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Brewing Change: How Stone Creek Coffee Balances Business Success with Social Responsibility | Restaurants & Franchises Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:11
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:14
  adversity. My name is Anthony Cotespotti
• 0:16
  and today's guests are partners in business and in life.
• 0:20
  First of all, Melissa Perez, User Experience Director and
• 0:24
  co-owner of Stone Creek Coffee. They are a Milwaukee based
• 0:28
  specialty coffee roaster that operates as a benefit
• 0:31
  corporation focusing on environmental stewardship, local
• 0:35
  community impact and socially responsible practices.
• 0:39
  They strive to create opportunities for positive roles
• 0:42
  in communities and are known for their commitment to local hiring
• 0:45
  suppliers and continuous improvement in quality.
• 0:49
  Throughout Melissa's time at Stone Creek Coffee, she has LED
• 0:52
  efforts to elevate the customer experience and champion numerous
• 0:55
  social initiatives. Under her guidance, Stone Creek
• 0:59
  Coffee has been recognized for its dedication to
• 1:01
  sustainability, earning praise for ethically sourced beans and
• 1:05
  community involvement. In addition to working at Stone
• 1:08
  Creek Coffee, Melissa is also a user experience designer at
• 1:12
  GOMOL Research and Design. She previously served as a
• 1:16
  marketing information analyst at Miller Brewing Company And also
• 1:20
  with us is Eric Resch co-owner and founder of Stone Creek
• 1:24
  Coffee. In 1993, at the age of 24, Eric
• 1:28
  established the Stone Creek Coffee under the corporate name
• 1:31
  Giri Corporation, a name derived from the Samurai code of honor,
• 1:35
  Bushido, meaning social obligation.
• 1:38
  Guided by this principle, Stone Creek has evolved from a small
• 1:41
  roaster from the Midwest into a nationally recognized leader in
• 1:44
  the coffee industry. Eric holds a bachelor's degree
• 1:47
  in Business and Sociology from the University of Wisconsin,
• 1:50
  Madison and earned his MBA from Northwestern University.
• 1:54
  Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
• 1:57
  brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where
• 2:01
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• 2:23
  Now back to our guest today, Co owners Melissa and Eric.
• 2:26
  I appreciate you making the time to share your stories today.
• 2:29
  Thank you. Thank you.
• 2:32
  OK, so before we talk about Stone Creek, Melissa, let's talk
• 2:35
  about your other job. What is user experience design?
• 2:41
  OK, so user experience design, I'll describe what it isn't.
• 2:45
  So there's user experience design and then there's
• 2:47
  usability and then there's user interface.
• 2:49
  So user interface is what it looks like when you look at a
• 2:52
  computer screen and how things are laid out.
• 2:55
  Usability is how easy something is to use.
• 2:57
  User experience is incorporates those things plus just how a
• 3:03
  user or a customer or a person or employee or anyone actually
• 3:07
  experiences the entire entity. Like not just what's in front of
• 3:11
  you, but what's around you in, you know, all your 5 senses.
• 3:16
  And so that's what user experience design is.
• 3:18
  So it can be applied towards user interfaces, but it could
• 3:22
  also be applied towards a customer waiting in line and
• 3:24
  looking at your menu board. So yeah, that's actually a great
• 3:28
  segue. Give us a practical example of
• 3:31
  how this experience comes into play with the coffee business.
• 3:35
  Oh, OK. With the coffee business
• 3:36
  multiple ways. So just putting my consulting
• 3:39
  hat on for Eric, I've put a, I've created projects where you
• 3:43
  look at the workflow of the menu or you look at the workflow of
• 3:46
  how customers go throughout the line.
• 3:48
  And then also just customer behaviors and customers in this
• 3:51
  point is the employee. So our employees are like, I
• 3:54
  treat them like our customers as well.
• 3:56
  So I'll do behavioral under use and just see like, OK, you're
• 4:00
  trying to create this new experience for a customer, what
• 4:04
  are the pain points? And just to see what the day in
• 4:06
  the life is for our employees. And so based off of those, I'll
• 4:09
  provide the leadership team with strategies of things that we can
• 4:12
  tweak or or change. And so I do that regularly.
• 4:15
  So with user experience consulting, there's a lot of
• 4:18
  interviews, a lot of observations.
• 4:21
  I want to come back to that and hear maybe a couple of specific
• 4:24
  stories. But before we get there, let me
• 4:26
  shift over to Eric and Eric, because I know that you can't be
• 4:30
  with us for the full time today. So I want to make sure we get,
• 4:33
  you know, a good chunk of your story out here.
• 4:35
  So tell us kind of how the idea to start Stone Creek came about.
• 4:40
  Yeah, happy to if I can remember it.
• 4:42
  I'm just kidding. So 30 ish plus years ago, I was
• 4:47
  an undergrad at Madison University of Wisconsin.
• 4:50
  And like many of us either after college, after high school,
• 4:56
  trying to find our bearings with how do I deed myself?
• 5:00
  How do I grow into a functioning adult?
• 5:02
  And I just kept trying to reflect on what is it that I
• 5:05
  love doing. I was using that as my, you
• 5:08
  know, North Star. What do I love and could I make
• 5:10
  a living out of that? And what I realized is I love
• 5:12
  just sitting around in coffee shops like it was where I did my
• 5:15
  homework. It's where I met my friends.
• 5:18
  It was a just a wonderful social environment.
• 5:20
  And so I decided I would pursue coffee.
• 5:22
  And this was after I had bought a blue suit, a really
• 5:26
  uncomfortable tie. I had done some interviewing on
• 5:29
  campus and just, yeah, felt really uncomfortable.
• 5:33
  So I essentially decided coffees by my direction and I I loaded
• 5:39
  up my, I don't know, 1984 Toyota Camry and drove across the
• 5:44
  country to Seattle and post graduation spend some time couch
• 5:47
  surfing and grunge music, dancing and and tried to figure
• 5:52
  out the coffee scene. This was 1991 when Starbucks was
• 5:57
  only in two markets had, you know, 30 ish stores.
• 6:01
  I spent a summer there and then I ended up going to Chicago,
• 6:03
  working for Starbucks for about 14 months, something like that.
• 6:08
  As a brief, I need to. Interject At that time, Chicago,
• 6:11
  just Chicago had a few cafes. Now they have like 660 some
• 6:15
  cafes in the Chicago area. Right.
• 6:18
  Well. And in 1991, Eric, actually, I
• 6:21
  mean, this is really early days. How did you even know that
• 6:23
  Seattle was sort of the, the Mecca for this?
• 6:25
  You know, the Internet wasn't really a thing like you decide
• 6:28
  you want to get into coffee. Why?
• 6:29
  How did you even know that that's where to go?
• 6:33
  I I. I knew of Starbucks.
• 6:35
  I don't really know how I had heard of it.
• 6:37
  Dark roasted coffee. There were a couple other
• 6:40
  Italian origin based coffee companies in Seattle at the
• 6:44
  time, Torfaccione being 1 and I, I guess I just, I don't know,
• 6:49
  read the newspaper as kids did back then and, and drove out
• 6:52
  there and just checked it out. And I had some friends out
• 6:55
  there. I was on the rowing team at
• 6:56
  Madison and some friends lived out there after graduation.
• 6:59
  So they put me up and yeah, then I ended up in Chicago, worked at
• 7:03
  35 E Wacker across from what was the Sun Times building and just
• 7:08
  worked 5:00 to noon, learned how to pull shots and mop the floors
• 7:12
  and and then I eventually bought a coffee roaster, moved back to
• 7:16
  Wisconsin, taught myself how to roast, and yeah, we were off and
• 7:20
  running. I mean, that is actually a bit
• 7:22
  of a a big jump there. You're working for somebody else
• 7:25
  and then you make the big step of I'm going to leave sort of
• 7:28
  the safety security of this job that's paying me to show up
• 7:31
  every day. And I'm going to invest some of
• 7:34
  my own money into a coffee roaster and like, like help,
• 7:39
  help fill in some of the gaps there.
• 7:41
  Like how did this actually get? Launched.
• 7:42
  Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question.
• 7:44
  I don't mean to make it sound easy or not scary because it was
• 7:48
  hard and scary. I had received a small
• 7:52
  inheritance, I don't know, $18,000, which at the time was
• 7:55
  like what the heck? My grandmother had passed away
• 7:58
  and I I decided I would invest that money in a coffee roaster.
• 8:02
  And so I did some research and bought this coffee roaster,
• 8:06
  shipped it to Milwaukee and then started roasting and eventually
• 8:10
  built some connections in this market with regard to retail
• 8:14
  locations and decided that I would start the business going
• 8:18
  down the retail path. And eventually some years later
• 8:21
  we did wholesale and obviously eventually e-commerce and other
• 8:23
  channels, but that was it. I did everything in the
• 8:26
  beginning from the roasting to the hiring to the accounting and
• 8:29
  worked, you know, 1214 hours a day for year after year just
• 8:33
  grinding. We will try to make some coffee
• 8:36
  jokes that being one and just kind of kept building.
• 8:40
  Here we are. Here we are today.
