Hiring Post-Prison People and Serving High-Quality Coffee with Pete Leonard
Pete Leonard:
We don't sit around and talk old prison stories. We don't revel in the days of committing crimes or anything like that. These are people that want nothing to do with that previous life, and all I'm doing is giving them an opportunity to show up, and they do.
Dusty Weis:
Greetings, innovators, and welcome to Back of the Napkin, where we explore big journeys in the world of small business, with the personalities who make it happen.
Stephanie Davis:
This is where small business leaders can hear about unique ideas that have launched successful enterprises across America, and meet entrepreneurs who aren't afraid to think differently, and it's brought to you by SurePayroll, where small business is their business. I'm Stephanie Davis from the SurePayroll team.
Dusty Weis:
And I'm Dusty Weis, a small business owner from the Midwest, and we are just excited to bring you yet another tale of a small business pioneer, doing really cool things. On today's episode, we'll be talking to Pete Leonard, who's the owner of I Have a Bean in Wheaton, Illinois. He's basically found a business model that combines brewing a great cup of coffee with giving back to his community in the process.
Stephanie Davis:
I actually ordered coffee from I Have a Bean for the first time at the beginning of stay-at-home orders, and it made a huge impact in my home. It was so good, I even got my dad to kick his lifelong of Folgers daily habit for a cup of I Have a Bean.
Dusty Weis:
That is really impressive. Coffee has always been interesting to me because in a lot of ways, I feel like there's a generational shift that's taken place, where maybe the old guard, they liked just their standard cup of coffee, and they never really felt pushed to get out and try different things, and now, I mean, there's different kinds of coffee that you can get all over the place, and always locally brewed and always with a really cool story too, though, none quite as cool as this one, I'd say.
Stephanie Davis:
Yeah. Variety is important, especially when it comes to coffee, but before we get into all fun things caffeine, we'd love it if you took a moment and subscribe to Back of the Napkin in your favorite podcast app. We'll be releasing our season one episodes over the next few weeks, and we don't want you to miss any of them, so take a moment and hit that subscribe button.
Dusty Weis:
If you enjoyed the show, why don't you leave us a rating in your favorite podcast app? Five stars preferable, but be honest, or even leave us a review to tell us what you liked about the show, and you might just be helping another entrepreneur like you find that bolt of inspiration that they needed. Back to today's topic. Pete Leonard has been kicking off small businesses for years now. His current venture, I Have a Bean, has two purposes in addition to just an awesome pun for a name. First, the goal is to provide a high-quality, organically-grown, fair trade cup of coffee, and the second is to offer people who have paid their debt to society and completed a prison sentence with an opportunity for a fresh start and a new life.
Stephanie Davis:
I Have a Bean also strives for top-notch service. If your order is placed before 11:00 AM Central Time, your coffee will be roasted and shipped that day. The packaging comes personalized too, which is super fun to see, a bag of coffee with your name on it. Pete is a long-term SurePayroll customer, and I first chatted with him a few years ago about his businesses for the SurePayroll blog.
Dusty Weis:
Pete, thanks so much for joining us today.
Pete Leonard:
Hey, it's my pleasure. Thank you.
Dusty Weis:
You started roasting coffee beans in your driveway as an experiment. What in the world led you to try that?
Pete Leonard:
Yes, I did start roasting coffee beans in my driveway in a roasting machine that I built out of my Weber gas grill, believe it or not. As crazy as that sounds, my wife thought it was crazier. Her pet name for me back then was the coffee wacko, and it certainly applies. Why did I do that? Because I had come from Brazil.
Pete Leonard:
I had been there on a short-term trip with my church, and we were drinking some really great, freshly roasted coffee, and when I got back, actually, I brought 10 pounds of the coffee that I was drinking there. I brought it back to the States to give it as gifts to the people that paid my way to go on that trip, and the coffee was so good, I drank eight of those 10 pounds before I had a chance to give it away.
Dusty Weis:
Oops.
