Killer Coffee, Resident Culture - SouthEnd — Charlotte, NC
Let’s start a bit earlier on, how did you make your way to Charlotte?
"I'm from a town called Anderson, SC. It's about two hours from here, and I went to school at Clemson after I graduated high school, and after that, I was living down in South Carolina. It was 2008, so the economy was less than stellar, to say the least. There weren't a lot of job opportunities down there; I was just bouncing around doing random stuff, and then a friend of mine from school had moved up here right after graduation and was working for the financial company Vanguard. Things started getting a little better, and they started hiring people again, and my friend was like, hey, you need to apply; I can get you a job here; you're a college graduate, you've got some experience, and I can get you a job here. Multiple of my friends through avenues had ended up in Charlotte; I just wasn't there yet, so that was kind of how I ended up here. I was just moving here for that job. I think when you're 24, you never really think about the long term, like where am I gonna be in five years and much less 15? So, here I am, and it's become my home now."
How did Killer Coffee come to light? Where did that passion for coffee kick in for you?
"I was working at a couple of different financial places for about 8-9 years. Ironically, once I moved here, I took a trip to Thailand. I was really unhappy with my job, and I took a trip there. I had this epiphany that in the grand scheme of the world, Americans have it better than almost everybody in Thailand, right? But from all the people I was interacting with, who were Thai, they just seemed so much happier than me, my friends, and everybody that I knew. I started to question how that could be. While I was there, I just kind of picked at that idea, and I realize that, oh, they're doing something that they love. For example, this guy loves serving this dish at this restaurant; this person loves being a cobbler fixing shoes; this person loves that occupation. So there was less pressure for them to do something they didn't want to do to make money; their culture doesn't have it. I thought that the biggest thing that I was missing was that I was not doing something I loved. And that's kind of what got me on this journey and Trying to figure out what it is that I want to do with my life. The first thing I knew I needed to do to do is get out of debt (laughs). I got a side job working at a coffee shop and just really fell in love with it and realized how much hard work it actually is. You're on your feet all day you're running around, you're up early hours. For the last decade, I didn't really do a job where I was up on my feet, doing stuff with my hands. I really fell in love with that portion of it, but then you begin to see the community-building side of it. And I really do like being able to connect with people and be the reason that they come in the morning because I may only have 45 seconds to a minute to talk to somebody, but I can set their day up in a better path because I might be the first person they're seeing in the morning. So, for me, I take it as an obligation. My job is to make sure that your day starts off right. The rest of the world will try to interfere with that, but I can do something in this minute and a half, whether it's just saying good morning and giving you the product you want or asking you how you are and building that rapport. So that's why I fell in love with it. Then, as a goal, how do I do this and have it be a career? That's when I started working at Undercurrent Coffee for a while just because at the time, they were one of the most, in my limited view of the industry; they were the most professional, and they were also paying the best honestly, so I started working there, and just through that job, I fell in love even more with the art and the craft of coffee and was exploring this idea of opening my own cafe. My goal was to do every job. I don't want to just get a bunch of money, go do it and not understand what it is I'm trying to do. I started at the bottom and worked my way up to become a manager in that company. So then I was trying to take that next leap to the next level. That's when this opportunity came up to basically build this coffee program for Resident Cultire. Where we are sitting, believe it or not, this was a this was a broom closet when they hired me. It was a lot of work to envision how I want it to look. How do I want it to feel. Just building it from the ground up. Ironically, now that I've become the Director of Operations for this cafe, everything comes full circle. I'm realizing a lot of the education that I got at Clemson was in operations management, and I'm actually using my degree. Look at that. My dad was right. Damn it. (laughs) So yeah, that's the start of all of this."
My first time here, I was on my way to work and you guys were pretty busy and you acknowledged me and asked how I was doing and made me such a great coffee and gave me a free coffee card for my next visit for the trouble when there wasn’t trouble at all. That made me come back and it’s now a routine that I stop here when I’m in the office.
“For me, it's about serving coffee at a really, really high level. But what we're serving at the end of the day, whether it's this part of the business or you're a bar serving beer or your at McDonald's serving a hamburger, you're serving hospitality. That's what it is. You could offer someone the greatest cup of coffee they ever had, but if you're a jackass and just give it to them; that's what they are going to remember so my big goal with building this place is a lot of specialty coffee to people who are new to it — is it can feel really intimidating. There's a lot of words you don't know. I mean, the cafe can be loud, there's a grinder, there's machines with steam. It can be a lot if you don't know what you are looking for or if you're trying to like come to this space for the first time and I don't want people to feel intimidated here, I want people to feel like they can come in and talk to my staff and ask questions, and that's one of the things that I've been very, very proactive on when I've had to hire new people. I'm very focused on that, more than how well they know coffee, because I can teach what you need to know about coffee, but I can't teach you to care about the customers when they come in and to want to talk to them and learn about them. The example that I use for my staff is the pretentious barista is a trope for a reason because there's a lot of them and we don't want that here. We want people to be able to come in if you drink Starbucks every day for the last 15 years. I want you to understand what we're doing but be comfortable enough to ask a question, and that I feel like we do a really nice job of balancing that here while also bringing that attention of the craft and care that you would get a cocktail bar.”