• 8:43
  And so at what point in that those early days did you realize
• 8:46
  I've got something that can actually last like you were
• 8:53
  starting to generate some profit like the proof of concept that
• 8:55
  was there like the the customers are consistent or or are you not
• 8:59
  quite at that point yet? Yeah, no, that's that's why I
• 9:02
  paused. No, I would, I would say
• 9:04
  realistically in all seriousness, it took 15 to 18
• 9:07
  years for me to get the business from a sort of cash flow
• 9:10
  neutral. And part of the reason is I, I
• 9:12
  built retail stores using term debt.
• 9:14
  We are 100% employee owned. We have no external, you know,
• 9:18
  funding sources. We borrowed all the money along
• 9:21
  the way, paid every Nickelback as we went along.
• 9:23
  And so I was highly leveraged for a good 15 to 18 years before
• 9:28
  the cash flow and some of this debt started coming off the
• 9:31
  books and we really felt like we had some some clear sailing.
• 9:36
  And Melissa, at what point in this trajectory did you get
• 9:39
  involved? That'd be 16/16/17 years ago.
• 9:48
  And how did that all come? Maybe that's why we started
• 9:50
  doing better. That's when things finally
• 9:53
  started to click. Yeah, exactly.
• 9:55
  It coincides. So how did the two of you meet?
• 9:57
  Let's start there. Oh, yes, we we met at a dinner
• 10:00
  party, but I was already applying to graduate schools.
• 10:03
  I wanted to study human computer interaction or at that's what it
• 10:07
  was called before using user experience design.
• 10:09
  And and Eric and I were dating and he's just like, why don't
• 10:12
  you look at Midwest schools? Because I was looking at the
• 10:15
  West coasts and the east coasts. And then it was a two year
• 10:18
  program. We got engaged.
• 10:21
  I went to my first year of grad school and all my friends were
• 10:24
  like, they were doing internships at Google and
• 10:26
  Facebook. And I'm like, OK, wait, OK,
• 10:29
  we're definitely getting married.
• 10:30
  Yes, we're definitely getting married.
• 10:31
  OK, We're definitely living in Milwaukee.
• 10:33
  Yes, we're definitely living in Milwaukee.
• 10:36
  And then I'm like, OK, OK, so. And then great things, both
• 10:41
  great realizations. Great things and it actually
• 10:44
  worked out really well because then I started working, I found
• 10:47
  like a boutique user experience design firm and, and they were
• 10:51
  ahead of their time, like where they actually were on the West
• 10:54
  Coast and they moved to the Midwest to raise their family.
• 10:57
  And you know, the first, the first year or so, like I was,
• 11:02
  you could like travel internationally and I was
• 11:04
  travelling a lot and consulting. And then we had our first child
• 11:08
  and I'm like, OK, I think I'm done.
• 11:10
  I'm not, I, I'm going to try the stay at home mom thing.
• 11:13
  And like, you know, mom 3, I'm like, OK, I can't do the stay at
• 11:15
  home mom thing. I just like, it's amazing how,
• 11:18
  how tough that is. And I really missed working.
• 11:20
  I really missed consulting. And so, you know, after Felix,
• 11:24
  our eldest was a year, I went back and then our second I was,
• 11:29
  we were pregnant with our second one.
• 11:30
  And then I'm like, OK, I have to quit.
• 11:32
  And they're like, no, no, don't, don't quit.
• 11:33
  Just come back when you're ready.
• 11:35
  And so it worked out. And then the third I'm like, OK,
• 11:39
  I'm done. And they're like, no, you're not
• 11:41
  done. Just don't quit.
• 11:42
  Just you'll just pick and choose projects.
• 11:44
  And so I do about two projects a year doing user experience
• 11:48
  design and that's really perfect because it keeps me like in the
• 11:52
  industry, keeps me learning, meeting new people using my
• 11:55
  brain. And then I can apply those
• 11:57
  learnings to storm free coffee. So I should add, so in between
• 12:00
  those, those times when I was, Eric kept on pulling me in and
• 12:04
  showing me like the financial reports and pulling me in.
• 12:07
  It's like, Hey, what do you think of this?
• 12:08
  And I think one of the reasons why we work really well together
• 12:11
  is because I, we both love working.
• 12:13
  We both love problem solving. And so it was fun for me to
• 12:17
  just, you know, just like brainstorm with Eric about his
• 12:21
  work. And so he kept on pulling me in
• 12:23
  until eventually he pulled me in full time.
• 12:27
  It's just like a magnet. He drew you to him.
• 12:29
  He drew you to Milwaukee. He drew you into the business.
• 12:32
  Yes. So, OK, so let's hear a specific
• 12:35
  example, Melissa, of how your work and user experience design
• 12:39
  has has helped Stone Creek Coffee like get get me, get me
• 12:43
  one where like, oh, this, this was a cool one.
• 12:46
  I think really it's the philosophy.
• 12:50
  So we have a saying at, well, we have a couple, but one of them
• 12:54
  is never stop learning. And that comes from the idea of
• 12:57
  user experience design where it's, so my motto is everything
• 13:00
  is iterative or ephemeral and or ephemeral.
• 13:03
  But so with this idea that it's iterative and the idea that, you
• 13:09
  know, never stop learning, you can always try something and you
• 13:12
  learn from failure, which I'm sure a lot of your other guests
• 13:15
  have talked about. But we really embrace it.
• 13:17
  We embrace it as in like, it's let's talk about this.
• 13:21
  Do we still want to move, proceed even though it's risky?
• 13:24
  Yes. No.
• 13:25
  And then we try and execute as much as possible.
• 13:28
  And if it doesn't work, then we iterate.
• 13:30
  And then if it still doesn't work, we iterate.
• 13:32
  And then eventually we're like, OK, yeah, we don't like doing
• 13:34
  this anymore. And so then it's ephemeral.
• 13:36
  So we'll try something new. And that really has just so just
• 13:41
  the the philosophy itself I feel like in user experience design
• 13:44
  has helped our company really embrace risks.
• 13:48
  Do you have a rule of thumb if you iterate X number of times
• 13:51
  and it's still not working that it gets chucked?
• 13:55
  Or is it just sort of more see how it goes and kind of what
• 13:58
  your gut tells you in the moment?
• 14:00
  Sorry, I would say yes or no. It's if the team is not having
• 14:03
  fun doing it and it's not it's like help me hold it.
• 14:07
  Is it bringing us joy? No, no longer.
• 14:09
  Then then we talk about it like and we don't put ourselves in
• 14:13
  painful situations. Even if it's, even if it could
• 14:15
  make lots of money, if it's not enjoyable to us, then we won't
• 14:18
  do it. I want to take a step back and
• 14:22
  kind of talk about the company more philosophically and a
• 14:26
  little bit structurally too. So you're a benefit corporation,
• 14:32
  all employee owned. There's this idea of the samurai
• 14:37
  code of honor, Bushido, meaning social obligation.
• 14:40
  Tell me kind of how all of this plays together.
• 14:43
  I. Think, Eric, you should go
• 14:45
  first. OK, Yeah.
• 14:49
  So it it's, it fits together as more of a story, meaning when I
• 14:55
  started the company, I started it, I named it Giri Corporation,
• 15:00
  which as you said, Anthony is means social obligation sort of
• 15:04
  loosely in the Samurai code of honor.
• 15:07
  And I did that philosophically as a 24 year old before the
• 15:10
  company named Stone Creek Coffee, our DBA was even set up.
• 15:14
  That was just a belief I held that if I was going to be in
• 15:17
  business, I was going to try to build a company that had a
• 15:20
  responsibility to things beyond making a profit.
• 15:24
  So that's sort of day zero. And then day one Stone Creek
• 15:28
  shows up and we start building and we have tried to bake into
• 15:32
  all our decision making, our culture and how we run the
• 15:35
  company of this general idea of social responsibility.
• 15:38
  And then I don't know, 10-12 years ago B Labs and might be
• 15:44
  even more started this this organizational structure, this
• 15:48
  corporate structure called the B Corporation.
• 15:51
  But corporations are set up at the state level.
• 15:54
  So it takes an act of state Congress to to initiate AB Corp
• 16:00
  in a given state. Wisconsin got theirs, I don't
• 16:02
  know, five years ago. So we were certified a few years
• 16:06
  ago. And what that did is it brought
• 16:08
  essentially structure to this, this philosophy of social
• 16:13
  responsibility. And there's five work areas that
• 16:19
  the B Corp sort of assesses you on.
• 16:21
  You get a score and every two years you have to be recertified
• 16:23
  to to remain AB Corp. The areas are workers,
• 16:28
  governance, community, environment and customers.
• 16:32
  And so we report out every year in our impact report on how
• 16:35
  we're impacting those five work areas, if you will.
• 16:39
  And then the last part of your question was about in being
• 16:43
  employee owned. And it's always been, Melissa,
• 16:46
  in my philosophy that our team, they are #1 we build for them
• 16:53
  with them. They are the middle of the
• 16:55
  concentric circle and we treat them, you know, like not so much
• 17:01
  like customers, but we, we, we think of them first and foremost
• 17:05
  as we make decisions. So we have 98, I guess soon to
• 17:10
  be 10 employee owners and we have what's called a phantom
• 17:16
  stock plan or essentially it's a contractual relationship whereby
• 17:20
  we value the company every year. And these employee owners
• 17:24
  essentially have a a basis or a zero and that's set, set at a
• 17:29
  value when they come into the program.
