Fighting Back: How one of our customers that should have churned ended up making a large donation of our cold brew to frontline workers

During a time when there so much fear and panic around the spread of coronavirus, there are also many stories of courage, generosity, love, and hope happening – but too many of these stories go untold. The first people who come to mind are our courageous healthcare workers, working around the clock on the frontlines, putting themselves at risk every day to help thousands upon thousands of people recover from being sick. But there are also our police officers, our firefighters, and even the employees who put themselves at risk every day working at grocery stores, restaurants, or making deliveries so that everyone else can eat and have a small sense of peace, normalcy, and relaxation at home amidst a chaotic time. Entrepreneurs and businesses are pivoting at record speeds to make hand sanitizer, masks, and other items that people so desperately need. People are adapting to meet changing consumer behaviors. There is so much happening every day, every week – and there’s no time to tell every story.

As an entrepreneur and small business owner in the food & beverage space, I’ve seen a number of these stories unfold over the past few weeks. I wanted to share one inspiring story that really touched my heart over the past couple weeks. We have local heroes all around us, and this story is about one of them. This is about one of our customers, Silverback Strategies, and Neil Welsh, their CEO.

Silverback Strategies is a digital marketing and advertising firm in the DC Area. They became a CWJ customer in April 2017. They ordered cold brew kegs for their office consistently over the last three years. I looked through our CRM and saw we had a number of issues that came up over the years – running out of nitrogen, product outages, liquid lines freezing, all kinds of things. We made a lot of mistakes as we figured out our business model of delivering a full-service kegged beverage program to offices, and as we did, Neil Welsh (Silverback Strategies CEO) and their team were extremely patient with us and provided feedback to help us improve our business model. Every time an issue came up, they worked with us and continued their weekly orders. Working with them really helped us to improve our business model and service for all of our customers.

Last summer, Neil Welsh (Silverback Strategies CEO) was changing a keg, and when he tapped the keg, it sprayed all over the place – it sprayed all over his face and it completely ruined his shirt. Can you imagine if that happened to you at work, especially if you were the CEO? That could completely change your day – you couldn’t attend client meetings like that; you’d have to go home, shower and change. The vast majority of people would have been extremely upset and canceled service with their coffee vendor that very same day. Not Neil though, instead of getting completely flustered, he took it in great stride and found humor in the situation. He made the post shown here, and it went viral.

Neil and I exchanged some messages on LinkedIn. We sent him a Commonwealth Joe shirt, some swag, and a replacement keg of cold brew as a token of our apology for what had happened. He was a great sport about it.

The cold brew spray incident became a running joke in his office, so much so that even one of the Silverback team members dressed up as Neil sprayed with cold brew for Halloween. Hilarious!!

I had the pleasure of meeting Neil a few months ago in one of the local WeWorks, where CWJ rents office space. It was great to meet him in-person.

Fast forward to COVID-19. CWJ was one of the businesses hit really hard. Our primary business is providing full-service cold brew and kombucha kegged beverage programs to offices. Within a period of about one week in mid-March, more than 200 of our customers called or e-mailed us to temporarily discontinue cold brew service due to COVID-19.

200 B2B customers that discontinued service grew to nearly 600. Everything changed for us and very quickly. We lost over 90% of our revenue over a couple weeks as stay-at-home orders were put in place and everyone self-quarantined at home. We shifted from 100% YOY growth and looking to make many more hires and framing up a Series B growth round to making layoffs and going into survival and cash preservation mode. We made some quick pivots to reach the "at home" coffee consumer, which included shifting our focus from kegged cold brew coffee to cartons.

Neil knew our business was hit pretty hard. He reached out to me a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn.

Hey Robert! I’ve read that Nurses and Doctors love coffee. Are you guys in any hospitals?

I'm thinking yes, I agree. We've made some small donations of coffee to hospitals recently, but we don't currently service any as customers. If Neil has any leads of hospitals who might be interested in our coffee, I'd love to talk with them.

Then Neil completely caught me off guard with his next two messages.

Would love to make a donation through you guys, if possible. Could we pay you for the product and delivery to a local hospital?

Also, I was looking at our P&L and noticed that we paused our delivery. Would it help to prepay our subscription for 6-12 months?

What a message. I’ll tell you what, I get a lot of e-mails, a lot of messages on LinkedIn, but I don’t get a lot of messages like this. With everything going on, and so many things and people to think about, why in the world would Neil make the time to think about his coffee vendor? Why is he going out of his way to help us?

We ended up connecting over a couple calls, and I’d come to learn Neil is both heartbroken for small businesses like ours who were hit hard by COVID-19 and at the same time inspired by the courageous work that frontline workers all doing all over the country. Neil wanted to find a way to give back and thought of a creative way to do so. Neil pre-purchased nearly 200 3-Liter boxed cold brew cartons on behalf of Silverback Strategies for us to deliver to local hospitals. That’s nearly 3,000 cups of cold brew coffee! And remember, every cup of cold brew coffee has 2x the amount of caffeine as a hot cup of drip coffee. That's a lot of caffeine! We made the first delivery to Inova Alexandria Hospital on Friday and will make the remaining deliveries over the next couple weeks! What an AWESOME thing to fuel frontline workers. We’re making a second delivery to the same hospital early this coming week. The next one will be one in Frederick Maryland, and we’ll be making many more donations over the coming weeks.

I was thinking about it more over the last couple days and talking with one of our mentors, who reminded me that coffee is something frontline workers absolutely need. It's a moment. It's a break. It's the energy to keep going. And we're not just giving them old, stale coffee. We are giving them THE BEST coffee we have. We are freshly-roasting, freshly-brewing cold brew coffee we've that been dialing in our recipe for since 2013. It reminds me that even though we have been hit hard as a small business, we can still give back and help fuel the fight and help get through this period.

Just for my own curiosity, I looked through our internal reporting to get a sense of how much business we've been done with Silverback Strategies over the years. The report below only shows revenue since January 2018, but remember we've been working with them since 2017. They have been a loyal repeat customer for three years. What really stood out to me though was how large this donation was they made relative to their average monthly spend. It was 10x their average monthly spend! When I saw this, I was like, "WOW!"

Neil’s donation gave me and our remaining team new hope and optimism. It created meaningful work for so many people on our team – it meant firing up the coffee roaster and kicking the brewery into production to fill the order. Our whole team has been working together to prepare for these deliveries. More importantly though, it reminded us that there are really good people out there – selfless people and organizations who are putting others first and holding out a hand to help those weathering difficult storms. It reminds me that we may go through difficult times, but we don’t go through them alone; we are all in this together – as Americans, and as the human race on planet Earth. We’ll make it through this and be stronger because of it.

It's amazing to see how a guy who sprayed himself in the face with our cold brew, who we thought was going to churn as a customer, ended up becoming a huge CWJ fan and making a large donation of our cold brew to hospitals during COVID-19. Thank you Neil. We’re honored to work with people like you and companies like Silverback Strategies.