Pete Leonard:
Yeah, that was a big oops. I got to the end of that coffee and I thought, "Well, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I guess I'll stop at the store," the local coffee shop, the big green monster, like we say in my industry, and get a cup of coffee, and it won't be the normal thing that I get from there because I will tell you, I drank all of my "Coffee" from Starbucks before I started this venture, but it wasn't really coffee. It was what we now call a frou-frou drink, which in my case is a mocha, right? Some espresso, a little chocolate and a lot of hot milk, and it's a wonderful drink, and that's all I was doing, until this trip to Brazil.
Pete Leonard:
I had freshly roasted coffee for the first time, straight black, and it was absolutely delicious. When I ran out of that coffee, having come back to the States, I'm like, "All right, what do I do?" I thought, "Well, the easiest thing, I'll just get a cup of straight black coffee at the corner coffee shop on my way downtown." I did, and I took one sip of it, and I couldn't get it out of my mouth fast enough. It was horrible-tasting compared to what I had been drinking, and I thought, "Well, I'm not going to put up with the headache of this."
Pete Leonard:
"I'm going to have to figure something else out." Keep in mind, this was a few months after the trip to Brazil, and I remembered this guy in Brazil, roasting coffee beans over really, an open fire. He had a stainless steel sphere that he apparently bought at the local hardware store, and he was holding this sphere over an open fire. He was rotating the sphere, turning the crank, the handle on it, and his wife was feeding sticks into the fire to keep the flames at the right height. Now, I had never seen anything like this, and I had no idea what was going.
Pete Leonard:
In fact, until I saw that, he was roasting coffee, I had no idea that a human being did such a thing as roast coffee beans. Wasn't in any of my experience. The only thing I knew about coffee is I stood at the counter and said, "I want my mocha," and 47 seconds later, there it was on the counter. I mean, that was it, you know? This guy was roasting these coffee beans, and they were fantastic, and so I'm sitting here thinking, "What do I do for a good coffee?" I remembered this roasting scenario I had seen in Brazil, and I thought, "That doesn't look too hard."
Pete Leonard:
"I could probably figure out how to do this here in Wheaton," so that's when I did a little research online and figured out there are a lot of people that are wacky like me when it comes to designing and building coffee roasting machines. They do it in everything from dog bowls and heat guns to their stove or a skillet or something, but a roasting drum in my grill seemed like the right way to go.
Dusty Weis:
Now, I've heard that same phrase, "Oh, that doesn't look so hard. I can do that easy," from a lot of people with a lot of different ventures, including myself once upon a time, when I tried brewing beer with near disastrous results, so how did that turn out?
Pete Leonard:
Well, the first roast didn't turn out so great because I just read the instructions online, "Turn your grill up to the highest heat setting, put the green beans in the drum, turn on the motor, and come back in about 12 minutes and you'll have roasted coffee." Well, that sounds real easy, so I did exactly that, turned up the heat as high as it would go on my three-burner grill, walked inside my house to get a cup of water. No sooner did I get into my kitchen, I looked out the back door, and there is thick, black smoke roiling over my backyard. It was like a smoke bomb went off, and I ran outside and, of course, the beans were on fire inside my grill. That was probably the first big failure that I had in coffee.
Dusty Weis:
Not so simple then.
Pete Leonard:
I wish it were simple, like anything, right? I don't care if it's video editing or roasting coffee. If you know what you're doing inside doing that, it's far more complicated than it looks like on the outside.
Dusty Weis:
What were you missing at that point? What was the missing piece or the missing pieces, I guess of the puzzle?
Pete Leonard:
The missing piece was a lack of control. I had no way to measure the temperature of the beans. I had no idea that how you get to your end temp is as important as getting there. We all know light, medium, and dark roast coffee, right, and you think, "Okay. All dark roast is, well, it's just dark roast," but you actually guide the coffee beans along a temperature path to get to your finished temp, and you can change any five seconds in that 15 minutes, and it changes what the coffee tastes like.