• 17:30
  And then if and when they leave the company, they're paid out
• 17:34
  based on the accrued value that happens during their tenure.
• 17:40
  That's the current plan. And I put that plan in place a
• 17:44
  number of years ago with the long term plan that we would
• 17:47
  eventually sell the whole company.
• 17:49
  When Melissa and I are tired, I will be tired seven years sooner
• 17:54
  than Melissa because I'm seven years older.
• 17:56
  But when we're tired and we're ready to move on, the plan is to
• 18:00
  do an ESOP and and take this this current phantom stock
• 18:04
  contractual type ownership and turn it into actual ownership
• 18:08
  via an ESOP. That will probably happen in two
• 18:12
  different recapitalizations down the road as we continue our
• 18:16
  values of being 100% employee owned.
• 18:20
  Melissa, what's your take on all this?
• 18:21
  Why is? Why is this kind of a structure
• 18:23
  so important to you? The structure is important to me
• 18:27
  because we I just like pausing because I was listening to Eric
• 18:33
  and I was like, yes. He nailed it, huh?
• 18:35
  You. Know he was just saying like our
• 18:38
  employees are not our customers, but I kind of view it
• 18:40
  differently like I feel like. The they're a type of customer.
• 18:46
  It's really easy to work on really hard problems and work
• 18:53
  hard if you enjoy the environment you're in and you
• 18:57
  enjoy like, like serving people. And so both Eric and I actually,
• 19:01
  we love, we, we, our brains love like working out things and we
• 19:05
  always like, we serve others. And I see that with our
• 19:10
  employees. I'm a lot behind the scenes.
• 19:12
  Eric's more like very coffee operations.
• 19:15
  And I'm more like in terms of strategy and, and, and behind
• 19:19
  the scenes. And I, I definitely see it as
• 19:21
  long term, you know, there's mostly 20 year olds, like on
• 19:25
  average 2030 year olds working for us.
• 19:28
  And as I said, everything is iterative.
• 19:30
  So what are they going to take if they move on to another
• 19:33
  career after this? So I see like a responsibility
• 19:38
  in hiring people like especially if they're teenagers or they're
• 19:41
  early 20s and they're, and it's between like semesters at
• 19:44
  college, what are they going to take away from Stone Creek
• 19:47
  Coffee and that they'll use for the rest of their life.
• 19:49
  So we have like these core commitments.
• 19:52
  We really teach these, these values that are extremely
• 19:54
  important to us that they can use later on in life.
• 19:58
  So I feel like that's what that also means to me.
• 20:10
  Anything. Else we just lost you there for
• 20:13
  a second, but that's OK. It records locally on your side.
• 20:16
  So we'll, we'll get it when, when we download it.
• 20:20
  So I, I'm just, it's, it's OK. I, I'm, I'm curious to hear like
• 20:25
  for each of you, like where do these values, these strong
• 20:28
  values come from? You just come out of the womb
• 20:31
  this way where you guys raised in a certain way where there's
• 20:34
  certain like, you know, experiences that you had growing
• 20:38
  up where, you know, these kinds of things became really
• 20:41
  important to you. Well, so Eric and I are both
• 20:46
  lifelong learners. And so we've had lots of
• 20:48
  mentors, both of us, same mentors, different mentors.
• 20:52
  And a lot of these core commitments came from our
• 20:55
  discussions with the mentors and what really, you know, resonated
• 20:58
  with us. Eric, do you want to add to
• 21:01
  that? Yeah, I'd say it's that and and
• 21:05
  then Anthony, as you said it, it has a lot to do with how you're
• 21:09
  raised, you know, both the type of parents, the type of house,
• 21:13
  the type of culture that you have.
• 21:15
  And I was raised in a home with a, a father who was an engineer,
• 21:21
  pretty hard driving, built his own company.
• 21:24
  And so I learned a lot from him about hard work and building and
• 21:28
  creating and fixing when things are, you know, broken.
• 21:32
  And then I, my mom was, yeah, just gentle.
• 21:36
  And if I was sick, I had a little bell I could ring.
• 21:39
  And I remember that distinctly. You know, she was, she was just
• 21:43
  filled with love and kindness. And so when I look back on the
• 21:47
  values that I carry both in the business and in my life,
• 21:50
  they're, they're a combination of those two deep influences.
• 21:56
  Yeah, that I had. Yeah, and then and then my
• 21:58
  parents were immigrants from the Philippines and very hard
• 22:01
  working. So hard work is as a court.
• 22:04
  And then also clean the corners, make sure all the details are
• 22:07
  set. It's yeah, I would agree.
• 22:10
  And then also learning like and in the immigrant culture, it's
• 22:14
  like learning will get you out of anything just.
• 22:18
  Get you out of anything. We'll just get you apart.
• 22:21
  Oh, got. You.
• 22:23
  It's it's a way through, right, Gotcha.
• 22:25
  It's a way up. So, OK, so let's talk about the
• 22:29
  current state of the business, how many locations we got
• 22:32
  retail, we got wholesale, kind of paint a picture for us.
• 22:38
  Yeah, I'll do that quickly. And then let's say you can add
• 22:41
  any color. So currently the company, and I
• 22:45
  just want to be clear, like the assumption that Snow Creek is
• 22:47
  not that we should be bigger, like we don't wake up every day
• 22:49
  trying to be bigger. Like I think there is this
• 22:52
  notion in all business that you should grow, grow, grow.
• 22:55
  And I, I do think that that's true.
• 22:56
  You should be changing, changing, changing.
• 22:59
  But we have tried to build the business so that it remains
• 23:03
  intimate and that we stay connected to our teams, our
• 23:06
  people. So that could be tricky.
• 23:09
  We have 9 retail cafes. We have AB to B or wholesale
• 23:14
  business somewhere in 250 to 300, you know, regional, local
• 23:18
  accounts that we serve, restaurants, corporations, other
• 23:22
  coffee houses. And then we have AB to B
• 23:26
  business, I'm sorry, an e-commerce business from
• 23:29
  stonecreekcoffee.com and some of the other social tools where
• 23:33
  we're shipping coffee, you know, around the country every day.
• 23:36
  So we have ±2 hundred 220 people.
• 23:43
  Melissa and I have worked hard, as I said, to try to keep the
• 23:46
  number of people limited so that we can maintain connections and
• 23:52
  walk into any of our cafes, any part of the business and know at
• 23:56
  least you know, a handful of people by name have a
• 23:59
  relationship and so that we stay connected to the culture.
• 24:04
  This. Anything to add to that?
• 24:07
  Just to add to that, like we, you know, when we were trying to
• 24:11
  figure out growth, like we, we tried Chicago and we just
• 24:14
  realized, no, we don't really want to go that far.
• 24:17
  We tried Madison, no, we don't want to go that far.
• 24:18
  So it was like through it was through these like trials that
• 24:22
  we realized what we wanted and what we wanted to focus on.
• 24:25
  And so instead of opening a new cafe, we can just remodel a
• 24:29
  current one that is tired or old.
• 24:31
  And we kind of have like almost like hit interval like where
• 24:34
  it's we work really, really hard and then we have the cash.
• 24:37
  And then instead of opening another cafe, we'll use that
• 24:39
  cash on our employees and also remodeling one of our cafes.
• 24:43
  And so we try to keep the spaces really beautiful and
• 24:46
  interesting. What does it look like to use
• 24:48
  that cash on your employees? Yeah, everything.
• 24:52
  From Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah, like everything from, you
• 24:55
  know, buying them Christmas dinner to, like, getting them
• 24:59
  bucks tickets to bonuses to, I mean, there's a lot of different
• 25:04
  ways in which we can do that. Or even simply like, you know,
• 25:07
  one of our cafes, we remodeled the employee bathroom so that it
• 25:11
  looked really nice. You know, it's just just
• 25:13
  depending on that. I mean, there's lots of
• 25:15
  different ways, you know, everyone gets a T-shirt a year.
• 25:18
  So there's all these little small things that I'm sure other
• 25:20
  companies do. Yeah.
• 25:23
  There's, there's also this morning actually, I think eight
• 25:26
  people jumped on a jet plane and they're all flying down to
• 25:28
  Guatemala. If you work for us for five
• 25:31
  years, we take you to Guatemala. So every year we're running one
• 25:34
  or two employee trips to Guatemala.
• 25:37
  They'll be down there visiting one of our long time partners
• 25:40
  outside of Antigua. And then in the evenings they'll
• 25:42
  be drinking and running around Antigua and having a blast.
• 25:47
  And, and for many of our baristas and other employees who
• 25:51
  are on that trip, you know, half of them are more 2/3 have to get
• 25:55
  their passport, don't have one, never left the country.
• 25:58
  So, yeah, again, fits in the philosophy of never stopped
• 26:00
  learning. The other thing we we do not
• 26:03
  only buy you Christmas dinner if you want to go pick it up, you
• 26:07
  know, when we buy bucks tickets, we have to buy, you know, 50
• 26:10
  sets or whatever. But what we, what we also do is
• 26:13
  we, we, we can't, we, we focus on a living wage.
