Danielle Connor - A successful local coffee shop can make how much?! RETROGRADE COFFEE ROASTERS reveals secrets.
Danielle Connor
You can go out there and do it. You can start the business, you can fail at it, and that's OK too. Like just go out there and try it and do it. I didn't think that I was capable of having my own business when I decided that I wanted to stay in coffee. I figured that I would be an A-plus employee. You know, I'll do whatever you want. I'll be the cheerleader for the company.
Anne McGinty
Welcome to how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McGinty, and today we have Danielle Connor with us sharing her story and what she has learned, going from employed barista to starting her own cafe and coffee roasting brand. Danielle is the co-founder of Retrograde, a popular local cafe in Sebastopol, california, and with a separate roasting facility in Petaluma. Retrograde was the first certified green coffee roaster and cafe in Sonoma County the first certified green coffee roaster and cafe in Sonoma County. Danielle takes a value-based approach in everything she does as a business owner, placing a focus on the people she works with and the quality of her products.
Thank you to our listeners for being with us today. Danielle, welcome to the show.
Danielle Connor
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Anne McGintyHost
Can you give us a little bit of an idea about your background, whether work or education that led you to eventually starting retrograde?
Danielle Connor
Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the East Bay Area in California. I always had a really big love for coffee ever since I was a kid. I can remember the first time that, like I had coffee with dessert during family celebrations. And as I got older I knew I wanted to try working in coffee coffee. Once I was 18, I got a job as a barista, working with my best friend for Pete's Coffee at the time, and I just kind of fell in love with it.
02:30
I really am a big people person. I'm a big social butterfly and extrovert, so I really love the nature of coffee where you can serve a really wonderful product, but it also is a space for people and a way to connect with people. So it just kind of was my calling. I stuck with it. I did spend a little bit of time in college but it wasn't really my thing and the entire time I was still working in coffee. So eventually I met my now husband, Casey, and he was also working in coffee and I just kind of came home from work one day and I was like what do you think if we started our own business and tried to have our own coffee roasting brand and our own coffee shop someday, and it took a little bit of convincing but he went along with it. And then you know, here we are now.
Anne McGinty
So what did you guys do, though? I mean, you came up with the idea. What kind of brainstorming or business planning or thoughts did you have for how you were going to make the idea come to fruition?
Danielle Connor
So at the time I was managing a bagel shop in Oakland called Beauty's bagel shop and it's a small like mom and pop shop. I worked really closely with one of the owners, Amy Remsen, and she really made me feel like I could have my own shop and she helped show me a lot of the ropes. She was willing to teach me anything that I wanted to learn, so I feel like the seed was really planted for me when I was working there. The shop that they had was bustling for me. When I was working there, the shop that they had was bustling. It was in a little neighborhood called Temescal, so very well supported by the community there, and it really made me see that you can have such a greater purpose through acts of service, whether it's food or beverage. And for my husband, he was working for Blue Bottle Coffee at the time he was working in the roastery as a stage and he was also working at the Ferry Building in San Francisco as a barista, so also very high volume. And it's hard for me to answer this question honestly because I feel like it all just kind of came naturally and there wasn't really like a ton of planning like I would do now if I could do it all over again.
04:46
So we started off by getting a coffee roaster and roasting our own coffee. We spent probably about six to eight months before we started serving our coffee just getting really good at roasting. We were really grateful for our friends at Blue Bottle who helped us learn how to roast tasted coffees with us, gave us really good, honest feedback so we could really perfect that part of our craft. And then we started doing pop-ups at Beauty's Bagel Shop. They were closed on Mondays so they let us use the space to do a pop-up cafe and my friend Sloan, who owns a bakery called Rolling Sloans, she did the pop-up with us and would serve her baked goods. So we figured that that was going to be a really good way to like test the market and see if there was a market for what we were doing, because at the time this is in 2014. So specialty coffee is becoming more of a thing. People are more interested in it and starting to seek out smaller coffee brands and it it worked out really well for us, honestly.
Anne McGinty
What do you think were the key elements that you observed at both of those locations where you and your now husband were working, that you were like we are going to bring this with us when we open our shop.
