We Turned Our Coffee Shops Into A Thriving DTC Coffee Brand

Marco Suarez

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Published: April 21st, 2022

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Marco Suarez

Founder, Methodical Coffee

Founders

Employees

Methodical Coffee

methodicalcoffee.com

from Greenville, SC, USA

started February 0015

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Marco recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Marco recommends to grow your business!

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See Seth Godin

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality ... Danny Meyer

Want more updates on Methodical Coffee? Check out these stories:

I’m Marco Suarez. I’m co-owner of Methodical Coffee. I run it with my business partners David Baker and Will Shurtz.

We run 3 cafes and a coffee roastery where we ship coffees DTC, wholesale, and to grocery stores. My role in the company as head of the customer experience which oversees any interaction a customer has with our company including our branding, marketing, comm, social, product design, packaging, and cafe design.

Along with selling whole bean coffee, we’ve launched a ready-to-drink beverage line and we’ve just launched a tea program. Over the six years, we’ve been in business, we’ve managed to at least double our business every year.

What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

My career has been in tech as a digital product designer. I’ve worked for a variety of large and small tech companies and been around the tech start-up community for years. Experiencing all the excitement and energy in that space caused me to dream of starting my own business. I wanted to create something of my vision and experience the creative process for myself. Through my experience at these companies, I started forming my own opinions and ideas about how branding relates to the customer experience and how it should permeate every aspect of the business. A brand is far more important than a logo and color palette but should be an expression and articulation of the company's vision.

At the same time, I was also growing tired of the digital. My entire career had been creating customer experiences on the internet and I desired something tangible. I explored different concepts that would marry the digital and the tangible, but nothing seemed to stick. I would bounce my ideas off my wife and friends, and nothing seemed like it was worth investing in.

I wanted to be connected to a place and create an environment for people to experience in real life. I also had a love for architecture and interior design as it relates to communicating a brand or concept. This led me to the idea of coffee. I was hooked on craft coffee since my first experience with it. To learn that there was an elevated experience with coffee that was more about the bean and the preparation than flavoring, really excited me. The concept of the coffee house was also really intriguing. I fell in love with the idea of creating a beautiful space that people found inspiring and energizing. This put me on the path of investigating how to open a coffee shop.

When the concept for Methodical first came about, I was living in Atlanta working for Mailchimp, and I would travel back to Greenville, SC to visit family and friends. In Atlanta, there was a great local coffee business called Octane. They were the place to meet people and talk business. Greenville lacked this type of spot. There were coffee shops, but not modern ones in the heart of downtown. I had met Will Shurtz years before. He was a very young guy who started a craft coffee catering service and was the coffee guy in town. I reached out to him asking if he’d want to partner up and start a coffee shop. In my mind, I highly doubted it would happen. It seemed like a daunting task, but I wanted to see how far we could get and what we could learn along the way. I also had no intention of leaving my growing career in tech. This was to be a side hustle.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

Whenever I came to town, Will and I would meet and chat. Our visions for what we wanted in a coffee shop were in alignment. Soon he brought in David Baker who had recently moved back to the States after living in Prague for 5 years. The 3 of us would meet whenever I was in town and quickly realized that not only were our visions in alignment, our skill sets were too. Will had the coffee expertise, David has the background in operations, and I had the branding/customer experience background.

Getting off the ground was an incredible challenge. We had no idea what we were doing and had to quickly figure out how to overcome each hurdle as we met it. After putting all our savings into the pot and raising some money from friends and family, we realized we were still short. Thankfully the landlord with whom we had recently signed a lease, was willing to finance the rest and we paid him back through our lease. The gesture was incredibly generous and we wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for them.

The first year was figuring out how to run a cafe. How to stay cash-flow positive while not running out of product, how to properly staff the bar, what offerings to have, etc. After the first year, we realized that it would be beneficial if we were providing the coffee we were brewing, instead of reselling other roaster’s coffee. So we started down the path of roasting.

We again raised money from family and friends, purchased a roasting machine, found a space to rent, and sent Will off to train under another roaster. We had a several-month runway to produce a product good enough to sell. Thankfully we came in well before that runway ended and the coffee was a huge hit. Though simply providing coffee for our cafe was enough to cover our costs, we began growing our wholesale business from day 1. The growth of both the cafe and roastery was organic but consistent year over year. As we grew, we hired more people, bought more equipment, and did our best to keep up with demand. Soon after our third year, we started down the path of opening our second cafe. And a year after that, opening our third.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Like so many other businesses, COVID did a number on us. Our cafes sales plummeted and we barely made it through 2020. But it also helped give us clarity on what type of business we were building. When we were working on opening our first location, I couldn’t see past our first cafe. There was no intention of opening more cafes or even leaving my career in tech. But as the needs of the company grew, and I began seeing the potential of the business, the type of business we were building became clearer. Methodical is a product business. The engine is our roastery. It allows us to use our cafes as not only a meeting place but a place for our community to enjoy our coffees together.