• 26:16
  So one of the core areas of the B Corp is our workers.
• 26:19
  It's called workers, not my favorite word, but that's the
• 26:22
  category. And we use the MIT living wage
• 26:26
  study calibration to target living wages for different
• 26:31
  roles. And we have 100% of people at
• 26:34
  Stone Creek have a living wage for an individual.
• 26:36
  And if you have a family, we are now working towards getting 100%
• 26:40
  for a family. And that's a, that's a high bar.
• 26:43
  I think in our 2023 impact report, the average barista made
• 26:48
  44,000. I don't have the number in front
• 26:50
  of me, but that for in this market for a single person is a
• 26:56
  living wage which is substantially above our our
• 26:59
  peers. And to do that there's all kinds
• 27:01
  of things we have to prioritize and ways we have to perform in
• 27:05
  the business. But not only do we get the bucks
• 27:07
  tickets and the dinner, but we actually focus on the heavy lift
• 27:11
  of improving wages for everybody across the business every year.
• 27:14
  I mean, that's substantial. You have $44,000 a year and that
• 27:17
  was a year and a half ago. Yeah.
• 27:20
  I mean that has to mean thinner margins for the two of you is
• 27:24
  the owners, right? It does actually, you know, in
• 27:30
  terms of let me be careful what I say so we get paid fine.
• 27:34
  I think if I was benchmarked against other companies, CE OS
• 27:37
  or managing directors, I would be lower.
• 27:40
  But that's a choice that we made based on our values and based on
• 27:43
  how we choose to live and what's important to us.
• 27:45
  So, yeah, at Stone Creek, it's never about the money, except
• 27:50
  when it's about the money to pay the bills, make the cash flow we
• 27:54
  need, take care of our debt. Like we are fiscally strong
• 27:57
  managers, not because we want to have, you know, a huge house
• 28:02
  and, and, and have all the accourements, but what we, we
• 28:06
  want is a business that's managed well so we can deliver
• 28:08
  on behalf of all of our employees.
• 28:11
  So you have 9 locations. Sounds like you've tried some in
• 28:14
  different locations and that didn't, that wasn't your thing.
• 28:17
  You wanted to keep it sort of more contained, more locally, a
• 28:20
  little bit more intimate. So is there the opportunity for
• 28:24
  the Milwaukee and surrounding areas to support more than 9
• 28:28
  Stone Creek locations? Is there a thought there?
• 28:32
  Yes. Yeah.
• 28:35
  I mean, to answer your question, absolutely we could build
• 28:38
  particularly our next, our most recent generation of our cafes
• 28:41
  has a, a full black iron kitchen where we have a just a really
• 28:45
  scratch made beautiful brunch, an all day menu that has really
• 28:50
  augmented the coffee program and the the bakery.
• 28:53
  We we run a a bakery commissary downtown that serves all of our
• 28:57
  cafes. So everything we make at Stone
• 28:59
  Creek food wise is scratch made. But to answer your question,
• 29:03
  sound like a commercial. Yes, we could.
• 29:06
  We could open more locations. I think the difficulty with
• 29:09
  retail and retail coffee and other coffee owners would
• 29:12
  express this is it's kind of a unique business venture in the
• 29:15
  sense like retail or a restaurant, you invest whatever
• 29:20
  200,000 a million, $2,000,000 in your build out, you sign a 20
• 29:24
  year lease and you have yet to serve a single customer.
• 29:27
  You open the doors and you just sort of see what happens.
• 29:30
  And there's just so much into that binary decision of the
• 29:32
  location you choose and sort of how you build it out.
• 29:35
  It can be a very risky proposition.
• 29:38
  So we've learned to do that well and we've closed a bunch of
• 29:41
  locations as Melissa said, like never stop iterating.
• 29:44
  So our strategic plan in the next 2 1/2 years we're half or
• 29:48
  part way into it is to build our direct to consumer business and
• 29:53
  our our B to B, our wholesale business.
• 29:56
  We, given our current financial model, we cannot continue to
• 29:59
  raise the living wage and the wages for our team across the
• 30:02
  board without a shift in essentially gross profit per
• 30:06
  payroll dollar. And the retail business is a
• 30:08
  tough one to move. And so that's what we're doing
• 30:12
  in the next 2 1/2 years to take another step forward with our
• 30:15
  pay. Anything to add to that Mosa no.
• 30:21
  Not. Really.
• 30:21
  Kind of. Sort of like the growth part.
• 30:24
  Now what is it? That you guys, it is.
• 30:25
  Sort of is really been the sort of the key component to your
• 30:29
  growth. Like why, why do why do people
• 30:31
  keep supporting so many Stone Creek locations?
• 30:34
  What are you guys doing that's different aside from aside from
• 30:37
  what we've already talked about in terms of like the benefit
• 30:40
  corporation and the the value system, which I'm sure appeals
• 30:43
  to a lot of your customer base. But but what is it that you're
• 30:47
  doing inside the store for the the customer experience?
• 30:50
  So the there's we have this. The other motto is we are coffee
• 30:54
  geeks providing remarkable care and never stop learning those
• 30:59
  three separate things are we actually.
• 31:02
  So we are, we are coffee geeks first and then providing
• 31:06
  remarkable care. And the remarkable care I think
• 31:08
  is what has our employee retention so high and that like
• 31:12
  while others were having are having a hard time hiring
• 31:16
  retail. We haven't had any issues even
• 31:20
  through COVID or post COVID and our employees.
• 31:24
  So it's so we've had luck with not luck, hard work retaining
• 31:29
  our employees and then also our customers.
• 31:33
  We provide remarkable care, like we go and remarkable care as
• 31:36
  Eric defined to like our team. It's someone actually has to
• 31:40
  comment has to remark on it to that's the kind of care we want.
• 31:45
  So Eric and I, we've travelled all over the world and we've
• 31:47
  just, and, and one of the things that I don't think that he, he
• 31:51
  has highlighted yet, but our learnings from all these other
• 31:54
  places we take back and we never really try and we never copy
• 31:59
  from other coffee companies. We could learn from other
• 32:02
  industries and learn from other like, just like a hotel, what's
• 32:06
  happening in this hotel industry?
• 32:07
  Like what's, what's happening in like, like what is Patagonia
• 32:11
  doing right now for their employees?
• 32:13
  So we actually take these learnings and, and, and take
• 32:15
  that back and, and that's how we provide remarkable care to our
• 32:18
  employees. And then in terms of customers,
• 32:20
  because our employees know how important that is.
• 32:23
  They also like they, they have such amazing relationships with
• 32:27
  our customers like that. I just heard that some people,
• 32:31
  Eric, you were telling me that someone went to a person's
• 32:34
  funeral, like some baristas attended a funeral because they,
• 32:37
  they knew the customer so well. And we just have all these
• 32:40
  stories across the board of just like how intimately these people
• 32:43
  get to know their baristas. That's amazing.
• 32:46
  Yeah. Say more about the product,
• 32:48
  Yeah. It's safe, yeah.
• 32:50
  As well. Yeah, I guess I can comment
• 32:54
  there. I, I mentioned that, you know,
• 32:55
  everything, all the food made locally.
• 32:57
  But, you know, in terms of coffee sourcing, we work what we
• 32:59
  call farm to cup. So we source coffee direct from
• 33:03
  family farmers, primarily in Central and South America.
• 33:07
  The product is brought to Milwaukee Roasted meticulously
• 33:11
  is the word we use. And we try to create coffee
• 33:14
  that's sweet, clean and juicy. And so those are the standards
• 33:17
  that the green coffee team and the roasting team that I set for
• 33:22
  them. And then that coffee is brewed
• 33:24
  using, you know, the most relevant and new technical
• 33:28
  equipment in the cafes so that, you know, the, the, the cup,
• 33:32
  the, the, the, how do I say it? The competitive advantage is not
• 33:36
  in the cup, but it kind of is meaning the cup has to be
• 33:40
  amazing and it is the best coffee in our market.
• 33:44
  And secondly, it has to be delivered by, you know, someone
• 33:48
  who cares, as Melissa said, who cares remarkably so that three
• 33:52
  seconds across the counter, that interaction and all of the
• 33:56
  elements that go into building that interaction is our
• 34:00
  competitive advantage. And I don't, I have no problem
• 34:02
  telling that because you got to do about 200 things really well
• 34:07
  to deliver on that 3 seconds. But that is how we compete in
• 34:11
  this market. And then we have beautiful
• 34:13
  physical infrastructures, right? So any successful business
• 34:16
  doesn't just do one thing well. They typically have three to
• 34:19
  five kind of concentric circles that overlap for the for the
• 34:22
  win. And then around that, there's
• 34:24
  another 203 hundred small things that have to be executed, you
• 34:28
  know, every week to make it run. So you mentioned the goal over
• 34:31
  the next 2 1/2 years is to grow the B to B, your wholesale
• 34:36
  business as well as the direct to consumer business.
