Reclaiming Your Community by Majora Carter

Author:Majora Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Constructing a Third Space: A Joint Venture

We didn’t know anything about opening up a cafe, but you wouldn’t have known that from watching us!

We hired Doel Rivera’s company as the contractor to build a space that we figured would work—it had exposed brick walls and lots of reclaimed wood leftover from one of his other projects. Boom!

To make the coffee, we planned on using the commercial version of the Swiss-based Nespresso system. Check!

It looked like any other cute little coffee shop in any urban area in the country. We ready!

Fortunately, before we opened in that configuration, one of the folks on our advisory board, Sulma Arzu-Brown, asked some friends who actually owned coffee shops to give us some advice. Those friends happened to be Jeremy Lyman and Paul Schlader, owners of one of New York City’s premier coffee roasters with an attendant line of shops called Birch Coffee.

To our surprise, they were interested in partnering with us on a coffee shop in the South Bronx as a joint venture between our companies. We were excited when Sulma’s family wanted to invest in the coffee shop as well, which was awesome because local folks investing in locally owned businesses is a part of our overall real estate development strategy that promotes generational wealth creation and retention.

It would be the first coffee shop we’d had in my neighborhood since I was in high school in the early 1980s.

I remember when Moshman’s Delicatessen closed. It was one of the last remnants of old-timey Hunts Point, when mostly white folks lived in the neighborhood. I still miss the bagels.

James and I got a crash course in the coffee shop business—from roasting all the way to shop operations. We learned everything from customer service, inventory management, shop maintenance, staff training, and yes, even how to properly steam milk and pull espresso shots. My latte art game is rudimentary, but I can make an endearingly lopsided heart on a cappuccino.

Having experts on board was a godsend: we really learned how much we didn’t know. We had to redesign the shop to make it code compliant and better functioning.

James or I or both of us were physically in the shop every day—mostly James because I still traveled for speaking engagements and consulting gigs, which paid our living expenses as well as some startup expenses for the cafe. James was the barista on duty every single morning for the first several months.

Birch covered all inventory and equipment costs as well as payroll (although neither James nor I took a salary; our work was sweat equity we put toward the operation). We covered rent, utilities, and overall management and maintenance of the cafe.

It didn’t take the Birch guys (or us) too long to realize that our partnership wasn’t going to work out. Birch Coffee had established its very successful niche by serving only excellent coffees, teas, chais, mochas, and milks, expertly prepared by skilled baristas—no crazy flavors or themed drinks. Just the idea of a Frappuccino was anathema to them.

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