Pete Leonard:
Yep, it's still dark, but now there's fruit flavors that weren't in there before, and now there's caramel that wasn't in there before, and so figuring out what a coffee has to offer and how to bring that out during roasting, that's where the magic happens.
Stephanie Davis:
You were roasting the coffee for fun as a side gig because you were looking an excellent cup of coffee. What were you doing full-time?
Pete Leonard:
That's a great question. I did have a full-time job. I wasn't roasting enough coffee on the weekend in my grill to make a living, and that wasn't even the point. I was actually, had another company. It was a software company, and we were writing software for a big company in Switzerland, believe it or not, so yeah. I'm a techno geek and have been forever.
Stephanie Davis:
What made you decide to turn that side hustle into your full-time business and switch out of the tech world?
Pete Leonard:
Yeah. Switching out of the tech world was a pretty tough thing, actually. I mean, I love roasting coffee, but being in the tech world was putting food on the table. What happened was very unexpected turn of events. Like a lot of people who start a business, especially one with a strong social mission like ours, it comes from something really personal that happens in their life, and in this case, I'm happily running my technology business, my software programming business, and we had an opportunity to bid on a project for this big company in Switzerland, and I knew two things.
Pete Leonard:
I knew I could figure out how to do it if we won the bid, and I knew we didn't have the skill in the company at the moment to actually do it if we did win the bid. That didn't stop me from bidding on the project, and lo and behold, we got the bid. It's like, "Okay. Now, I got to figure this out," and it just so happened that my brother-in-law had exactly the skill set that I needed to solve this technology problem, but he was employed full-time elsewhere, but I came home from work and, it was probably two days, maybe three days after we won the bid for this software, and my brother-in-law was the lead story on channel seven news here in Chicago. He had been arrested out of state and was in jail, waiting to post bond, and probably was going to go to prison.
Pete Leonard:
That was a kick in the gut, I'll tell you that. I had come home from work, and the first inkling we had that there was anything going on was this news story, so it was heartbreaking.
Dusty Weis:
Oh.
Stephanie Davis:
That's tough.
Pete Leonard:
What I didn't understand was how much this life changed for him was going to change my life as well, and it had to do with merging people who have come out of prison with coffee roasting. I'm at home, roasting coffee during this time and selling my beans on the weekend to neighbors and people at church and that kind of thing, but he got fired from the job that he had the instant the story ran on the news. His employer didn't wait to find out if he was guilty, if he'd done anything wrong or anything like that. It was immediate firing. Well, that was actually good news for me, and it turns out for him, since he had the skills I needed for the project, so I hired him.
Pete Leonard:
I mean, he's my brother-in-law and I had known him for 20 years at that time, maybe a little bit longer, and so we did the work. We had won the project, we wrote the software, delivered it on time and under budget, made a little money doing it. It took a year for us to get that done, and it took a year for him to finally go to trial, and he did get convicted, and he got put in prison. When that happened, I ended up having to hire four other programmers to take his place. I mean, he was stellar at doing what he did.
Dusty Weis:
Wow. Yeah.
Pete Leonard:
That's how I got into kind of thinking, "Okay. There's a problem in society." It's with post-prison people, because when he got out of prison, and he was only in, I don't know, nine months, something like that, minimum security, but now he's got this box on an application that he's got to check every time he applies for a job, "Have you been convicted of a felony?" "Yes, I have," and when he got out, I watched him go through interviews countless times, and he checked that box. He was perfectly qualified to do the work, and nobody would touch him because he had a felony on his record.
Pete Leonard:
They didn't even ask him a question, "What happened? Tell us the story." No interest. "You're a felon, you're out of here." That was wrong, and I could see that that was wrong.
Pete Leonard:
Now, before this happened, I didn't want anything to do with anybody who had been in prison. It's not like I'm walking around every day thinking, "Oh, those poor people who have gotten out of prison, they should have thought about that before they did the crime or whatever it was." Now, it's somebody I care about. That is what changed everything about my perception of post-prison people.
