The Indie Espresso Revolution

When I was a kid, I was a day-dreamy kind of kid. I wasn't the kind of dreamer who was quiet and melancholy, but the kind that tells anyone who will listen all the ideas and dreams welling up inside them.

I used to spend hours in the backyard of my Great Aunt's house in Desloge, MO trying to find the right combination of the same used lumber, nailed to the same old long-suffering tree, to bring about this Platonic form in my mind called "The Ultimate Clubhouse," that would be a place for all the kids in the neighborhood to come and be together. I wanted to be one of them and to be there with them, but more than anything, I wanted to build this place for them- a place to be and to be together.

On Sunday afternoons, after dinner, my parents would pile me into the back seat of their 72 Dodge Dart, that my dad described as "baby shit green" and go for long drives in the country, surrounded by the rolling hills of the Southern Midwest. I would be in the back seat dreaming and asking a million questions and they would be discussing their dreams of entrepreneurship. They would inevitably stop on the way in and out of town and peek in the windows of empty buildings. I recognized something common in what we both were doing. So, in the back seat of a "baby shit green"' Dodge Dart it happened. Those two ideas got fused in me- the forging of community and the life of grassroots entrepreneurship.

My parents ended up buying a gas station on the corner and, after selling that, they bought a liquor store on the corner of our small town. I grew up behind the counter, doing my spelling words, sitting a six cases of beer so I could see everything. I listened to my dad chat with people and remember what they drank, what they smoked, and that they were about to forget the diet soda for their wife that they always forget. I saw people's lives come together around the daily rituals of mundane commonplace commerce. This put the nail in the coffin so to speak.

I opened a skateboard shop the summer between my Junior and Senior year of high school. It was a massive failure and I knew next to nothing about business. It was taken from me in a way that nearly cost me my sanity at 18 years old. I was crushed, but that defeat led to me entering my truly formative years with something to prove to myself, to build this same thing that had been in my heart since a little kid. I became who I am.

I turned to religion, youth ministry, and eventually moved to Columbia, MO, the greatest college town in the whole world, and tried to build an innovative place for ministry, based around community and the arts. I spent whole days in Lakota Coffee Company, reading Thomas Merton books and counseling confused punk rock college kids, while trying to figure myself out by writing in my journal. But something happened again. I began to get glimpses of the value of the community that dwelled within the sacred walls of that coffeehouse. I began to recognize it as akin to the dream I had been chasing.

I'll bore you no more with my personal biography, but jump to the point. I am an entrepreneur at heart, but not the kind that does things only for money. I've just never been able to do anything for nothing but money for very long. I would quit or get fired. I am a horrible employee. Why? I'm a leader.

That sounds arrogant to say, no? But, Jamie Buckingham says, in his recent book "The One Thing You Really Need to Know" that the leader is someone who looks at the present and sees what it can be, not what it is. They are future oriented. I realized that in my gut, the unspoken presupposition in my mind, no- in my heart, all those days in the backyard, in the back seat, in the skateshop, and in the coffeehouse, is that things are not the way they should be. Now, this goes far beyond confines of my role in the business world. That nagging in my gut has steered the course of my philosophy and religion. It has moved me toward certain writers, painters, and poets. It has made me trust mystics, because talk about the world we can't see.

So, what in the world is all this doing in a blog entitled "The Indie Espresso Revolution?" Well, glad you asked. Because I am, in some ways, re-designing Coffeeboy, but more accurately, I am returning to the dreams that I had when I started it.

To that end, I spent much of Friday on the phone with the small coffeehouses around my home town in Southern Missouri. (For you that don't know, I live in Ventura, CA now.) I wanted to talk to them and find out what their lives were like. I was pleased and surprised to find that small indie coffeehouses are popping up all over the area I am from. This didn't just make me happy because I found new potential clients, though I do enjoy making money and have become strangely attached to living indoors, eating food, and not walking everywhere. But it wasn't the fact of their existence that delighted me so much as the people who are building them.

Now, coffeehouse owners are a different breed and I love them. (If any of you folks are reading this- I love you all.) Why? Well, I am close with most of my clients and as small businesses joined in a mutual attempt to survive and flourish, we become more linked than you and the guy who sold you your copier. But, that's not the point. Coffeehouse owners make places. Very few people in this world set out to make a place, but these people do to a fault and I saw that that is true in Ventura, CA, but it is also true in the beloved podunk towns of Southern Missouri. They tell you about their place and what they are doing and what they are dreaming of doing and for whom they are doing it. (I know that sentence was ungrammatical, leave me alone- I liked the cadence of it.) They will tear out their heart and sew it on their sleeve. They are making a place, a place for others, to be and to be together.

So, I could go on a diatribe about the ratio of small shops to ugly corporate chains, or about the fact that machine suppliers seem to assume that every shop will have a fully trained espresso tech across the street that can fix an overly complicated machine that will in fact break down. I could dream about the fact that Italy is roughly the size of California and has 200,000 espresso bars and that 85% of the country hits one every day, while America has, last I heard, barely 20,000 or so. (The market is far from saturated.) I could proclaim from my bully pulpit, as the Chief Espresso Evangelist of Coffeeboy Espressoculture, that indie shops will take over the world, but I will stop just short of that and talk about the people.

Here is a snapshot of the people I talked to. One guy left a computer networking job for a Fortune 500 bank to open a coffeehouse. (They open Tuesday, so pray for them.) I talked to lady in a small town, with a community college as its only anchor, who proudly told me she had "bat wings" sticking out of her headband. (She has a headband for every season she told me.) I talked to a nice lady who bought a snow cone kiosk and put an espresso machine in it. I talked to the manager of a shop that is in a small space carved out of a building attached to a salon, with 5 tables, in the town my parents live in. I caught a lady at home, after hours, and she talked to me for an hour, read this blog, and wrote me a quick note pointing to her blog. I realized we were on the same page. These people don't make a whole bunch of money. These people make something better than money- they make place. They are "other-oriented." They see their town as a blank canvas on which to paint what stirs within them. A place to be, to be together, and to experience the mundane daily luxury of great cup.

You ask if that is the revolution- coffeehouse culture penetrating into the nicks and crannies of the heartland? That's part of it. Is it that we are re-tooling Coffeeboy to do more than provide great coffee at a fair price, but to solve the problems that distract these beloved place-making souls from the task at hand? That also is part of it. But, the real revolution coming out of the world of indie espresso retail is that these people are modeling a way to do business- a way to think about your business. That way is to "create" your business- to "make" in the raw human universal kind of way. They are showing how to live the entrepreneurial life in a way that is human and enduring and worthwhile.

So, your homework, dear blog readers, is to get an old Merton book, your journal, and an old friend, and go to that litttle place on the corner. Let them give you what they've made...and some coffee too. Oh, and while you're there, hug the super hero behind the counter and thank him/her for making a place to be and to be together.