Danielle Connor
The way that everyone interacted with the community, the way that the owners were so invested in all of us as employees, making sure that we had, you know, skills to do the job to the standard that they expected. They were very supportive. I mean, really just seeing the way the community responded to them was so impactful for me, when I worked at Pete's, there was a community of regulars, but it just wasn't the same as working for like a small mom and pop shop, and I was there for about four years total and it was just like so special to me to see the way that you get to know people on kind of like a granular level. You get to see their families grow, you get to celebrate all of these wonderful moments with them and you've learned stuff about them that maybe even some of their closest friends or family members don't know through those connections you make.
Anne McGinty
So can you tell us about some of your most memorable memories from that time when you and Casey were roasting and you were practicing because I assume that Blue Bottle probably didn't give you like full reigns to use their roastery to practice your technique Can you just tell us some of those stories from the really beginning?
Danielle Connor
Yeah. So Blue Bottle definitely didn't let us use their roasters. But also, I mean, their coffee roasters are huge and we were just starting out so it wouldn't make sense for us to do that. We bought a one kilo roaster called the Hooky 500. So that was kind of our first step and then we operated it in the kitchen at beauties after hours. My husband does all the roasting, so that's a little more of his realm. But yeah, we spent a lot of time like making sure everything was tasting how we wanted it to.
07:50
We definitely had some really, really long nights because at the same time, you know, I was working at Beauty's Bagel Shop managing during the day, sometimes 12 hour shifts there and then stay at the bagel shop after my shift was over so that we could roast coffee and then utilize their equipment there to see how the coffee was tasting and see what we wanted to change. So I feel like there were really some very long nights. There were times where things unfortunately went horribly wrong, like I remember one of our first nights when we were getting ready for a pop-up and we're roasting coffee and on that coffee roaster, since you're roasting one kilo at a time, it produces about 12 ounces of roasted coffee, so like one bag of coffee. So we're roasting you know, my husband's there roasting for like 12 hours all night. I'm there getting other beverages ready, like making lemonade and cold brew and iced teas, and I bumped a full like five pound bag of coffee over onto the ground and obviously we did not use that coffee for the pop-up.
09:00
So like a lot of little, like bumps in the road, like that, that I felt like really tested me and tested us as to how much we wanted it, you know, and we really did want it, we really wanted to be successful. So we just, you know, you just keep going, start roasting again, take it from the top. Sometimes that's just kind of all you can do.
Anne McGinty
Nice, yeah that's awesome, and is it common for people within the industry to kind of open up their spaces and to support their employees this way with their own ideas and business concepts?
Danielle Connor
I think it is really special. You know, I don't know what it was. What she saw in me that made her want to support me, and it could have also been the fact that I am very nosy. I ask a lot of questions. I'm always, like you know, peering over her shoulder, wondering what she's doing, because their shop was successful from the get-go. The day the doors opened, like, we had lines out the door and around the block and I was amazed by the way that people showed up for her and in turn she really showed up for me and for the other team members.
10:07
For Casey, when he was at Blue Bottle, it was more so the people who he was already working with, who were close with him, who were willing to support us in this journey.
10:18
So, not necessarily a ton of higher ups, but at that time he was also working with Lauren Crabb, who's the owner and founder of Andytown Coffee Roasters in San Francisco, and I think that there was just, you know, a spark there and between them they were able to also kind of bounce ideas off each other and just talk about, like, the journey that lies ahead.
10:40
And it's it is special because I don't even to this day, you know I've been in business for 10 years when I need help. Still it's hard to find people in my industry who are local, who are willing to like help out, have these conversations and, you know, let me pick their brain. But my hope is that we can change that and I want to be someone who is available for other people. I want to be someone who is available for other people. I want to be able to mentor people in the same way that I was mentored by Amy. So I hope that, you know, the industry can just shift and I think part of that is just having more interaction, going to more coffee shops. It's really easy to just stay in your own and not branch out. So the more we support each other too in other ways like that, then I think people will be more willing to support more like logistically too.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, I think it takes a certain kind of confidence for somebody to feel like they can reveal, like the secrets and the keys, and to help somebody else out without it threatening their own business. Right, you have to like be a certain size?
Danielle Connor
Yeah, definitely, and I think people really view it sometimes as competition, and even if you are competitors, we're still in community together and I really believe that the tide raises all the ships. So if I'm having a problem, you might be having the same problem and we could really help each other out by just being able to be open and have conversations like that, and sometimes you even just want to lament to someone who is in the same industry as you and knows what it's like. So it's yeah, it's really nice to have friends in the industry.