Dusty Weis:
I think that that's really poignant that you point that out because I do think that there's a tendency among people in a certain strata of society to overlook the importance of employment opportunities being available to recently incarcerated people. I think that people that haven't been touched by the criminal justice system tend to look at it and say, "Oh, you were in prison? You must be a bad person. I don't care if you have job employment opportunities available to you or not. I don't care if you receive rehabilitation while you are paying your debt to society."
Dusty Weis:
"I just want you punished and gone, and away from me." I think that that is, in a lot of ways, an unrealistic way to look at it, because once these people pay their debt to society and their sentence is over, they have to go back to living a life, and if there are no opportunities available to them, how can they be expected to do that?
Pete Leonard:
That's exactly right. If we won't let them back into society, they have done their time, they've paid for their crime, and they want to come back, so why are we not letting that happen? I think it comes down to fear. We're afraid, as people, of really, things we don't know, and we don't know, most of us, what it's like inside a prison or what somebody has to do to go to prison, and we're thinking it's the worst things possible, and in a lot of cases, that's true. That does not mean that a mistake made by a person should define them for the rest of their life, but we want to make sure that it does as society in general, and one of those ways is you can't work here, you can't live here, you can't be around my family, you can't be in my neighborhood, anything to get them away, and that's really shortsighted.
Pete Leonard:
The fact is, people get released from prison into communities all across this country every day. Now, if I can just talk about the Cook County and the surrounding collar counties, more than 20,000 men and women are released from prison into our counties every single year. More than 20,000. Illinois has, at the moment, the second highest recidivism rate in the country. It's over 50%, so recidivism, meaning somebody gets out of prison, and within three years, they go back to prison, and then they might get out again, and within three years they go back, and that's just a never-ending cycle for 50% of the people that get released from prison. Illinois spends $126,000 per person to reincarcerate them, so if it's 50% and it's $126,000, you've got a $1.2 billion cost in making that happen, and the vast majority of the reason people are reincarcerated comes down to technical issues.
Pete Leonard:
They missed a court date, they missed a parole officer meeting, something along those lines most of the time, and they go back to prison. That's not fair.
Dusty Weis:
How much then does having access to employment opportunities reduce the risk of going back to prison?
Pete Leonard:
That's a good question. I know in general, having the ability to work reduces recidivism, and by a lot. We do track that here at I Have a Bean. If Illinois' recidivism rate is above 50%, ours is right now less than 3%. It's actually less than 2% right now.
Dusty Weis:
That's incredible.
Pete Leonard:
I've employed more than 60 post-prison people over the last 10 years, and only two have ended up going back to prison, and that had nothing to do with anything they did while they were working here. It was after they left our employment. There's no magic here. All I'm doing is giving them an opportunity to work and expecting them to be great at what they do. We don't sit around and talk old prison stories or anything like that.
Pete Leonard:
We don't revel in the days of committing crimes or anything like that. These are people that want nothing to do with that previous life, and all I'm doing is giving them an opportunity to show, and they do.
Stephanie Davis:
After your experiences and knew that this was a goal for your new business, how did you go about the strategizing and recruitment, and making it a possibility?
Pete Leonard:
That's a good question, and it took a lot of work, a lot of time and talking with friends to help figure this out. First thing I did is I got introduced to a local post-prison reentry program. It's based in Wheaton. It's called Koinonia House National Ministries, and they've been in business helping men transition out of prison back into society for 25 years, something like that. I got to know the founder of that organization.
Pete Leonard:
I already knew the bookkeeper for them. He was a good friend of mine, and just started meeting the guys that were in that program and talking with the founder, Manny Mill about what the issues were that these men faced. It turns out, of course, employment was the biggest issue. They were learning how to live in society, how to interview for a job, how to run a computer, those kind of things, but they weren't getting the opportunities, so it was talking with people, and then figuring out that it was the merging of these two things, my brother-in-law going to prison, and then getting out while I had the technology company, but while I was roasting coffee at home and actually earning a little income on the side doing it. I was doing it at home, and that link was to people who are living in a halfway house in Wheaton was in a home.