• 34:39
  What's the strategy there? How do you think you'll be able
• 34:42
  to grow each of those sectors? You know, I think like all
• 34:48
  businesses, the strategy is innovation and product
• 34:52
  development. So we are not trying to scream
• 34:56
  louder. We're not putting out more
• 34:57
  Facebook ads. We're not hiring PR consultants,
• 35:04
  although for the first time we might hire one because of some
• 35:06
  new products we have coming out. But it really is being that
• 35:09
  growth will be driven by product innovation of which we're going
• 35:13
  to be launching a new product in May, We're launching a new
• 35:17
  website in March that'll be an updated packaging for the Stone
• 35:21
  Creek brand. But we have new product lines
• 35:24
  coming on board to grow both of those channels.
• 35:27
  And we're going to, as Melissa said, try and fail and try to
• 35:30
  grow the business beyond just, you know, where Stone Creek want
• 35:35
  to buy some of our coffee because there's about 6000 other
• 35:37
  roasters around the country that have that same message.
• 35:40
  Want to buy some of our coffee. So can you say more about the
• 35:43
  product innovation or is it too soon since we are we're
• 35:46
  recording this end of February of 2025 and it sounds like it's
• 35:49
  still a couple months off from being released?
• 35:53
  Yeah, I guess what I that's fair.
• 35:55
  I don't like because that sounds annoying, but I'm not going to
• 35:58
  say specifically what they are because we want to launch them
• 36:00
  obviously. So forgive me for that.
• 36:02
  But what I can say is they're what I can say is they are
• 36:08
  they're built for tighter customer segments than the Stone
• 36:11
  Creek brand is, meaning tributes of coffee buyers, you know, run
• 36:17
  up and down the board from the roast you like to the type of
• 36:21
  decaf you like to the type darkness of the espresso that
• 36:25
  you like to, you know, what kind of single origin, what varietal
• 36:29
  do you like? What process do you like?
• 36:30
  You know, there are 15 to to 25 attributes that customer
• 36:39
  customers have when they're buying their coffee.
• 36:40
  And so our plan is to build product lines that are built
• 36:43
  around these tighter customer preferences.
• 36:46
  And for folks listening who are saying, hey, I want to know more
• 36:49
  about this when it comes, when it's ready, how can they, is
• 36:53
  there a mailing list that they can sign up for?
• 36:55
  How can they sort of raise their hand and say, please, Eric,
• 36:58
  Melissa, tell me when this is ready?
• 37:01
  Yeah, they can sign up for our. Newsletter OK, go ahead, babe.
• 37:03
  Sitecircuitcoffee.com or they can also check out our Instagram
• 37:08
  and that's Junkie Coffee. Both of those will have, you
• 37:11
  know, the timeline and a lot of information.
• 37:15
  Yeah. I'm going to jump to this
• 37:17
  question maybe a little bit earlier than I normally would
• 37:19
  because I know that Eric's time is limited.
• 37:21
  And I always like to ask my guests about a serious challenge
• 37:24
  that they've overcome, whether it's personal or professional or
• 37:28
  maybe something that kind of, you know, interweaves the two of
• 37:31
  those things. How you got through that and
• 37:33
  some lessons that you learn coming out the other side.
• 37:36
  Maybe Eric, you can go first. Yeah, I'm happy to.
• 37:42
  As we talked about a little bit before we jumped on for me, I'd
• 37:48
  say the toughest, well, I'll just say COVID, I know that
• 37:52
  that's a little bit for every business.
• 37:54
  It was very difficult. I think what was unique about
• 37:57
  Stone Creek and, and the COVID situation is we, we shut down
• 38:00
  like many others. Obviously it was prior to the
• 38:04
  PPP and other programs that eventually came out, but we were
• 38:09
  just terrified. And listen, I agreed, you know,
• 38:12
  within a few days of shutting down that we would pay our
• 38:17
  employees 100%. I had a fairly large line of
• 38:21
  credit for buying green coffee. We were going to be buying a lot
• 38:25
  of green coffee. So I said, we'll just use our
• 38:28
  line of credit, you know, screw it.
• 38:31
  We, if we go a million and a half in debt, that'll get us
• 38:33
  roughly through whatever we calculated July.
• 38:36
  This thing's got to be over by July.
• 38:39
  And then, and then we've leaned into our values and we said,
• 38:41
  hey, never stop learning. So the only thing we asked of
• 38:44
  our employees was that they learn a new skill that could be
• 38:47
  knitting, it could be sourdough bread, it could be anything they
• 38:50
  wanted. And they would just send a quick
• 38:52
  e-mail to their boss and CC Melissa and I at the time,
• 38:55
  because we wanted to see what they were up to, just to kind of
• 38:58
  celebrate this, this moment. But we paid everybody went into
• 39:04
  the fairly deep debt in the summer.
• 39:06
  The programs from the government came online and we were able to
• 39:09
  work through it. But what we learned is that if
• 39:11
  you trust your values, and we will always lead with these
• 39:15
  values. And it was, it was, it was quite
• 39:18
  terrifying because I was prepared to be deeply in debt
• 39:21
  for many years, but I was also prepared to take care of our
• 39:23
  people when they needed us to. So I want to pause for a moment
• 39:27
  on this because I think I think it deserves a bigger spotlight.
• 39:34
  When this all started, you know, March of 2020, yeah, there was a
• 39:39
  lot of people who thought, hey, this is only going to last a few
• 39:42
  weeks, a few months, something. We just got to hold on until
• 39:45
  then. But the reality is nobody knew
• 39:48
  nobody knew how long this was going to last.
• 39:50
  Nobody knew how long the shutdown was going to last.
• 39:52
  Nobody knew how the curve was was going to look.
• 39:55
  And so yeah, to to use the word terrifying it, it almost feels
• 40:00
  like not a big enough word because.
• 40:04
  The whole world, you know, could have completely melted down and
• 40:07
  you didn't know. And so to dip into your line of
• 40:10
  credit that you used to buy coffee beans and go into, you
• 40:13
  know, over $1,000,000 in debt and to make that commitment to
• 40:17
  pay your employees 100% it like it's one thing to do that if,
• 40:22
  yeah, we know this is going to be over in two weeks, 3 weeks, 4
• 40:24
  weeks, we can sort of pencil it out and be like, OK, this is
• 40:26
  tough, but we, we can make the numbers work.
• 40:28
  But with that uncertainty, that unknown deadline of when things
• 40:33
  might kind of snap back to a little bit of normal, I think it
• 40:36
  says a lot about how committed both of you are to your values
• 40:42
  when things are going well, when you're successful, when the
• 40:44
  money's flowing, easier to have these values that talk about
• 40:48
  taking care of everybody, being involved in the community.
• 40:51
  And then when it's, you know, you're, you know, I don't know
• 40:54
  which financials look like, you know, your house is on the line,
• 40:56
  you know, the line of credit, like the business is on the
• 40:58
  line, like things could really completely implode to, to commit
• 41:03
  to that, to that financial level.
• 41:04
  I think it is something really impressive what you're going to
• 41:07
  kind of add to that there, Melissa?
• 41:09
  Yeah, I was actually going to say like, we need to like
• 41:11
  spotlight on this more because I feel like in February, Eric and
• 41:16
  I were we were watching the headlines.
• 41:18
  My my parents were visiting their family in the Philippines.
• 41:21
  And Eric was already like, I think you should come home.
• 41:23
  They didn't. They didn't want to, but like,
• 41:25
  you should come home. And so Eric actually started
• 41:27
  like, like just laying down the groundwork of like he was, I
• 41:30
  feel like ahead of a lot of other people of like, what is
• 41:33
  going to happen? We should just plan for this
• 41:35
  just in case. And I remember we were together
• 41:38
  and we made a decision. It was a weekend.
• 41:41
  We called our leadership team and saying we're going to close
• 41:44
  tomorrow. But I want to highlight how much
• 41:46
  we like, we really leaned into it.
• 41:48
  We took care of our employees, but we would receive the most
• 41:52
  amazing videos. Like they would post on
• 41:54
  Instagram, like what they were learning and you know, with the
• 41:56
  hashtag never stop learning. You know, like our graphic
• 41:59
  designer learned how to do animation and someone learned
• 42:02
  how to like just do juggling. I mean, just really great.
• 42:06
  And so I will add that it really brought a community within Stone
• 42:10
  Creek Coffee. Like because we're all trying to
• 42:12
  like it's such a weird time. No one was going outside,
• 42:15
  Everyone was inside, but it kept everyone connected because they
• 42:20
  would share these things with each other and then we'd all
• 42:22
  share them together because like, did you see how like they
• 42:25
  were able to like bake this amazing pie, like just all that
• 42:28
  kind of stuff. And it was really, so I felt
• 42:30
  like that was really fantastic. And it really like, I think the
• 42:34
  employees finally understood, OK, I understand what this like
• 42:37
  community is about. And that was really lovely.
• 42:41
  And just again, we leaned into just like surveys, like we did
• 42:45
  lots of the data, the data part as we also kept surveying our
• 42:49
  employees, not just the customers, but the employees
• 42:52
  like, hey, how like how safe do you feel?
• 42:54
  What's going on? And then that's, that actually
• 42:57
  helped us build our, our roll out plan to reopen some of our
• 43:00
  cafes. And how do we do that?