Anne McGinty
So when it came time to come up with a business name and the branding, what was your process?
Danielle Connor
The name Retrograde just kind of came to us when we decided we wanted to start a coffee roasting brand and coffee shop. We just started like a note where we would just write down random names, like sometimes you just think of something and you're like, oh, that sounds really good. And we really liked the way Retrograde coffee roasters sounded. We liked the idea of retrograde is planetary motion, seeming like it's moving backwards. So we really liked that concept and wanted to kind of incorporate that into our philosophy with coffee, where we were doing things really small batch, making things by hand, trying to go back to the basics of where we felt coffee should be and what makes service really special.
13:08
And then we picked out the astronaut for the logo. We wanted it to be something really fun and approachable because at the time we really felt like a lot of the coffee shops and coffee that was represented in Oakland was just not necessarily approachable to people who were not already part of specialty coffee. You know there's a lot of people who are showing interest in it and it's really easy to be intimidated by the way that people have their shops laid out, their branding. There's a lot of like modernism and I love the modern look, don't get me wrong, but for me it's about being like bright, colorful welcoming, make it fun and invite conversation in with our name and our logo and the way we represent ourselves.
Anne McGinty
And then how did you decide on a location Like what were you looking for, and can you give us some insight into how much it actually requires in money just to get started with finding a place that you're going to lease, with getting the equipment that you need to get up and off the ground? If somebody else wanted to go out there and do this, what would they need?
Danielle Connor
So, like I mentioned, we started in Oakland and then we always kind of knew that we didn't want to stay in Oakland. I had fond memories of Sonoma County from when I was a kid. I used to come up here and go to the Antique Society with my grandma when I was little and we would spend time out on the Russian River swimming in the summer and having a lot of fun. So my husband had never been up here. We took a trip up here for a weekend and Sebastopol was actually our first stop on our trip. We checked out the coffee in town and in the surrounding areas.
14:54
We spent the weekend out on the river and it just it felt like a great little town in Sebastopol, like very cute and quaint. Everyone was really friendly and I remember we had a moment where we stopped in one of the liquor stores on the highway to like get some drinks once we got into town and I just said, oh, I love it here so much. Everyone is so friendly and nice, this town is so cute. And the person in front of me in line said where are you from? And I said we're from Oakland and he's like well, you should live here if you like it.
Anne McGinty
That much and I was like okay, like, is this my sign?
Danielle Connor
Like I will never forget that person. And then, yeah, we went back to Oakland, we decided to move up here. So six months later, quit my job and we moved up here to Santa Rosa. We started roasting coffee in our apartment and got a cottage food license so that we could do farmer's markets. And then for the next year and a half we did farmer's markets, we catered weddings, we did events, like pretty much just getting ourselves out there wherever we could and see how different parts of the county reacted to us and if they liked us or not. And doing the farmer's markets was such a great way to do that. We were as far north as Healdsburg and as far south as Petaluma doing farmer's markets. Ironically, we actually never did the Sebastopol farmers market. We couldn't get in, but we did do the Occidental farmers market and that was like one of our best farmers markets.
16:28
So once we were like, okay, we should start looking for a location, we were just kind of I mean, we looked at so many spaces like all over Santa Rosa, sebastopol, we looked at many shops in Petaluma as well, but financially like that was a really big barrier for us. We knew that we could not take something on and completely build it out from the ground up. So we were really looking for something that was a little more turnkey, smart yeah, it's a good way to save money and also go into something that already has some sort of established customer base. So we were doing a holiday market in downtown Santa Rosa and we had a friend named Cameron who I met through serving coffee at markets and events, and he came up to us one day. We were so busy and he's coming over and he's like whispering at me. He's like I think I have a cafe, I think I know a spot where this could really work for you, and I was like, oh my God, I'm so interested, Cameron, but like please not right now. So we connected later and he introduced us to his friend, adam, who was the former owner of the shop that we are in now in downtown Sebastopol.
17:39
Are in now in downtown Sebastopol and Adam was looking to get out and sell his business. Unfortunately, it wasn't doing very well for him. He was doing like a wine and coffee concept that was very heavy on the wine and that was more where his expertise was. So I think that's part of why it probably wasn't too successful. They needed a little more experience in coffee. So we met with him.
