This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up listeners, side hustle school friends, community. I hope you're doing okay. I hope you're doing better than okay, actually. I hope you are thriving. I hope you are navigating whatever challenges this year has brought to you.
I mean, this year has brought challenges to all of us, to varying degrees, various types and such. But just know that you're not alone out there. Lots of people are trying to find the opportunity in the midst of all the uncertainty. So that's what I'm trying to do myself. I wanna be a better person at the end of the pandemic than I was in the beginning.
That's what I said when this all started and I'm trying to kind of keep that mindset with me as we go along. Of course, there are various ups and downs and such. But let us go now to the theme of the program, what this is all about, Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? Where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. We recently heard from an accountant who sells spreadsheet templates and other financial resources to creatives.
A guy who made $100,000 on Fiverr and many more. Today, we're gonna talk about coffee. We actually had a coffee episode about, I guess, four to six weeks ago. Another Throwback Thursday episode with the guy who started Busy Coffee. Now that was different because that guy and his business partner really scaled that business.
They've actually gone all in with it. Today is quite different because the business you'll hear about now is a family-focused business. It's by a guy who still has his day job. This guy is in the state of Washington. He started selling coffee in his neighborhood to teach his kids about small business.
That's how it all got started. But he ended up learning a few things himself. We first featured him in episode 549, which was approximately, by that I mean exactly, 828 days ago. Incredible. What's happened since?
Let's hear directly from him. His name is Doug. I will be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
I'm Doug Valenti from Issaquah, Washington. My side hustle is Valenti Family Coffee Roasters.
And I was featured on episode 549. We are a family-owned mobile micro coffee roasting company specializing in small batch, fresh roasted coffee for our community. I've been interested in coffee since college when I worked for a small coffee roaster, boutique coffee roaster in Northern California. You fast forward that many, many years. And on a whim, I bought a small electric coffee roaster and started experimenting by roasting coffee for personal consumption.
I was able to find a couple of companies that specialized in small amounts of green or unroasted coffee for home roasters. And once we had fresh roasted coffee, we were hooked. At some point, I ended up with way more coffee than I could humanly consume. I bought a couple of sample bags and I started giving it out to our friends and neighbors. Serendipitously, we lucked into a small used propane-powered commercial roaster, which increased our roasting capacity by about 10 fold.
Because we roasted small amounts, I could experiment with lots of unique single origins. And I was always posting my thoughts and feelings on my Instagram and Facebook page. Pretty soon, our social media friends were all asking how they could order our beans. We worked with a site called 99 Designs to come up with a logo and some branding around the idea of a family owned coffee company. Not long after we launched our site, my eight year old son and I were at our local farmer's market and he looked at me and said, "Hey dad, who should roast coffee here at the farmer's market for all of our friends and neighbors?" And I looked at him and thought, "Well, that's not a crazy idea." Turns out it probably was, but here we are.
My day job is in technology and I've worked for both small and medium sized startups for most of my career. So I've always been around very entrepreneurial environments. So this was my attempt to get back into meeting directly with customers. And also I wanted to teach my kids how to run a business. Lots has happened since we were featured on Side Hustle School.
We attracted a bigger and bigger following every year. And we had to be very realistic about what it was we wanted to do and what we could achieve. My wife and I both work full time and juggle schedules for our five kids. Since this is a side hustle that involves our entire family, we had to be mindful about impacts to everyone's schedules. So really it's caused us to be much more narrowly focused on what our product and our brand is.
And I think the most significant changes have been twofold. The first is we've learned to measure everything. So some of the things that are pretty obvious are sales, monthly sales, daily sales, and how much we had left over at the end of each of the markets. When we first started tracking sales by hour and then sales by coffee type, we found that most of our coffee was purchased during certain hours. That allowed us to focus our efforts on those hours and not roast too late into the day, which was leaving us with a lot of leftover coffee.
Secondly, we learned to simplify wherever we could. And that was also a huge thing. I would pack up the trailer the night before and show up at the farmer's market at about 4.30. And I had to be able to essentially pull everything out of the trailer and set the whole thing up by myself and start roasting so that we could limit the days of the week that we were roasting coffee to that day at the market. And it required thinking through what we brought and what we didn't bring and really focus in on the simplest way to really deliver a quality product to our customers.
The one piece of advice that I would give people is to keep it simple. You don't have to have it be a home run out the gate. Keep it simple and be smart about where you grow and listen to your customers. That's for us, that was really the game changer is listening to their likes and dislikes. And even if we didn't agree with them, we at least understood where they were coming from.
- So one of the things I really appreciated about Doug's updates and he had some others for us as well. We had lots of notes from the transcript of that call. He talked a lot about making decisions based on your capacity. And you heard a bit about that in the update about how they had to be realistic about what works for them because it's a family business, they've got day jobs, et cetera. He also talked a bit in the transcript about the impact of COVID-19.
And of course that's affected him just like it's affected so many other people. We're trying to kind of de-COVID some of the episodes so that not every single episode is about the pandemic. I know that gets kind of old, but of course we're all still living in it. So that's reality. But about this point of making decisions based on your capacity, something else he said, he's like, one example is that everybody at the farmer's market, they want us to serve coffee.
They want us to serve cups of coffee and they don't. They actually just sell the beans. And he says, a couple of reasons for that. One is if you're gonna have any kind of refrigerated cream in the county that they live, you have to have a health permit, which is about $1,200. And presumably that's renewable as well.
So you think about $3 for a cup of coffee, you can see how they're gonna have to sell a lot of cups of coffee doing the farmer's markets for Saturdays a month or whatever. So they try to just not focus on that. They try to say, well, we're not trying to sell cups of coffee. We're gonna focus on the beans, basically. They've also had a lot of people ask them to do a brick and mortar location.
And they thought about that, but then there's a ton of complexity that comes with that. So they've just decided, this is our capacity. This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna focus on that and do it well. I think that's something that all of us can learn from, myself included, and at the end he said, the game changer for us is like listening to our customers, listening to their likes and dislikes.
And even if we don't agree with them, we at least understand where they're coming from. So that's pretty key as well. I actually have a classroom episode coming up very soon. I think it's next week or the week after about how the customer is not always right. It's very important to listen, but ultimately you need to make the decisions yourself.
So I am so grateful to Doug for helping us out with this segment. Thanks, man. We'll continue to do these new segments throughout the rest of the year. This is, of course, our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you would like some delicious curated coffee, not a cup of coffee, but some actual beans, go to valenticoffee.com.
That is V-A-L-E-N-T-E, coffee, C-O-F-F-E-E.com. I'm gonna link it up on the notes page as well. And if you've got a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much. Much more is coming up.
Be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
