Today, we are 5.

musings on five years of Time & Tide Coffee

Five years ago, in a flurry of November snow, we peeled the brown paper off the windows of Time & Tide Coffee and opened the door of our (mostly) sunny cafe to the public for the very first time. The roaster came a few months later.

That opening day was one of the busiest we had in those first few months. Once the initial excitement died down, though, those first few months – having a brand new small business in the winter in Maine – were incredibly hard.

If I’m being honest, it’s still hard - just in different ways.

But here’s the thing. Approximately 45% of small businesses fail during the first five years. And we’re still standing, so as hard as it can be some days, we must be doing something right. At least some of the time.

In the Spring of 2016, while sitting on a rooftop in Antigua, Guatemala, Jon Phillips and I scribbled the idea for a future coffee company in the dog-eared Baron Fig notebook I carried everywhere with me. We made notes on what the place we would build might be like, the place that was not Brooklyn that we might find ourselves. And in the summer of 2017, during our annual family vacation in Maine, we walked into the Biddeford planning office and asked about the steps one might need to take to open a business here.

We’d been through Biddeford before. We ate at Biscuits & Co. We knew about Palace Diner. My cousin shopped at Suger. And on this trip, we really noticed the signs of entrepreneurship that had been bubbling up for a few years prior. We had a beer. We talked to locals. We felt welcome, and we felt like the little coffee company we wanted to build could be a possibility in this small city.

So in January of 2018, we loaded up the car and the cats and said goodbye to Brooklyn - the place I had lived longer than anywhere else in my entire life.

Yes. Just like that. ??

In retrospect, there are a couple of things I might have done differently. But you don’t know what you don’t know. And it’s hard to predict the future. And it does no good to look backward at all the “could-haves” and “should-haves.”

So here we are. Today, we are five.

There are a few things that we have learned in these first few years. A few things I want to share with anyone embarking on a small business journey, especially a brick-and-mortar business.

Start with a plan. Having a solid business plan, even if the initial projections were not quite on target, was one of the best things we did. It was imperative in getting a bank loan, but it’s also a tool we can look back on and track how we are doing. As we enter our sixth year of business, we’re doing the less-than-glamorous work of revising the plan for what the next five years, and beyond, will look like.

Have a clear vision of who you are. Everyone and their mother has an idea of what your business can and should look like. For the most part, they are well-meaning, but they are just their opinions - and trying to please everyone will only throw you off-track from your original goals. A few things we were told as we launched our coffee company: “you should serve soup,” “you should get some comfy couches” (no thanks - not interested in deep cleaning spilled milk from upholstery!), “you should definitely have a drive-through,” “you should have ‘normal’ flavors” … and so many more. None of these align with our vision for our company, and that’s OK.

Know when to pivot. At the same time you need a plan and a clear vision, it’s also important to know when to make adjustments for the reality of your situation, your customers’ needs, and the overall state of the world. If the pandemic hitting so soon after our first cafe-birthday taught us anything, it was that the best-laid plans can go kablooey in a moment – but having the vision of what Time & Tide Coffee is (and is not) allowed us to adjust to the needs of our community and our staff, to keep serving everyone in a safe way, and to pivot our year 2 focus from growing the wholesale side of things to really shoring up our retail operation.

Patience is truly a virtue. Success, whatever that looks like, rarely happens overnight. And it, for sure, doesn’t happen like every 80s movie montage would lead you to believe. Building a successful business means sometimes you have to wait - for people to find you, for things you can’t control, for repair people … you get the idea. We all think the idea we have for our business will hit like gangbusters, but that is rarely the case for small businesses that survive long term.

Hire for the person. Not every small business starts with a staff, but ours did. And one of those people (hi, James!) is still with us today. Five years (!!!) later. In every business - and I promise this is true because I’ve worked in a lot of industries + jobs in the past 25+ years - you can train for the day-to-day, but it’s a lot harder to train for “soft” skills or personality. Finding people who have a great attitude, who are excited to learn, and, in hospitality, are stoked on making people’s days … that goes a lot further than knowing someone can make a swan in their latte art (or whatever the equivalent flourish is in your industry!).

Tomorrow is the first day of our sixth year in business. And there is so much I am taking into the next 5 years from the first 5. We learned a ton. We still learn every day. We can’t wait to share what’s next.

Stay tuned.