18:05
We looked at the shop. I hated it. I said, casey, there is no way we are going to open up a coffee shop here. It's just it was dusty, it was not looking good Like the first day we went to look at it. The employees didn't show up for work, so like they weren't even open. Like I do not want to take over this disaster, but I thought about it more. I showed it to my mom and my mom was like I think you can do something really great here, and Casey also, like really believed that we could do something great there.
18:36
So we talked with the owner. He was willing to do a part owner finance for the sale of the cafe and that is pretty much what allowed us to be able to open. So thanks to my mom, thanks, mom. She co-signed on a loan for us for $60,000. That was a personal loan and then we paid off the rest of the amount to Adam over the course of the next 18 months with a monthly payment. Wow, and I think we had about $15,000 in our bank account when we opened and that was enough for us to get our inventory set up for all of our dairy and food and coffee, paper, goods, all of that and get our payroll started so we could start training people ahead of when we open, and then, you know, float us like a little bit for the first few months because it was definitely pretty slow. So we needed a little financial help from that loan to like, pay the rent, pay our PG&E bill and all of that.
Anne McGinty
How long did it take before you felt comfortable, where you felt like the cafe is starting to see more people turning in? What did you do to bring the community to your shop?
Danielle Connor
A lot of what has made us successful is word of mouth. People love coffee out here, which is really great, and people would come in have a great experience and tell their friends great. And people would come in have a great experience and tell their friends. Honestly, the first year we opened was 2017. So that was an incredibly rough year up here.
20:09
There was a flood in the Barlow in January when we opened and that was also the year of the firestorm that came over from Napa. Honestly, the firestorm. And when that happened we were so busy because the Center for the Arts and Annalie High School that are right by us were both evacuation centers for people and people were just coming in in droves to get coffee, charge their devices, even just have kind of like a nice little community moment. Even just have kind of like a nice little community moment. And for my husband and I, as well as several of our employees, we were also all in it and dealing with the impacts of the firestorm. Most of us were displaced from the firestorm, but we were all still wanting to show up together to be there for each other and be there for the community and I mean people were just so gracious and so thankful for us being there.
21:05
And that's when I kind of felt like, okay, I think we're going to be, okay, we're starting to make money. Of course it's, you know, for an absolutely horrible reason, but people are discovering us, people are telling their friends about us and we're providing a really valuable service to people beyond just coffee. And over the next few years, we saw really great growth year over year. And then the pandemic happened. Of course, how was that for you? It was challenging. We lost over 50% of our income.
Anne McGinty
Oh my gosh.
Danielle Connor
And we we closed our coffee shop for two months during that time, so it wasn't for the PPP loans. We wouldn't have been able to pay our staff during that time or even reopen, because there's so much inventory costs that you need to, you know, purchase in order to open again.
Anne McGinty
So how many people do you have on your team now?
Danielle Connor
We have 18, including Casey and 18. Yeah, we have 18, including Casey and I.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, oh my gosh you really wouldn't know that I know. So when you see other cafes out in the world, like I'm sure, you travel around, go to different cities and you observe the way that other cafes are doing things, what are you noticing? Like what to you? Are you looking at one cafe and going, oh, I like that. Or you're looking at another one and thinking they could really improve if they just did xyz a lot of times I think it's with efficiency.
Danielle Connor
When I go into a shop, I love to watch people work. I do it when we go out to eat. It's just I can't help it. I'm always like watching the way that things are flowing in different shops and restaurants and, yeah, I feel like a lot of times there's a little bit of a lack of efficiency. I think in part, it's because people need more skills and they need to be invested in. You know, your employees are the people who are representing your brand, and in coffee, they are serving the final product that many hands in a supply chain were involved in before it got to you and, you know, eventually to the consumer. So that and just customer service is so important to me, and I will not go back into a place even if the product is amazing, but if the customer service is not 100 percent, then it's just, it's not for me, and so I think that those things go hand in hand, though, because when people are invested in, they also feel important, they feel valued, and then they generally are more pleasant at work and have a better time at work, because they feel supported and capable in their role and like they know the expectations.