Are you a goal-driven person?
“I wish I could take it day by day, honestly. Those people seem to be a lot more chill than me. I'm a very goal-driven person. I don't like to put things in time frames because I feel like that's an unnecessary anxiety that I can avoid, but at the same time, if I don't have a plan, then what am I doing? I feel kind of rudderless. Aim it that way, and let's go that way. And if it takes us seven months to a year to get there, that's fine. But if it takes us seven days, that's even better. So I think for this, our real goal has been to just build the community around it. When we first opened, there was another gentleman running the kitchen, Hector Gonzalez and he and I essentially opened this first part of the day here at Resident Culture and in our heads because I had known him through working in cafes because he frequented them regularly; we were kind of brainstorming. We're like, alright, we're going to open a cafe. It's going to be great. Your food's awesome, my coffee is great, and we ran through the soft opening, but that is not what this is. The space is way too big. What are we like? How do we figure that out? That was our first real big goal, which was to figure out who we were. I think we kind of found the groove of what we are, and that is we are an interesting hybrid of a restaurant, cafe, a coffee shop and a co-working space. So we have the room to come in and do your work. If you want to get away from all of this noise because, like I said, this is a noisy area over here, you can turn the corner and can go sit and you can study, do your work, whatever, but if you want to hang out and get that cafe feel, you can, you want to go sit at the bar and have lunch and have a beer, you can do that. So, in this area of the neighborhood that's really just now beginning to form, even though we are in SouthEnd, we're kind of on the outskirts a little bit. Being that gathering space for this neighborhood as it grows, that was our goal to determine what it is, and I think that's what we are. The variety that we offer allows for anyone to walk in the door, and that's really our big goal, to come in and feel comfortable wanting them to come up and be willing to ask a question or just enjoy the space. Yeah. It's really kind of evolved into that and we're happy to find that we found that groove. I think we're just now looking at how we grow this and how we let the best-kept secret in Charlotte out.”
What is your biggest struggle with life right now?
“I would say my biggest struggle is work-life balance. I have a one-month-old daughter at home, so it's learning the balance of how that looks with her being here. As before, you have to work longer hours and you stay and do it. It's like, hey, you've been gone a real long time, and you're missing precious moments. Your wife's exhausted from dealing with the baby for all that time. So, learning that new balance is really my biggest struggle right now. From the work side of it, luckily, I've got great staff that have been with me a long time and are able to run this place without me. For me, I think that's the ultimate testament to any sort of management relationship if you can teach somebody to do it and not you be here. And in fact, I feel like sometimes I get behind the bar, and I'm in the way. We're actually less efficient with me here.”
What is a proud moment in your life that has shaped you into the person you are today?
“It's a really interesting question. The thing that probably shaped me to where I am today, realistically, was when I decided to get serious with my wife. She was a really big factor and gave me the encouragement to take the leap moving from Finance into something that I cared more about and without her holding my hand on the way down that jump, I don't know that I would have ever done it, and I would have been just a miserable 50 year old in a suit and tie that I probably should have tossed out 15 years ago. But it's the biggest thing that's kind of taken me from the time I was in to the place I am now. Realistically, if I'm a smart man, it'll be the thing that takes me from where I am now to where I need to go. So it's that support, I think, is really important. Now that I'm thinking about it, it’s really underappreciated in the grand scheme of things.”
Whats next?
“With this place, I mean, we just love our customers. What we want to do is just continue to grow. We've got a lot of room to grow. It's a good spot to be in, and we've got the ability to grow and bring more people under the tent to evangelize coffee. What we have to offer and what we have to teach them. I think that's our big goal here, which is to feel like we've got a lot of customers, a lot of regulars and that they are comfortable and understand what we do and trust us. My hope is that over the next year or so, we can begin to expand some of the higher-end coffee stuff that we do, like potentially bringing single origin coffees and get that educational piece about the coffee as a larger product. Having people maybe branch out and like teach them a little bit about coffee. That's one of my goals, how do I get people to trust me in that? Because I think the want is there, and it's ironic that I technically worked for a brewery because I feel coffee is where beer was at 15 years ago, right? Where there is a subset of people who understand the product and the craft that goes into in the care and they want to learn more. They'll sit down at a bar and drink 15 IPA's to tell the difference between all the different hops. Why would they not be willing to learn more about coffee as well? That is one of our longer-term goals here. My short-term goals I'm hoping I get a nap this afternoon (laughs).”