Pete Leonard:
All right. If their biggest problem is getting a job, what if they created their own job, and that could be, well, roasting coffee. I'd taught myself how to do it, I can build a roasting machine, ha-ha, in a grill, and we thought, "Let's do that. Let's build some coffee roasting machines, and we'll teach these guys how to roast on that," and then other skills that come with a small business, marketing, sales, administration, accounting. "Any of those things that we have skills to teach, let's teach them how to do that," and pretty soon we thought, "They'll be earning money by selling a bunch of coffee, being able to pay for the training and education that they're getting in a halfway house."
Pete Leonard:
The best thing that we did after having those thoughts was write a business plan. A business plan, well, it was very difficult to write. Took a lot of time. In fact, we probably went through 20 iterations of this plan. We learned a number of things about what we were going to have to do to actually make a business that was a success, right away.
Pete Leonard:
This had to be a business, a for-profit business, not a not-for-profit. Nothing wrong with not-for-profits. I just don't know anything about running one, so it had to be for-profit, right? I could write software that people would buy and I've done other things that people would pay for, but donations and that kind of thing weren't where my head was, so how do we make this strong social mission something that somebody is willing to pay money for? We thought, "Okay. If it's coffee, what's going to differentiate it?"
Pete Leonard:
It needs to be very high quality. "How do you define that?" This is all coming out of the business plan, right? "What is very high quality?" Well, it turns out, having coffee beans, rated in the top 1% is as good as it gets. Nobody in this businesss back in 2007 was saying anything about coffee bean quality being nearly that high.
Pete Leonard:
"Okay, great differentiator. What about cheap? Can it be cheap coffee and the top 1%?" Nope. That can't be, so it's not going to be cheap coffee. In fact, we're not going to be pursuing business based on price. We're going to be pursuing it based on the quality of our product.
Pete Leonard:
"Is there something else we can do to make it differentiate from our competition?" Yeah. Speed is a thing that we could do, so what does that mean? "What if we roasted it the day you ordered it and got it into your hands that same day? How do you have a business that does that?," and no coffee roasters as a business are doing that, so we sat down and just figured out, "How do we create a business that roasts top quality coffee and gets it out the door the same day, and more than that, into a customer's hand the same day they ordered it?"
Pete Leonard:
It took weeks to write that business plan, but we got that done. Once we launched our business, parole officers started referring their parolees to us, judges started referring people that they had sentenced to prison and had gotten out. They started referring people to us. In fact, we had one judge say, "Look, this is not the same kid that I put in prison seven years ago. He's completely different, and I've actually been employing him to work on my property. You guys need to talk with him," and, of course, we hired the guy.
Pete Leonard:
It's pastors, it's small group leaders, it's grandmothers, you name it, newspaper articles when they come out about us, maybe even this podcast. People here, they're like, "I know somebody who's in that situation. Maybe they should go talk to somebody at I Have a Bean and see if they can get a job."
Dusty Weis:
It sounds like the uniqueness of your business model has spared you having to spend any expenses on recruiting, so that's got to be a nice, little bonus to have, but what form has your business taken since then? You have a storefront, you have cafes scattered around the Chicago area. What does the operation look like today?
Pete Leonard:
The operation today ... First of all, let me clear up. I'm not roasting coffee in my grill anymore. Yeah, that's in the business.
Dusty Weis:
Not ever? Not even just for fun?
Pete Leonard:
Nope, not ever. Not ever. The business plans showed us that quality comes with control over the roasting process, and software, remember, I'm a techno geek, software is what gives you control, so I thought, "Well, we need to find a roasting machine that gives you the level of control, what's unprecedented if we're going to be producing great coffee." In 2007, no such thing existed. If I'm really being called to start this business to serve post-prison people, well, it sounds like I need to invent a coffee roasting machine using my software skills and some friends that can weld metal parts together, and sure enough, that's what happened.