24:01
Usually, when we go out on vacation, we pick out a few different coffee shops to visit that you know we think are going to be doing it to the nines places that I followed on Instagram who I think are really inspirational. So I like to stop in and see what kind of special drinks they're making, the way the service flows and there's definitely been some cafes we've been in. They're operating very efficiently, they're engaged with the customers. You feel like you're a local while you're there and I love that. Like that's the kind of experience that I hope to replicate at retrograde for tourists and people who are visiting from out of town. Like you want to feel like you're part of the club, you want to vibe with people, chit chat and have a good time.
Anne McGinty
So, now that you have a team of like 18 to 20 people, like how have you gone about increasing the size of your team while also maintaining the quality of your product and not necessarily being there all the time?
Danielle Connor
It's definitely training and having really good leaders who are part of our leadership team with us. There's no way that I could do it without our leadership team in particular. I'm a very hands-on person and, having been a barista for so many years, I still love to do that work and I love to teach it to people and I still love to be involved in all of that in the shop and work on the floor. But a wise person once told me that you can't work on your business if you're constantly working for your business, and that really stuck with me.
25:34
In 2019, I worked with a business consultant who's a friend and a regular at Retrograde, and I feel like what I really learned through him is that I needed to invest in my management team. We have a wonderful manager named Angela. I'm sure you know her. She's been there pretty much since we opened for seven years too, and she's really grown with me and with Retrograde and as we got busier over the years, my brain is one like I want to solve the problem. So I see we're really busy. We need more help.
26:10
I try and get ahead of it by like hiring and training before the need is like really an emergency that needs to be addressed. So, yeah, that's really just what's helped us, I think, stay successful and make sure that we're maintaining putting out a high quality product that is also consistent for customers Like. It all starts with the training and continuing to be there and checking in, having my hands on the product, working on the floor with people too, and you know, just being involved, because I think that when there's an owner present in a shop, you can really tell, by the way that the employees are interacting with each other, the quality of the drinks that are going out. I mean even a certain level of like cleanliness in the shop and in the dining room. It makes a really big difference to have an owner present.
Anne McGinty
And when you say it all comes down to the training, what specifically are you telling your management team to look after or to observe, and how are you incentivizing them to do a good job for you?
Danielle Connor
We have a training program that we've developed in part with our leadership team. We have a lot of lists. I'm a list person. I think it really helps people to have something physical that they can reference like during a training and after a training. And then we also do progress reports. So we try and make sure that our trainings are not necessarily led by the leadership team, but they are led by the team member who is going through the training, making sure everything's making sense to them.
27:45
Do you want to spend a little more time on the food menu today to make sure that you really have it down and just you know identifying where people are struggling, so that those are the areas that we're supporting them in the most. So I find that usually when people are new to working in a cafe or working in coffee, there's areas they're really going to excel in and then other areas that need a little more work. It's just, it's natural and I think really having an environment where people feel comfortable saying I'd like a little more training on this, can we go over this again? This isn't making sense to me. I've worked in cafes where you were just expected to go through a training, memorize everything and then you're going to do it by yourself the next day and it just doesn't work. It's chaotic, people don't enjoy their jobs. It's really not good for the customer experience either.
28:36
So all of our leadership team, they all are involved in various levels of the trainings too.
28:42
So Angela will do all of the introductory trainings, all the education. We have several shifts that are just learning about retrograde learning about the products and tasting everything before they even step on the floor to start helping customers. And then we like to make sure they know the flow. We're pretty meticulous about the way we want things to flow on the register and on the bar, and then we like to make sure they know the flow. We're pretty meticulous about the way we want things to flow on the register and on the bar and then also knowing that there's always someone there who they can call on for support if it gets really busy or if they have a question, and then having those progress report check-ins that are led by the team member who's being trained so they they're able to do a self evaluation of their own performance and then we can really kind of connect with them afterwards and be like, okay, we'll do another training here and you know, so on and so forth.
Anne McGinty
Do you have some sort of bonus structure for them? Because when I go into your shop, it seems like your team is really motivated to do a good job, as if they are the owner, you know. So you've got some sort of magic sauce that you've figured out when it comes to increasing the size of your staff. How is your team so dedicated to the success of your business?