• 43:02
  Like everyone was trying to navigate it, but we, we relied
• 43:05
  heavily on making sure our employees were comfortable and
• 43:08
  safe. And, and then on top of that, we
• 43:11
  also had tons of products. So we, we had lots of coffee and
• 43:14
  we still had lots of coffee and it still has to get roasted.
• 43:17
  So we were just we were giving it to the hospitals, we were
• 43:19
  giving it to schools and teachers that were like having a
• 43:22
  hard time. Like we were giving it to like,
• 43:25
  you know, donate some to your neighbor, like it just and then
• 43:28
  our e-commerce just went crazy up.
• 43:31
  And then also we could have like tip your barista and like it was
• 43:34
  an online tip your barista. I mean, just all these things in
• 43:37
  which we could navigate and we were just trying things.
• 43:39
  But it was it was actually. Even though it was such a dark,
• 43:42
  weird time, it was also lovely and within the stone coffee
• 43:46
  culture. That's interesting.
• 43:49
  And so I hear that there's a lot of sort of like internal leaning
• 43:53
  on each other. Did you also have maybe peers
• 43:57
  who were in similar businesses or unrelated businesses that you
• 44:01
  could kind of, I don't know, talk to and use as a support
• 44:05
  network for? Hey, what are you guys doing?
• 44:07
  How are you handling this? Yeah, I guess we, I'm part of
• 44:11
  some executive groups, so I had some discussions.
• 44:14
  But, you know, our situation was very unique in terms of just the
• 44:17
  number of people and the age group and just sort of how we
• 44:20
  manage them. And we, what we learned, as
• 44:22
  Melissa said, is that you, you just, you have to be 100%
• 44:25
  transparent. Hey, we don't know what we're
• 44:27
  going to do. That's why we're sending you
• 44:28
  this survey. Can you tell us how you're
• 44:30
  feeling about Acts? Can you tell us what you think
• 44:33
  of why? And we sort of used the
• 44:34
  collective wisdom of the group to navigate the decisions.
• 44:37
  And of course, when we did that accidentally, we were we were
• 44:41
  essentially following all the steps of change management.
• 44:43
  We were just involving everybody.
• 44:45
  We are getting their input. We are having early wins.
• 44:48
  You were rolling it out with good communication that we just
• 44:50
  learned that skill set. And as Melissa said, many times,
• 44:54
  that's just helped us build our culture like, and, and so I very
• 44:57
  much believe that, you know, when it's tough, you know, it's
• 45:01
  sort of like, OK, where's the lesson?
• 45:03
  And how is this going to propel me?
• 45:05
  And it that that brings this sort of dichotomous joy between
• 45:09
  the toughness and then which gets gets mitigated by the team
• 45:12
  and the fun with the learning. And that usually adds up to just
• 45:16
  a a challenging, fun day, week, month, year, whatever.
• 45:21
  If you had to sum it up, what was the biggest lesson that you
• 45:23
  learned going through that experience?
• 45:29
  Go ahead, Musa, I, I have. Resilience.
• 45:31
  I mean, I think that is a word commonly used with with COVID.
• 45:34
  But I definitely feel like Stone Creek Coffee, the culture is
• 45:39
  very resilient. Yeah, I and I would, I would say
• 45:44
  trust yourself and and those you care for.
• 45:47
  Yeah. I like that.
• 45:49
  Tell me a little bit more about the community involvement.
• 45:52
  What kinds of things do you guys do to stay connected with those
• 45:55
  around you? Well, obviously related since
• 45:58
  we're, you know, very food related.
• 46:00
  A lot of it is just food banks. We we donate a lot of coffee and
• 46:04
  we donate bakery items. Homeless shelters.
• 46:09
  Eric is very much involved with a homeless shelter and the food
• 46:15
  bank. River West Co-op Oh, no, wait,
• 46:17
  no, it's called kinship now. Sorry.
• 46:18
  They had. They had a name changed.
• 46:23
  Yeah, I, I would say the, there's always been this tension
• 46:26
  and I'll just kind of layout the tension quickly.
• 46:28
  I know I'm going to bounce here in about 5 minutes.
• 46:30
  But the tension is, do you earn a bunch of money and then change
• 46:34
  the world or do you operate your business in such a way that you
• 46:38
  change the world everyday, Every customer, every employee, and
• 46:41
  we've sort of shifted. I mean, when I was young, my
• 46:44
  belief I was going to go to the Peace Corps, I was ready to go
• 46:46
  to Honduras. I said, you know what, I'm going
• 46:49
  to go into business because to me at the time, that's where the
• 46:52
  levers of power and change existed.
• 46:55
  And I thought, if I can get my hands on some of those levers,
• 46:57
  I'm going to make a bunch of money and then I'm going to
• 46:59
  change the world. So fine, good idea.
• 47:01
  That's why it's Geary Corporation in a way.
• 47:03
  But what I realized along the way is actually the change
• 47:06
  happens every day. So if we build an amazing cafe
• 47:10
  in your neighborhood and we have these wonderful teams in there
• 47:14
  serving you, is, is that a community asset or is that a
• 47:17
  business that's trying to make money?
• 47:18
  Well, from our seat, it's a community asset that you now get
• 47:22
  to walk your dog and when your grandparents come, you can all
• 47:24
  go down there and get a really awesome sandwich and have coffee
• 47:28
  and see your favorite barista and you just build this
• 47:30
  community connection. You see your neighbor.
• 47:33
  So I very much see many of pieces of our business.
• 47:37
  We do the traditional things. We everyday we send our leftover
• 47:40
  bakery to the, you know, to the shelter.
• 47:43
  We do lots of what we call brewing change.
• 47:46
  So we have these initiatives, employees can raise their hand
• 47:48
  and we give them money and support and use our assets to
• 47:51
  help them do the change they seek.
• 47:53
  And we do all the traditional things.
• 47:55
  But what we do, I think most importantly is we look through
• 47:59
  and into the business with a set of glasses that look for ways to
• 48:03
  make this impact in the decisions we make. 50% of our
• 48:06
  vendors are within 90 miles of of, of, of Milwaukee, 90 plus
• 48:12
  percent of our customers are, are are within 90 miles.
• 48:15
  So those are the kinds of things that we do in the sort of
• 48:18
  broadest sense of community and that's the impact that that we
• 48:21
  make everyday. It's so interesting to hear that
• 48:25
  part of the impetus for starting the business was as a vehicle to
• 48:30
  make the world a better place. Let's start the business.
• 48:33
  I can make a bunch of money and and then I can use that money
• 48:36
  and leverage it to make the world a better place.
• 48:38
  And then, you know, as you got into it.
• 48:40
  People do that. Even even today, right, but,
• 48:42
  and, and it's kind of evolved is what I'm hearing you say is we
• 48:46
  don't have to wait until we've got this pile of a billion
• 48:48
  dollars. It's like, you know, what can we
• 48:50
  do in the big and small things every day and in how we treat
• 48:54
  our employees and how we treat our customers and how, you know,
• 48:57
  we outfit our cafes just to, to make the world, our little
• 49:01
  corner of it a little bit better for everybody?
• 49:04
  Right, right. And what, what you also realize
• 49:06
  as you get a little older is the changing the world means
• 49:09
  changing the people around me, the people I care about, the
• 49:13
  people down the block. And that it's, it's that place
• 49:16
  where you have the boast agency and you can't, I, I mean, I can,
• 49:20
  I can buy mosquito Nets, you know, and I can ship, I can, you
• 49:23
  know, I can make donations of money to Ng OS and, and
• 49:25
  certainly I do some of that stuff.
• 49:27
  But the biggest impact in the part that I think has the most
• 49:31
  return is when we work locally, we think locally and we make
• 49:34
  that impact in our neighborhood, in our community.
• 49:37
  That's so powerful, right? Because we think about making
• 49:40
  the world a better place and we're like, oh, the world's a
• 49:42
  big place. There's lots of problems.
• 49:43
  There's lots of people like, where do I start?
• 49:46
  And yeah, just just look around you there.
• 49:48
  There's people that need your help.
• 49:49
  There's things that you can do a little bit better.
• 49:51
  I I love that always be learning what's a book, podcast, course
• 49:59
  or other resource that's been really helpful for each of you
• 50:02
  that you'd recommend to somebody else?
• 50:06
  OK, so there's a Jacob Nielsen 10 heuristic usability
• 50:13
  principles and, and that sounds like it's a mouthful, but it's
• 50:17
  literally a page that you can read.
• 50:19
  Oh, just like, and it just breaks it down.
• 50:22
  So, so it's like 1010 usability heuristics and then Nielsen N
• 50:26
  i.e. LSEN Nielsen.
• 50:30
  But I still remember that. I, I remember the list to this
• 50:33
  day from grad school, but that it's just basically make things
• 50:37
  flexible, make things like real world make things.
• 50:40
  And so there's like this list of design principles and you can
• 50:43
  apply that to business. You can apply all of them to
• 50:46
  business. And it's it is actually really
• 50:49
  impactful. And we've used it at Stone Creek
• 50:50
  Coffee so. How about you there?
• 50:55
  Yeah, for me, I would say never stop learning.
• 50:59
  You know, start reading, start listening to podcast.