Our roastery quickly outgrew its current location and we’re now roasting in one building and fulfilling in another. We’re in the process of purchasing a warehouse that will become our new HQ. We’ve released a line of ready-to-drink beverages including cold brew coffee, cold brew horchata, and chai that we’re in the process of scaling and distributing. And in 2022 we’re launching a new tea line that will open up more opportunities for us.

Another byproduct of COVID was our e-commerce sales exploded. I used to believe that people wouldn’t buy coffee on the internet, but I was very wrong. Our subscriptions and shipping direct to customers all over the country have become a major pillar of our business model. Early in 2020, I pulled a segment of our most loyal online customers and began marketing to them separately. What I found out is that they were massive fans of our product and brand. So we created a club for them called the Home Brewers League. This top segment of our customer base gets first access to all our new releases, which is where we poll gain insights into how we’re doing and give them deeper discounts. This small segment produces just as much revenue for us as the rest of our list.

We don’t spend any money on social ads. While I was at Mailchimp, I saw their marketing strategy was more on supporting people, events, and businesses that were doing good in the world. It seemed every event I went to, every podcast I listened to, or every blog I visited was sponsored by them. And they experienced massive growth during that time. I don’t believe they invest as heavily into those things as they did back then, but I’m trying to steal that strategy. We already have incredibly strong retention, so my strategy to acquire new customers is collaborations and sponsorships. We’re looking to grow the number of email lists, podcasts, and blogs we sponsor. And collaborations with artists that we admire. It’s not traditional, which is why I like it. I’d rather do this than compete with every other coffee business selling ads on Instagram.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

After our first year, I quickly realized that though I know how to create a strong customer experience, I know nothing about running a business. I was used to the start-up world where revenue was not as important of a metric as growth, or even the potential of growth. But when you’re a bootstrapped business, you live and die by the bottom line. So I got my hands-on business books, listened to podcasts, and did everything I could to understand the basics of business. I wish this was foundational to our education.

Basing decisions on intuition and gut isn’t bad, but you first have to be informed. A well-informed gut decision is what you’re after. And to get informed, means you have to do a lot of research.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Square for our cafe POS system.

Shopify for our online shop.

Wholesale Gorilla for running our online wholesale platform.

Stamped.io for product reviews.

Shipstation for shipping.

Roaster Tools for managing our fulfillment.

Cropster is a coffee roasting software that catalogs and measures every roast and helps us batch our roasts.

Smartrr for subscriptions. They’re brand new but offer far more features with a better UX than competitors.

Klaviyo for email marketing. I spend a lot of time here and love it.

Airtable for our CRM and managing employee applications.

Slack for internal communication.

Bonusly for internal rewards.

Google Analytics.

Quickbooks for bookkeeping and invoicing.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

My favorite books include This is Marketing by Seth Godin, it’s my go-to for marketing. My Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is fantastic for a basic understanding of business. Setting the Table by Danny Meyer is an incredibly challenging book for creating a world-class customer experience. For inspiring biographies, I love Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, and Losing my Virginity by Richard Branson.

I walk my dogs and listen to podcasts nearly every day. I listen to Freakanomics Radio, How I Built This, DTC Podcast, Akimbo, eCommerce Fuel, and Planet Money.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Starting and running a business is incredibly difficult. It’s easy for entrepreneurs to focus solely on the creation part, which is fun and exciting. But that’s a blip compared to the amount of time you’ll spend running it. It’s also easy to get wrapped up in emotions. Basing decisions on intuition and gut isn’t bad, but you first have to be informed. A well-informed gut decision is what you’re after. And to get informed, means you have to do a lot of research. The reality is there are a million different ways to run a successful business. The hard part is making a decision and sticking to it. Most of the business owners I know are always willing to sit and have an honest conversation. Regardless if you’re exploring or already running a business, take the time to spend time with other business owners in similar industries. It can be lonely as the owner, and having other business owners to talk to will make life easier. Oh, and make sure you have a stellar CPA!

Where can we go to learn more?

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