Danielle Connor
Well, I try and make sure that they're paid well and luckily we also get great tips from our community who supports us there too. So that definitely helps. We're finally able to provide benefits for people and I mean, I think part of it is just being really transparent with them about what's going on within the business and the bigger picture, like I've always let people know. You know, angela, and we have another team member, neil, who they both been with us for seven years and I've always told them like I want to take care of you, I want to get you benefits, I want to do all this. Like we just have to get the business to the point where we can afford to do those things.
30:31
And you know, I know it's really hard and it's honestly a lot of coffee jobs. I've never worked in a coffee job where I've been given benefits or even, like I used to get 10 cent raises at Pete's Coffee. It's like a joke. So we make sure everyone knows like every anniversary they're up for a raise. This year we even just gave everyone a raise at the beginning of the year instead of waiting for their annual review to happen.
30:57
401ks healthcare we just started providing paid time off to people as well.
31:03
So I think you know, taking care of people with benefits and making sure they feel taken care of, that they don't have to struggle, that's incredibly important and makes people enjoy doing the job that they do, cause you know it's really hard work sometimes and it can be really stressful and emotionally challenging. But also, honestly, just being there with them and being in the trenches with them when it's really busy, showing up with them just as much as they show up for us is, I think, part of what makes people like working for us, and coffee kind of draws a really particular individual to the industry too. There's a lot of artistic people and creatives who use coffee as a means to kind of fund their life and their lifestyle outside of work, and that really helps too. We have a lot of people who like each other a lot. We hang out outside of work. We have like craft nights, we go and do things together and that just helps build the connection more. Like you know, when you like hanging out with your coworkers, you're more inclined to come to work too.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, you've done a great job with it, thank you.
Danielle Connor
I'm so I honestly I have to pinch myself sometimes because I've worked at shops with incredibly high turnover. It's really hard when you hire a new person and they're like oh, everyone else is new also. Oh, yeah, like what's going on here? So I'm really grateful that we have a team of people who are passionate about coffee. They're passionate about what we do with retrograde and all the behind the scenes stuff and they just I think they like me.
Anne McGinty
I think so. What your team is is an admiration and aspiration for what a lot of small businesses should aim for having, because it just feels very cohesive. Thank you. So I've always wondered this and I would love to know whatever it is that you're willing to share and you don't have to give us an exact figure or anything like that but can you just give us an idea of like how much can a popular single location, local hotspot of a cafe make in revenue and profit?
Danielle Connor
You can make a million dollars.
Anne McGinty
Nice.
Danielle Connor
I mean not in profit, but you can make a million dollars. Yeah, something for us I mentioned earlier. We've always wanted to just keep reinvesting back into our business and back into our team. So honestly, yeah, I feel like we could be more profitable if we didn't do that, but it's not the way that I would ever want to operate my business.
33:31
I want to, you know, see where the need is and say, ok, we need another oven, let's buy another oven, instead of just trying to make it work and break our backs with just one oven for all of our baked goods throughout the day, just being able to identify problems and if we have the funds that we can fix it, then let's fix it.
33:51
Part of what allowed us to give a raise to all of our team members at the beginning of this year was because we just paid off our loan for our coffee roaster, so that freed up $1,500 a month and to me, that should go to the people who work for us and not in my pocket or Casey's pocket. I feel taken care of from retrograde and our business and what we're able to live off of, so I want to make sure that I can make sure that, like everyone else, feels taken care of now in their roles. Amazing, you are a role model. Thank you. Well, I feel like you know, some people would probably say that I'm not a very good business woman because my business does not show a huge profit every year.
Anne McGinty
Honestly, you and Casey, I assume, are on payroll. We are, yes, so this is the profit is on top. Do you roast all of your own beans? We do, yeah, how do you source your coffee beans?
Danielle Connor
So my husband, casey, does all of the coffee sourcing when he was working at Blue Bottle. We were able to make some connections there and just kind of understand how that part of the process worked. There's a really great company based in Oakland for small kind of like home roasters and people who are starting out called Sweet Maria's. They also have a sister company called Coffee Shrubs, so through them you can source some really amazing coffees. These folks are a very small team. They go to the country of origin, they meet with the farmers multiple times throughout the year and are invested in those communities. So when we were starting out like, we knew that we wanted to make sure that we were purchasing coffee ethically and that the farmers who are growing the coffee are being taken care of, especially because a lot of coffee farms are also growing fruits, vegetables. You know they have cows, maybe they're growing sugarcane or producing other things. They're supporting a greater community around them as well. Sweet Maria's was a great way to make sure that we were buying really high quality coffee and that we felt really good about the coffee that we were getting.
