2 Coffee Shops in 2 Years the Short Version

Trusting God and jumping in head first is the short story. By now maybe most of you know that the mobile shop was our quarantine project. We bought an extremely run down camper on the side of the road for $200, took it home and built it out with Hunter’s parents in their driveway up in Northern WI. Now we are virtually doing the same thing with a big brick building, except this one doesn’t move and we have property developers, an architect, the whole nine yards, Oh! And it’s in Western KY.

5 years ago I started visiting a friend that lived in this area and after my first visit I swore to Hunter that I would live here. Her and I stayed connected over the years and when we had closed the mobile shop after the first season open in 2020 we were sitting at our breakfast table, highly unemployed and waiting out the winter. I get a text that loosely says “My husband’s family bought buildings downtown Henderson Ky and they want to develop them do you guys want one?” We left at 3:00am 2 days later to make the 13 hour trip down from the northwoods.

I haven’t ever been offered a building before so we were not quite sure what the answer would be but I knew I wanted this BAD. We visited, toured the buildings, met people, and left 2 days later. Debating for a week or so, we called our developers to ask questions and by the end of the call had agreed to the shop down south.

Within a month and a half we decided to put our house on the market, it didn’t sell for almost 9 months. We lived on Hunter’s family’s property and reopened the mobile shop in May of 2021, had a full run until mid November. Our apartment building down south here wouldn’t be ready for another 4 months so we started bottling and delivering our drinks to our northern customers. In late January we left for my parents house and ended up with them for a month because our apartment building was (you guessed it) still not ready. We left Quincy Il the last week of February and were just going to stay 1 night with our friends down here but, almost a week later and it still wasn’t ready. We moved in late that week and can finally be on sight helping and working on our new espresso bar.

I told you this would be the short version so I guess I just want you all to see the craziness in between the fun announcements. I could go on and on about daily disasters, machines breaking, losing all our product driving to a location or all the hurtles we will jump with the brick and mortar shop. We could build 2 shops in 2 years because of 3 big reasons. 1 we are willing to live in ridiculous circumstances to make Antler work, our business is always our number 1 priority. 2 we accept help, there is a lot that we have to do on our own scrambling to get things done, working crazy hours, etc. However, accepting help from family and friends when the opportunity arrises expands not only the influence of the brand you are building, but the growth you are able to accomplish. 3 we trust God and know that we will make it work because it has to work, we jumped in both feet first and quite our jobs because we knew it would make us work harder.

Be willing to do the things your competition isn’t. Be the best at what you can be best at. Oh, and be nice to people.

This is my short business story/lesson for the day

PS it is 6:00am so if something in here doesn’t make sense just blame it on that.

Have a great day

Annalisa