spending a lot of income has been ongoing as we’ve been building a business.
A intelligent thing we did was, in sequence to keep costs on a reduce side, we became a play for some vital apparatus like espresso machines and coffee brewing equipment. So, we get play prices on things when we need to squeeze them for ourselves.
Something we figured out early on is that a lot of coffee shops go out of business since they live and die by a series of people who travel by a doorway each day. So, we motionless from a unequivocally commencement that we were going to do some-more than only have a coffee bar. We wanted to have diversified income streams because, in a summertime, a business kind of drops off since it’s unequivocally prohibited here in Georgia. Pretty most any approach we can find to work in coffee, we’re going to do it.
Advice for New Entrepreneurs
You have to go in with your eyes open, meaningful it’s going to be a lot of work. Our days are as prolonged as they were before we non-stop a business, though we’re in control of that. If we need to do something outward of work, we can report it into a day. It’s tough removing divided when we have a business, so we have to put people in place that we trust who can run your business but you. If it can’t run but you, you’re in trouble.
We did all ourselves during a beginning. You need to be prepared to do that when we initial start a business. But, we also need to know your strengths and weaknesses. There are some things that we’ve only said, “You know, we need to get other people to assistance us with this.” Once we turn successful, we need to let go of some of a things we used to do, since we can’t do all anymore.
The Future for Buona Caffe Artisan Roasted Coffee
There could be some-more Buona Caffe’s in a future!