36:00
As we started to grow, we started to look at other importers. You know there's some coffee importers who are more commodity coffee. They're serving much larger corporations. And then the importers that we like to work with are not their specialty coffee. They're working direct with farms and they're serving small businesses like us.
36:21
So in coffee there's also there's kind of like a joke that you want to be able to like eventually leave your job as a bar, want to be able to like eventually leave your job as a barista to be able to become like a green coffee buyer or, you know, get into the office job so that you can have a little more security, be a little better taken care of.
36:39
So you kind of end up having friends too, who maybe you worked with them as a barista or they were a roaster at a coffee shop you liked, and they've gone on to work for a different coffee importer. So we have a few friends who we work with to source our coffee who work for various importing companies who are still more oriented towards specialty coffee. It's really nice to have those friendships too, because we can be really candid about the types of coffees that we're looking for, depending on the purpose for the coffee. Like if we need a certain coffee to fulfill a certain taste for a blend, we can let them know and they'll give us little sneak peeks at coffees that are coming in that. I don't know if other people get that treatment, but I feel special.
Anne McGinty
So, between the cafe and the coffee roasting, what is your future vision for retrograde?
Danielle Connor
Well, we have a second location in Petaluma at our coffee roastery that we are working to open.
37:38
We actually we signed the lease almost three years ago for this location location. My dream has always been to be able to serve coffee where we are roasting coffee and be able to show people a little more in depth, like behind the scenes, as to what goes on in the coffee roasting process and in the coffee roastery Cause it. You know, it's kind of a lot of people don't really know. So we had signed the lease three years ago to open up that location. It's in a little bump in the road right now where the property needs to annex to the city of Petaluma and connect to city sewer and water for us to be able to get our health permit to open. So luckily we have a really wonderful landlord who's very invested in the property and the vision that they have for this space is great and what has kept us there for so long. So we are hoping that it'll go through. They're actually supposed to vote on it next month and I hope they make the right decision.
38:40
So that we'll be able to open up another location. I would love to do more wholesale and like help other places serve better coffee by being able to provide them and their employees with more training too. So you know, there's a lot of places like bakeries or restaurants, resorts even that serve coffee, but they're not a coffee shop and they might not have someone on their staff who knows a lot about coffee to be able to serve a really great product. But you know, we're in wine country. People come here for a certain experience, and I think that if we were able to grow our wholesale program, we could really elevate the experience for a lot of people in different areas and different industries.
Anne McGinty
That sounds like a great vision, thank you. Do you want this to be a lifestyle business where you keep it kind of small, or do you want to just see where it takes you and grow with it?
Danielle Connor
I'm not opposed to other locations, but it is very hard even just having the one, and I've seen some companies open up many locations and the quality suffers or the employees suffer. I don't want to be that company. I'd rather stay small and have more controlled growth. If it feels right, then you know we can explore that and see what that looks like, but I definitely want to maintain the quality and everything that we already have going.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, that makes sense. So if somebody approached you and maybe they want to start a coffee business, or maybe they just want to start a business, what advice would you give them? That are key lessons you've learned from your entrepreneurial journey that you think could really help them.
Danielle Connor
I would say, to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and your mental health before you really need to. I think that it's really easy to keep going and sometimes we feel like we have to keep going, but sometimes you need a break and it's really hard and personally I struggled so much with my anxiety this was even before the pandemic from just working so much, being successful but also being really stressed out about how to sustain the success. Is it going to last, you know? And I had times where I just couldn't even bring myself to drive into work, to tell you the truth, and I would have to call my husband and be like I am having a panic attack. I need to just like take this day for myself, and that year I really worked so much and, you know, worked with a therapist to like get through that for myself. But I wish I did it before I needed to do it and had the tools to take care of myself before I was already in a state where I really needed help.
41:31
I also think it's really important just to get experience in your field, whether it's from having someone to mentor you or a consultant, like someone who is experienced in the industry who can help guide you through all the bumps in the road and the struggles, or even just you know work as a barista. Come pick up a few shifts at a shop and see what it's like, cause I think to be successful, you really need to understand how to do the job at every single level, starting with you know working the register, hopping on the bar and making sure that you understand what it's like for your team members and for your customers. Otherwise, I don't think you can really expect people to put out a really high quality coffee or a really high quality product and provide good service if you're not capable of like doing it yourself and being a good example for those people doing it yourself and being a good example for those people.