• 51:01
  It doesn't really matter to be honest.
• 51:03
  What matters is starting and learning and trying to implement
• 51:06
  them and working on the habits that are required to make that
• 51:08
  change. I'll say a couple just because
• 51:11
  you asked, but there are hundreds.
• 51:13
  The first one is read to your kids.
• 51:15
  I'm just kidding, but that is important if you have kids.
• 51:19
  Let's see. I'm just looking at my notes.
• 51:20
  So, so one that had a big impact on me, although it's a little
• 51:23
  bit maybe odd, not odd, but Ray de Leo the book principles,
• 51:28
  pretty hefty book. But if you slow down and you
• 51:32
  read that book really well, you're going to learn a lot
• 51:35
  about building culture and building performance.
• 51:37
  Because remember, a really lovely culture has to be married
• 51:40
  with performance because without performance, we don't have
• 51:42
  enough money to do it again. And then you failed.
• 51:46
  So you have to perform while you build an amazing culture.
• 51:50
  And we have a strong performance culture at Stone Creek like this
• 51:53
  is not get your guitar group hug.
• 51:56
  We we do. We do have guitars and we do
• 51:59
  have group hugs, but we perform and we perform at a high level
• 52:02
  and we keep our commitments. So secondly, Fred Kaufman,
• 52:06
  Conscious Business, I think is a really rich and deep study on
• 52:10
  how to make commitments, how to have agency, how to own your
• 52:13
  responsibilities. It's kind of a little bit of a
• 52:15
  tough love book, but sometimes that's required as we build
• 52:20
  cultures that are trying to change the world, meaning our
• 52:23
  community. That's good stuff, Eric.
• 52:27
  Is this the time that you need to bounce?
• 52:30
  Yeah, I do. I we're building a new website
• 52:32
  and I meet with our developers at 11 on Monday.
• 52:36
  So forgive me for bouncing, but I appreciate Anthony, the invite
• 52:40
  and the time. And it's just a blast to talk
• 52:42
  about the business and hopefully this helps some people, you
• 52:45
  know, build their build their path.
• 52:46
  I know that it will appreciate your time, Eric.
• 52:48
  Melissa will continue to carry the torch for us here.
• 52:51
  All right. Thank you.
• 52:54
  Bye. I'm so glad he was able to meet
• 52:57
  with us as well so. Oh yes, it's to be able to talk
• 53:01
  with both partners, especially, you know, given all of Eric's
• 53:04
  perspective and his different involvement in the business.
• 53:06
  It's it's it, it was great to have his voice in here.
• 53:10
  So I'm, I'm curious to hear a little bit more, Melissa, about
• 53:13
  those usability heuristics and how those come into play for
• 53:16
  Stone Creek. Yes, OK, so let me try to think.
• 53:22
  So one of the examples is like what Eric had just mentioned.
• 53:24
  There's lots of different ways in which people try and buy
• 53:27
  coffee. You know, they and so early on
• 53:30
  when I joined the team, I interviewed lots of customers,
• 53:35
  our customers and I interviewed a lot of our wholesale customers
• 53:38
  and I said like, what is like? And so then I basically had them
• 53:41
  rank how they buy coffee and observe them buying coffee and
• 53:45
  observe like their conversations with people buying coffee.
• 53:47
  Then I also looked at like, then I married it with how our
• 53:50
  baristas talk about coffee, how they look at coffee, how they
• 53:53
  like, what do they look for when they go to other coffee shops
• 53:56
  and, and, and whatnot. And then with that information,
• 53:59
  I provided like a, just basically some information like
• 54:02
  here's the experience of coffee buying and here's what we're not
• 54:06
  doing. And with that, we were able to
• 54:08
  change the design of how we talked about the coffee, how we
• 54:11
  sold the coffee, how we even like the visual design of the
• 54:14
  coffee bags. So that's most people.
• 54:17
  First they look at the roast, which is really interesting
• 54:19
  because I should add, Anthony, that there isn't a scientific
• 54:22
  like light roast in Milwaukee is completely different than light
• 54:26
  roast in San Francisco. And dark roast, I mean, this is
• 54:30
  completely different. So the the West Coast is like
• 54:33
  light roasts are very, very, very light, basically raw.
• 54:35
  And then the Midwest, they prefer things as dark as
• 54:39
  possible. So our light roasts are still a
• 54:41
  little like there's still caramelization.
• 54:44
  Anyway, that's a tangent, but Long story short.
• 54:46
  So we were able to have it. So it's segmented by light
• 54:50
  medium roast. And then we have that visually
• 54:52
  so that it's very easy for someone to see like, oh, I
• 54:54
  definitely like the light, the light roast coffees.
• 54:57
  And so this is where it is because these are all like
• 54:59
  golden yellow. And then these, the medium
• 55:01
  roasts are like have an orange bag.
• 55:03
  I don't know if you've been to our website, but it's also split
• 55:05
  that way. So.
• 55:07
  So we mirror that as well. So then so then the darker roast
• 55:10
  and so, so that you can see that light to dark spectrum.
• 55:14
  So that would be one one way in which usability user experience
• 55:19
  design is is used. Why do you think the the the
• 55:23
  tastes are so different from Midwest to West Coast?
• 55:26
  I I would think that within the US, that coffee sort of coffee,
• 55:31
  no? No, I think it's, it's
• 55:33
  culturally what sells well. And so like just a different
• 55:37
  palette and, and usually like the Midwest is like in the
• 55:40
  middle and in terms of like, you know, the weight, there's a lot
• 55:43
  of medium roasts and, and really like the roast is like, think of
• 55:48
  when you're baking a chocolate chip cookie.
• 55:50
  So sometimes you want that chocolate chip cookie to be like
• 55:54
  a little soft. Sometimes you want it hard so
• 55:56
  you can dip it in like some milk.
• 55:58
  And then sometimes you want it like our black sheep blend is
• 56:01
  kind of like the chocolate chip cookie.
• 56:03
  Think of it as it's, it's hard on the outside and it's soft on
• 56:06
  the inside. So it's, it's really like the
• 56:07
  roast temperature and it really is a recipe.
• 56:10
  And that's what like we're very meticulous of where we want each
• 56:13
  roast to be at. So it's like that, that sweet
• 56:15
  spot of here's a medium because what we like are medium roast is
• 56:18
  like where it's hard on the outside and like soft on the
• 56:21
  inside. Not this is not like literal,
• 56:23
  but just more of like just if you, if you have the metaphor of
• 56:26
  a chocolate chip cookie, you can describe and explain roast more
• 56:29
  and how like it's very, it's very different.
• 56:32
  So like the West Coast, they like their their chocolate chip
• 56:34
  cookies a little softer. Is there something in sort of
• 56:38
  the user experience design space that like a project you're kind
• 56:42
  of working on internally that may roll out here in the cafes
• 56:46
  coming up? So often I interview our
• 56:51
  employees and again I say that there might, you know, there are
• 56:53
  customers. And so when we're, when we're
• 56:56
  rolling out like a new, a new product, they won't know what
• 57:02
  the new product is, but they'll get hints of, I mean, I think
• 57:05
  they can read between the lines. Actually, I should choose a
• 57:07
  different one because since we can't mention the product, but
• 57:10
  it's just, it's, it's interesting because Eric and I
• 57:12
  are, we're a lot older than a lot of our employees.
• 57:16
  And so things that I think are super cool are probably not
• 57:20
  super cool. And so there's a lot of like red
• 57:23
  shirt, blue shirt, red shirt, blue shirt, but it's not just AB
• 57:26
  testing, it's also like ABCDE testing.
• 57:31
  And then just our, our designs, we have a really strong design
• 57:35
  team. Angelina Garvey is an amazing
• 57:38
  lead designer and she understands like our, we, we
• 57:42
  like things that are, that are aesthetically pleasing, but also
• 57:46
  just a little like either funny or weird or just something just
• 57:51
  a little different. And, and her, her pieces are
• 57:55
  very beautiful. So that's something that we we
• 57:58
  test with and we, we will roll out with our employees so we get
• 58:04
  their opinions a lot. SO talked a lot about iteration.
• 58:09
  We innovate, we iterate, we see what we learn.
• 58:12
  And you know, we, we make changes as we go along.
• 58:15
  And sometimes we try something innovative and it does, doesn't
• 58:18
  work. It, it falls on its face.
• 58:20
  But in that process, generally, if, if we're thinking and we're
• 58:23
  observing, we're learning something from that quote UN
• 58:26
  quote, failure. Can you think of an innovation
• 58:28
  that you've tried, just didn't go the way that you thought, but
• 58:31
  you still pulled some lessons from it?
• 58:34
  Yes, this is very basic, but this is an example.
• 58:40
  So when we did a remodel of one of our cafes, I wanted like our
• 58:44
  bathrooms to be. I wanted a bathroom to be really
• 58:46
  Hey, let's put. So I had one bathroom have like
• 58:49
  221B Baker Street, like the number sign and the knocker and.
• 58:52
  Everything it was. Yeah, it was like, I'm like, oh,
• 58:55
  that's so cool. And then but we didn't push it
• 58:58
  far enough and it just was still an ugly, not ugly, but like just
• 59:02
  a basic bathroom. And and then one of our cafes,
• 59:07
  like we had a shared bathroom with another space, another
• 59:10
  Bruegel, Bruegel, another bagel company, Brueggers.