Pete Leonard:
It took me two years, but I designed, and built, and created a brand new commercial scale coffee roasting system that is software-controlled, allowing for perfect repetition in roasting coffee in an unprecedented level of control. To this day no machine exists like what we created. That's really the key ingredient to let us do what we're doing.
Dusty Weis:
And so now, how many locations do you have?
Pete Leonard:
Right now, we still only have one roasting location. We've had coffee shops in downtown Chicago. We have one in the Wheaton Public Library. Course, with the pandemic, the library is closed to visitors, which means our cafe is closed, but what we're planning on doing, and our business plan has always pointed to this, people are released from prison every year in every community across the country. That's great because people drink coffee in every community across this country too, and they could use a local high quality roaster with a strong social mission that can help those people get back to work, so we are going to be opening roasting plants across the United States. It looks like the first one is going to be in Memphis, Tennessee and likely in 2021.
Pete Leonard:
We'll open our second roasting plant down there, and then who knows where it's going to go from there, but I expect, no, I plan to open 72 roasting plants across the country.
Dusty Weis:
Holy cow.
Stephanie Davis:
That's so impressive.
Pete Leonard:
Isn't that crazy?
Stephanie Davis:
Well, Pete, it certainly sounds like you're winning hearts and minds one step at a time. We're going to continue this conversation with Pete in a moment, but first, we have some updates to share from the SurePayroll bulletin. It's the SurePayroll's Back of the Napkin podcast, where entrepreneurs share stories of their big journeys and small business. I'm Stephanie Davis.
Dusty Weis:
And I'm Dusty Weis, and we are talking to Pete Leonard, owner of I Have A Bean, a coffee roaster in Wheaton, Illinois. Pete, it's time to do a little something that we call The Fast Five. It's five, quick questions to get to know you better, and appropriately enough, I think the first one that we're going to serve up to you is, what is the best cup of coffee that you have ever had in your life?
Pete Leonard:
That is a really easy answer. Panama Geisha La Esmeralda. I had the honor of roasting a few pounds of this coffee back in 2007, so it's been a while, and it was really that good. Heavenly, actually. Rachel Peterson is one of the owners of this farm in Panama, and it's so good that they have their own auction every year, and in 2007, it broke all records for the price of green coffee. I think it was $121 a pound green, okay?
Dusty Weis:
Wow.
Pete Leonard:
Now, that sounds insane. It's 2020. What do you think it went for this year? $1,029 a pound green.
Stephanie Davis:
What?
Dusty Weis:
I would aspire to taste a sip of coffee that costs $1,029 green. That sounds like it would be pretty good. Oh my goodness.
Pete Leonard:
It's fantastic.
Dusty Weis:
What about the worst cup of coffee you ever had? Other end of the spectrum.
Pete Leonard:
Yeah, unfortunately, that's also a really easy question to answer. The two worst cups I've ever had were just this year, in fact, just a few weeks ago. One was from a large, old coffee roasting company that's trying to reinvent themselves with a fancy, new packaging and some creative marketing, and they're doing this. They've produced a bourbon-soaked roasted coffees. Their packaging is dynamite. It's great-looking stuff.
Pete Leonard:
It was the worst, not just coffee I've had, it's the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth. It was that bad. The second is a new company, producing a super coffee concentrate that they sell in the little eight-ounce bottle, with a promise that just one tablespoon will improve any beverage. Well, I tried it with Windex and it didn't improve the Windex. No. Literally, it was horrible, so those were the two.
Dusty Weis:
That's rough. Pete, back to your fast five. What's the last good book you read?
Pete Leonard:
It's what I'm actually reading right at the moment. It's called Deep Work, and it's by a guy named Cal Newport. His whole premise is that professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration can push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. He's talking about eliminating distraction, cellphones, text messages, emails, you name that, for a certain period of time and concentrate on one thing and getting better at that, could be writing a book or whatever the skill is. So few people do this, that if you do it, you're going to achieve a level of production and in skill that is hard to replicate.