Anne McGinty
It sounds like in your journey that it was really important that you had mentors and jobs at places that were very successful. Do you think they could get the same kind of experience at any location, or do you think they should be cherry picking?
Danielle Connor
It's funny that you ask that, because I feel like it's great to work at a successful place and be mentored by someone who is successful. Also, I learned so much from them. I mean, when I worked at beauties, that was like the best job I ever had. I loved it so much.
42:59
It was really hard for me to leave the job that I went to after. That was a coffee job that was not good at all. It was very hard. I had a really hard time like fitting in there and I do think I learned a lot from that job, though, like I learned a lot of what to do and then a lot of what not to do, especially, just in part, because I had worked for someone who did not have experience in coffee. And yeah, I mean, he was very honest about that, which I appreciate, but it made it really challenging to communicate issues that we were having, you know, in the shop and getting him to understand the importance of it and the way it was impacting the customer experience. And just, you know, I've had some bad managers, but I thank them at the same time because that's a good point.
43:50
Yeah it. It shows you what you don't want to do, and you can really learn a lot from a bad experience. That is so true.
Anne McGinty
So true. So just for a final question here, and this is one that I ask everybody if you could go back and talk to yourself when you were in your early twenties and it doesn't have to be business related, just wisdom what would you say to yourself?
Danielle Connor
I feel like this one might make me cry. Just believe in yourself. I didn't think that I was capable of having my own business when I decided that I wanted to stay in coffee. I figured that I would be an A plus employee. You know, I'll do whatever you want. I'll be the cheerleader for the company wherever I go, and whatever it was with Amy and I and whatever she saw in me like I'm so grateful for that, because sometimes you can't recognize it in yourself. But now that I'm older, I really see it in so many young people, so many people who work for me, who are so talented and want to pursue other things and, like I, just want them to believe in themselves and believe that they're capable. You can go out there and do it. You can start the business. You can fail at it, and that's okay to like. Just go out there and try it and do it, that's awesome advice.
Anne McGinty
Thank you and I think we all face that at some point in our lives, just not believing in ourselves, and it doesn't serve us necessarily to do that.
Danielle Connor
Yeah, and I still do feel that way sometimes. And then I try and just tell myself like no, you have been doing this for 10 years, you're capable of doing hard stuff. Like just keep putting yourself out there and keep doing it.
Anne McGinty
That's right. Well, Danielle, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Danielle Connor
Thank you so much for having me, and sharing your story, which is incredible.
Anne McGinty
Thanks for being here. Today's key takeaways:
If you're a local cafe or restaurant, interact with your community and make connections with your customers.
45:59
Invest in your employees by making sure they have the skills needed to do the job well and be supportive.
Oftentimes, at the beginning of any small business, you'll be working long, long days and nights. It's just part of the process and how you'll know you have the fire in you to make it a success.
You will hit bumps in the road that will test you and make you question how much you really want the success. Just keep going and take it from the top.
Work in the industry you're thinking about starting a business in and learn as much as you can and see if there is a way you can test your concept. Maybe there's a restaurant that is closed on certain days and they will allow you the space to start a pop up. Get a cottage food license so you can set up at farmer's markets to further test your concept.
Make friends with others in the industry. Competition doesn't need to be the enemy and in fact, there is so much to connect on and you may be able to support and help each other.
Make sure you understand what it means to have excellent customer service, because customer service can sometimes make or break your business. When it comes to growing your business, just remember that you can't work on your business if you're always working for your business.
47:23
Hire and train before the need for employees is an emergency.
Develop a formal training program with your management team and meet your team members where they are and in the areas where they self-select needing the most support. Have physical lists that they can reference during a training and after a training.
Take care of yourself and your mental health before you even think you need to.
Every job is an opportunity for learning. If your employer is doing a great job, take note of what they are doing that you'd like to do, and if you don't like your job, take note of what not to do.
Lastly, believe in yourself. You are capable of learning anything. Get out there and try what it is that you want to try and do it, and be willing to fail at it.
That's all for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.