• 59:14
  And I just couldn't stand those bathrooms because they were so
• 59:17
  just like metal stall fluorescent lighting.
• 59:21
  And So what we did, we decided to lean in and we went like, OK,
• 59:24
  let's have a fancy hotel bathroom.
• 59:26
  Like let's have really nice. And so we actually spend a ton
• 59:29
  of money on on just tile and like really nice fixtures for
• 59:34
  our bathrooms. And I would say that's the
• 59:36
  iteration that we like. We kept pushing on and like it
• 59:38
  wasn't enough. Now we like have very high
• 59:41
  expectations for our bathrooms. That sounds bizarre, but it's it
• 59:45
  is an extremely important customer and employee
• 59:47
  experience. Yeah, especially, you know,
• 59:49
  folks are going to hang out there for a little while and
• 59:51
  everybody knows sort of like coffee that kind of helps get
• 59:54
  things moving in the morning. You want to have a nice facility
• 59:56
  there for your customers, right? And your employees spending a
• 59:59
  lot of time with you. Talk to me about your daily
• 1:00:03
  habits, any practices that are regular occurrence for you that
• 1:00:08
  kind of help keep you on track, keep you centered.
• 1:00:10
  Yeah, I will add, I'll speak for Eric.
• 1:00:12
  He does meditation every single day, every day for many years.
• 1:00:17
  And that has really helped him stay calm and focused and he
• 1:00:22
  highly recommends it. So I, I, I need to add that for
• 1:00:26
  me, I do, I doodle and, and do art every single day.
• 1:00:30
  Creating is extremely important to me, even if it's just on a
• 1:00:33
  napkin. But I draw and paint and do a
• 1:00:38
  lot of art every day, so those two things help.
• 1:00:42
  Anything from your Filipino heritage kind of show up in your
• 1:00:45
  your doodling in your art. I do paint a lot of my family.
• 1:00:52
  I paint a lot of them and like just in terms of just my mom is
• 1:00:57
  she's very funny. And so she appears a lot in a
• 1:01:01
  lot of my art because just that immigrant experience, she's
• 1:01:04
  hilarious. So her texts are like usually at
• 1:01:07
  2:00 in the morning and extremely long.
• 1:01:09
  And so I have a painting in one of our cafes and it, and it
• 1:01:13
  actually has like the verbatim quote of like just this really
• 1:01:16
  long, just this breakdown of a day.
• 1:01:19
  And then I have all these different Filipino things around
• 1:01:21
  it painted. And that's that's really fun.
• 1:01:25
  And is your mother still in the Philippines?
• 1:01:27
  Is that why you're getting the text at 2:00 AM?
• 1:01:29
  Why are you getting text at 2:00 AM for mom then?
• 1:01:33
  She actually lives, so we're really lucky.
• 1:01:36
  My sister lives down the street and my mom lives three blocks
• 1:01:38
  away, so we're really close. What's one thing you wish more
• 1:01:42
  people knew about your industry? Knew about our industry, I
• 1:01:50
  think. If that one doesn't feel right,
• 1:01:51
  what's one thing you wish more? OK, go ahead.
• 1:01:54
  This. This feels right because this is
• 1:01:55
  definitely true. I feel like baristas don't get
• 1:01:59
  enough respect, like in terms of a lot of people think, oh,
• 1:02:03
  barista, like you're just a barista or like that's just like
• 1:02:06
  a side gig or job. But it is amazing to me.
• 1:02:09
  Like if you know how to be a barista and know how to pull
• 1:02:12
  shots and know how to make a really beautiful latte art, you
• 1:02:15
  will be able to get a job anywhere in the United States
• 1:02:19
  and anywhere in like Europe. I mean, honestly, like I would,
• 1:02:24
  there's, there's always a cafe, there's always a coffee shop.
• 1:02:27
  And if you can do beautiful, like if you know your coffee,
• 1:02:29
  like the way that we teach knowing your coffee and you can
• 1:02:32
  Polish two shots and make gorgeous latte art.
• 1:02:35
  I mean, you'll be hired. You could go to somewhere in
• 1:02:38
  Ohio and somewhere in like Utah, somewhere in Montreal.
• 1:02:42
  I mean, and so I feel like Baristos don't get enough credit
• 1:02:46
  for being like such a, it's just such a great job to have that
• 1:02:52
  you could do anywhere. It's a skill that takes a lot of
• 1:02:55
  practice to learn, like anything else.
• 1:02:57
  Yeah, yeah. So Melissa, I've just got one
• 1:03:00
  more question for you, but before I ask it, I want to do 2
• 1:03:02
  things. First of all, everyone listening
• 1:03:04
  today, I'm sure that you love today's show because both
• 1:03:07
  Melissa and Eric have been wonderful guests sharing lots of
• 1:03:10
  great stories. Please hit the follow or
• 1:03:12
  subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to continue
• 1:03:14
  getting great content like this. I also want to let people know
• 1:03:17
  the best way either to get in touch with you or Eric or to
• 1:03:20
  continue following the brand story.
• 1:03:22
  What would that be? Well, there's our Instagram and
• 1:03:26
  there's our website. Our website
• 1:03:28
  isstonecreekcoffee.com. And then our Instagram is
• 1:03:31
  Instagram. It's Stone Creek Coffee and you
• 1:03:34
  can reach out to either of us through e-mail and you can find
• 1:03:37
  it on the website. It's a very long e-mail address
• 1:03:40
  so I won't even repeat it, but. OK, great.
• 1:03:42
  But they can be found on the website, which we'll include in
• 1:03:44
  the show notes. So last question for you,
• 1:03:46
  Melissa. As you look to the future, what
• 1:03:48
  changes in the coffee industry are you most excited to see
• 1:03:52
  unfold? Most excited, I'm excited to see
• 1:03:57
  just the innovations of water, just innovations of where do we
• 1:04:03
  get our water, How do we filter our water?
• 1:04:05
  And you know, we're right by the Great Lakes, but water is going
• 1:04:09
  to be extremely, it's going to be extremely an important
• 1:04:13
  discussion and within our lifetime.
• 1:04:15
  And that's definitely going to impact coffee.
• 1:04:18
  So then how do you have like, will it be packaged coffee?
• 1:04:23
  Will it be, how will it perform? So all these things will be
• 1:04:27
  impacted by water. So I think maybe part of what
• 1:04:30
  you're saying is that water, especially in certain parts of
• 1:04:33
  the world, is becoming harder to get.
• 1:04:35
  Clean water is getting harder to get.
• 1:04:38
  Maybe another element of this is, yeah, what's exactly in the
• 1:04:43
  water that affects the the quality and the flavor of the
• 1:04:46
  coffee, right? Yeah, yes.
• 1:04:49
  Like the mineral content and all of that.
• 1:04:51
  Yeah, coffee that's made in one of our cafes will taste
• 1:04:54
  completely different from another because of the water.
• 1:04:57
  And we actually have our water and we we treat it with
• 1:05:00
  different minerals so that they're all the same.
• 1:05:02
  And so we're already doing that. So that's just going to be and
• 1:05:05
  that's now. So what's going to happen in
• 1:05:07
  like 10 years that you'll have like manufactured water is just
• 1:05:12
  bizarre to me, but that's possible.
• 1:05:14
  When you say manufactured water, just the ability to sort of like
• 1:05:18
  tailor that mineral content so that you can affect the flavor
• 1:05:22
  and the quality of it. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:25
  And this hit home for me several years ago.
• 1:05:27
  I used to, my family is from Italy.
• 1:05:29
  We used to travel there regularly.
• 1:05:30
  And I'll tell you what, there was something about the espresso
• 1:05:33
  over there that it just seemed to taste better.
• 1:05:35
  And I thought, well, it's just, it's in your head because, you
• 1:05:38
  know, you're in this, you're in Italy and it all just seems more
• 1:05:41
  exotic. And my grandparents actually did
• 1:05:44
  an experiment and they brought some tap water back with them
• 1:05:47
  and prepared coffee here in the States and it tasted the same
• 1:05:50
  way that it did back there. Sort of this light bulb moment
• 1:05:53
  for us that yes, there's a lot to be said for the water that
• 1:05:57
  you're using. Yeah, same with dairy, like the
• 1:06:00
  dairy and and latte, like dairy tastes very different wherever
• 1:06:05
  you are. California, Wisconsin.
• 1:06:08
  Europe. Yeah.
• 1:06:10
  And so in in Stone Creek, you're already sort of standardizing
• 1:06:14
  that water output in each of your locations so that you know
• 1:06:18
  somebody gets it in this part of town versus that part of town.
• 1:06:21
  That's going to be the same experience for them.
• 1:06:23
  Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
• 1:06:25
  Well, Melissa, I want to be the first one to thank you for
• 1:06:27
  sharing both your time and your story with us today.
• 1:06:30
  I really appreciate. It it was fun, yeah.
• 1:06:33
  Folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories
• 1:06:36
  podcast. Thanks for learning with us
• 1:06:37
  today.