Dusty Weis:
That sounds terrifying to me. I don't know what I would do without my distractions. What was your first job ever, Pete?
Pete Leonard:
My first job, reading the funny papers, the Sunday funny papers on the air, he was a radio DJ, every Sunday with my father. I was six years old.
Dusty Weis:
That's so cool.
Stephanie Davis:
And what would you say is your favorite vacation spot?
Pete Leonard:
Anywhere with my wife.
Dusty Weis:
True.
Stephanie Davis:
[Yeah 00:29:07].
Pete Leonard:
I am not kidding, we have so much fun together. It's just unfair, but I think we had the most fun on a 10-day trip to Italy a few years back when we celebrated 25 years.
Dusty Weis:
Well, congratulations on that.
Stephanie Davis:
Yeah.
Dusty Weis:
That's a great milestone.
Stephanie Davis:
Pete, when we spoke a couple years ago, you were telling me how detailed your business plan is and how you think through every single decision that impacts your business. One of those, when you were trying to decide where your roasting plant was going to be, was you wanted it to be accessible for your employees. Can you explain more about what you were looking to achieve and how you wanted it to work for them?
Pete Leonard:
Here's the issue. If we were opening a business that was hiring and employing people who had been to prison, trying to put ourselves in their shoes, what are the issues they're going to face? Are they going to face any issues and just getting to work? Turns out, yeah, they can face a lot of issues. A lot of people coming out of prison don't have a driver's license.
Pete Leonard:
They live in a community that's not accessible to public transportation sometimes, and so if we're going to make it so that they can actually get to work, I mean, if we're employing people that can't get to work, then we don't really have a business, do we? We looked at, "Where can we place a roasting plant that is easy to get to?," meaning, accessible very easily by public transportation. We searched all over the Western suburbs. We finally found the place that we're at is in Wheaton. It's half a block from the bus stop and five blocks from the Metro train station.
Pete Leonard:
We've had people come to work literally from all over Chicago land because they can get on public transportation, and eventually, they can show up at our door. I had one guy that worked here for a couple of years. He walked to the bus, took a bus to the L station, took the L to a train station, waited on the Metro train from there, and then walked here from the Metro train station. It sometimes took him two and a half hours one way to get to work, and that guy didn't just show up at work every day, he was the first person at work every day. It's that kind of, "I've got to work," that post-prison people have and why I think they make a great employee for a lot of businesses.
Dusty Weis:
Pete, you went into this with a lot of experience, operating a small business, and certainly it seems like you know what you're talking about here. I mean, you talked earlier about the importance of having a business plan. Advice like yours is probably advice that would have proved valuable to a first-time entrepreneur like me and many other people out there, so what do you think are some of those other keys to success that first-time entrepreneurs should really keep in mind?
Pete Leonard:
I'll tell you first, when somebody hasn't started their own business yet, and you're on the outside looking in, running your own business seems like, "Well, that would be great. I can be my own boss, I can come in when I want, I can do what I want, how I want," all of that kind of stuff. It's not easy. Running a small business is one of the hardest things I've ever done, so keys to success, you need to understand the why of what you're doing, so passion, if you will. If the why is strong enough, you'll figure out how to survive, and surviving is what it is, and in fact, you need to be a firefighter because if there's anything that running a small business is, it's putting out fires all the time, so you have to be able to put out fire after fire, after fire so that you can survive, and if you know and live the why, then you can do that. Part of that is understanding your destination.
Pete Leonard:
"Where are you trying to go?," and if you know where you're trying to go, you'll be far less likely to get distracted by things that might lead somewhere else. Here's a quick example. I've been counseled a number of times that I should offer less expensive coffee so we can sell more of it. Well, less expensive means lower quality, right? Quality comes at a price, but I'll tell you this, we are never going to offer a coffee that does not rate in the top 1% for quality.
