overdue update
Good grief, where to begin? We began this blog to chronicle what happens with Bridge City Coffee as it is being built. The point being to accomplish something fairly unique in that the outcome of what we are trying to accomplish is still unknown and we are updating you on things as they occur. You can read more about that in this post here. Since we began, this is the first major thing to happen that we hadn't been planning on.
Since I last wrote we wrapped up our first big wholesale order, a potential collaboration with a really cool business in our roasting space is in the works, I’ve experienced a death in the family and had multiple family members with serious health issues, we decided to not open the shop right now and instead ramp up our roasting and mobile operations, which is a great thing, Jon and his wife took a trip to Iceland, my wife finally moved here permanently from Denver, and we’re going to start working with an all female farm from Rwanda...I think that covers most of the major reasons I haven’t written for much longer than anticipated. Oh yeah, and Game of Thrones has been incredible.
During our last entry we were moving forward with opening the shop and things were trending in a good direction to do so. That trend continued. However, we realized that if we opened the shop now it would require us to spread ourselves very thin risking the quality of what we want to do for quantity. It was a difficult decision to make given how much both Jon and I, but more so myself, want to open a shop. To be clear, it is in no way a decision to not open a shop at all. Rather, given the unique model we are building, we are postponing it until our operations and finances are more established and fine-tuned. Business growth is a tricky thing. Grow too fast and often the intended identity of your business is compromised. As a result, the mission, core values, and culture are never truly established the way you originally believed they should have been. Conversely, if you grow too slowly and avoid taking any chances you run the risk of not growing your customer base or income enough to make it to the next level.
If our goal was simply to make money and grow a brand, opening the shop now would have made sense; but we want to do more than that, much more. To impact people’s lives – our employees, the farms we source from, partner organizations in the community, and of course our customers – our growth will have to be more calculated and steady. If you know me, this is something completely contrary to my preferred mode of operating and honestly quite difficult to do. But here we are walking down the path we’ve chosen at the first big fork in the road for Bridge City. It definitely won’t be the last big decision we have to make, but there is always more weight and gravity that come along with first of anything – the first day of high school or college, the first year of marriage, realizing the kid you just had isn’t going away for at least another 18 years, deciding to bend the knee to Daenerys, or any number of other big decisions. I'll write more about what our operations will look like focusing on roasting and pop-up events in the next post, which will be sometime next week.