Pete Leonard:
Never, and you know why. When you can sell top quality product, I've got post-prison people doing that, and it changes their perception about themselves, we're not changing the quality of the product, that means I don't think that they're capable of producing the best. Not going to happen, and businesses, other businesses, like the one right across our parking lot, look at what we're doing, and if it's not the best of the best, they're going to be far less compelled to say, "Hey, Pete, you're hiring post-prison people, and you guys are doing great stuff. How do I get involved in that?" The reality is, I've had more than 10 businesses, big ones, ask me that exact question for that exact reason.
Pete Leonard:
"You guys are doing great. I love your people. How do we get involved in doing what you're doing?"
Stephanie Davis:
Throughout your time as a small business owner, has there been anything that really surprised you that you weren't expecting?
Pete Leonard:
Well, I've done four or five or six now with small businesses. This is one of them. I am constantly amazed at how hard it still is to do it. You'll learn a bunch doing one, and you think, "Okay. I won't make those mistakes anymore," and sure enough, you may or you may not, but it doesn't mean the next one is any easier.
Pete Leonard:
I'll tell you the maxim that I've come to. You write your business plan, you figure out the worst case scenario. How much money are you going to need and how much time is it going to take? Whatever that is, pad it by 20%, and then triple the amount of money you think you're going to need, and double the amount of time, and then you might be close, so it's a lot of work to run a small business. A lot.
Dusty Weis:
And it's certainly a frustrating process to get caught up in that grind. Do you ever have trouble just getting discouraged and sort of hitting a wall and thinking, "You know what? Maybe I shouldn't have gone into coffee roasting?"
Pete Leonard:
Boy, oh boy. You know what? I actually don't ever have that particular thought. In fact, if I look back over my history of work, in all the various businesses that I've been in and run, everything I've done clearly has prepared me to do this business. None of what I've done in the past, if there was anything that was eliminated, I would not be able to be doing what I'm doing right now.
Pete Leonard:
The fact is I wake up every day and I am ... In fact, I wake up almost every day before my alarm goes off. I'm anxious about two things, "What wonderful coffee has Duke roasted for me that I'm going to get to drink today, and whose lives get to be impacted by the fact that we're still open even in the pandemic as a roasting plant?," because I see people's lives transformed, and at the end of the day, for me, that's what it is all about. People change. Post-prison people change, become better people.
Pete Leonard:
People that work here change, and they go on to do some fantastic things. I could spend another two hours telling you about just those things.
Dusty Weis:
Oh, that's awesome. Again, it's such a worthy mission, and I imagine that there are so many individual collective stories that could be told about how your business has changed people's lives for the better. We're just so appreciative that you took the time to talk to us here. Pete Leonard, owner of I Have a Bean Coffee Roasters. Good luck with your expansion plans in the year ahead, and thank you for joining us on the Back of the Napkin podcast.
Pete Leonard:
Thank you very much. Been my pleasure to be with you guys.
Dusty Weis:
That much said, that's all that we have for this episode of Back of the Napkin, where we explore big journeys in the world of small business with the personalities who make it happen.
Stephanie Davis:
Please make sure that you're subscribed in your favorite podcast app, and if you enjoyed the show, leave us a five-star rating, or even a review. We would love to hear from you about any ideas you have for small business owners who we should be featuring on our show.
Dusty Weis:
Back of the Napkin is brought to you by SurePayroll. From easy online payroll to 401(k) support, an award-winning customer service, SurePayroll has been serving the payroll and business needs of small businesses for more than 20 years. Learn more at SurePayroll.com and get two months free as a new customer.
Stephanie Davis:
Here on Back of the Napkin, our Executive Producer is my boss, SurePayroll's [Carrie Streets 00:00:37:35]. Co-producers are Kevin Kevin Aubrey, Ashley Peterson, and Dave Pappa, and our production partners are Podcamp Media.
Dusty Weis:
Where we provide branded podcast production services for businesses. Our editor and producer is Larry Kilgore III, so thanks for tuning in to Back of the Napkin. I'm Dusty Weis.
Stephanie Davis:
And I'm Stephanie Davis.
