We were lucky to catch up with Conor VanBuskirk recently and have shared our conversation below.
Conor , appreciate you joining us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?
The first business I bought and operated was a local Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company franchise we opened in the Dierbergs Plaza off of Mid Rivers Mall Dr. We sold it after 18 years and it is still open and thriving- I just bought some chocolate-covered strawberries for family dinner from the new owner last week!
Listen, I had no clue what chocolate even was when we made this investment. I just wanted in the game, and this was the opportunity that fell in my lap. So my recruitment plan was basically to hire family that knows I don’t know anything and will help me. All I really had going for me was a great attitude and a characteristic lack of patience.. Luckily my mother-in-law had worked in chocolate for decades and my wife even highlighted in high school dressing up as the easter bunny with a sign! Needless to say, I leaned heavily on them. I focused on learning the business and how to make money and keep some of it, they worked at the front of the store. It was amazing. Most fun I have ever had and to see results that immediately is very gratifying.
So to sum up, if you are just going for it and don’t know anything hire people who are smarter than you, loyal as heck, and want your success as badly as you do! By the way, this only works if you outwork them. The key to everyones belief in you is never letting them down. New entrepreneurs often times overlook this. They let people outwork them because they. are the “owner” and should only delegate. Great way to be sitting in your shop alone delegating to your backpack while sobbing alone and writing a list of excuses for your failure. It always comes down to doing the work.
The most impactful thing I have learned after hiring a couple hundred people is to find people that have the same principles as you. For instance, there are things that are important to me that if they aren’t to you we probably won’t respect each other and therefore can’t work together. I have found the types of personalities and principled people that I work well with and so now my interviews are much more about who you are and what drives you, versus past experience and a bunch of idea’s of what you think you can do. I want to know what your values are and what’s important to you in life, not just work.
Then I know what drives you and whether or not we can work side by side. I also try to promote from within, this doesn’t always work, but is always our first look so our people have a path to a career and we have the opportunity to grow with those that started at the bottom and understand our culture from the ground up.
I also have learned to hire fast and fire fast to retain my excellent people I cannot expose them to mediocre employees for very long or the excellent people move on. Reduce all mediocrity in your organization and one day you wake up surrounded by excellence that is now self-enforcing. That’s always the goal, the team instills the culture regardless of owners instilling it, then owners back it up and it isn’t just top down. It is self sustaining.
Conor , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was a kid who dreamed of owning a small business while other people were focused on playing video games and watched a lot of tv. I didn’t give a crap about games, I wanted to get ahead. Part of this was due to my childhood of both parents raising 3 kids without a college degree and both parents getting thier degrees in their mid-30s while raising us. All while working full-time jobs and working side businesses. This kind of no-excuse leadership by my parents and example of work ethic left a stamp on me that I am not sure most kids were lucky enough to get. It felt miserable at the time spending all weekend cleaning churches and dentist offices to help out, but in reality, I was learning how to be uncomfortable to get ahead. My parents gave me the greatest gift, work ethic and lack of desire for consumption for the sake of consumption.
This being said in my early 20’s I met and married my wife Stacey at 23, we settled down, bought a 600 sq ft house for 30k in a really bad neighborhood and lived amongst our brown recluses with the ghosts of the guy that commited suicide in our basement. Slightly disturbing but led to my first opportunity to make money in real estate versus buying a big house and being house-poor forever. We ended sub dividing that lot, building another house and selling both of them so we could move out to St. Charles into a nice 2 bedroom condo.
Around the same time (2004) we had the opportunity to buy a chocolate franchise out in St. Peters and further bet on ourselves and grow our small business. We signed on and did our first year with my wife, mother-in-law, me, and a foster baby swinging in the kitchen. We learned the retail business and started to grow it. We eventually grew this to 4 locations and then looked to craft our own brand.
In 2012 we decided to open VB Chocolate Bar in Cottleville and dive into a restaraunt / cafe concept. We built this from the ground up and had immediate success bringing the perfect spot for before / after dinner drinks and desserts. I focused on our hand-crafted chocolates and ice creams and worked closely with our bar side, and coffee side to provide wonderful experiences for our customers. The downside to this business is we were open from 7 am to 1 am and involved in several businesses under one roof which eventually led to us wanting to choose one side of the business to focus on. I felt the coffee side would be much better if it had the complete focus, and so would the bar side. I had fallen in love with the coffee side as it fit my need to be with my wife and kids at night, so we chose that side and rebranded to Upshot Cofee to fully put our focus on being the best. Not settling for middle of the pack. Now our goals at Upshot are to compete nationally and internationally and make ourselves one of the most respected roasters/operators in the country. We are not concerned with locations or gross sales. We are concerned with tight brand control, high margins, and only working with extremely talented people. We will limit growth if those things are not possible through it. We have started to learn the agricultural side of growing coffee as well as our roasting and wholesaling to others. One of my future goals is to have ownership in a farm and be a fully integrated company that has the ability to educate our staff through the ability to process and grow coffee ourselves. This will make us better buyers and partners to all the farmers we purchase from.
I shelved VB Chocolate Bar for now, but after 5 years of not having it around I am more sure than ever it will come back as its own business at some point. And our ability to focus on that concept as its own thing will allow us to make it one of the best cocktail bars in the country. So when the time is right I think you will see both of them thriving and serving their communities.
I thought 20 years in I would be more relaxed, but if anything I am more aware than ever about how much work we have to do. I am significantly less relaxed 20 years in. There is. no time for relaxing. Just time to get better and make everyone around you better.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I actually am now just coming out of one of the darkest times of my life. The last few years were hell on earth for us. We got ourselves involved in 2 lawsuits that we had to fight through and win for our survival. In both cases our legal fee’s were not covered so even when we won we had 6 figure legal bills to work our way out of. In both of these lawsuits, we won, and were right in following our principles. That being said, they created a ton of division in our small communities through people attempting to shred our reputation over a period of years. They hurt us financially. We lost friends and regulars who thought they needed to choose sides. At the same time my mom suddenly passed away. If you looked at anything with rationality I should have walked away and gone and done anything else for my mental state. There were days I just had to lay on the floor and breathe through panic attacks daily. My wife would ask how we could pay for something this month and I would just look at her and have zero answer. It was really tough not having answers. That’s a bad spot to be, but so necessary and humbling. It was awful. But it had so much purpose. It taught me several lessons. One, make sure you only partner with principled people, two, spend a lot of time understanding your contracts and operating agreements, then never drop the ball not being prepared. Being lazy in these areas opened the door to chaos. Totally avoidable and I was so grateful I survived and learned the lesson. Never want to do that again. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite people. “It takes 2o years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Warren Buffett.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
I would say during the period above I was in therapy, and my therapist recommeded I read 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. I started it and it really offended me, so I quit it. He didn’t push it, then 6 months later I decided to try again and this time I couldn’t put it down. Gave me a whole new set of ideas and goals and they all revolved around personal responsibility. Nothing impacted me more than that book over the last 5 years.
Another book that blew my mind and was important to my journey was the book “Awareness” by Anthony De Mello.
Also “Falling Upwards” by Richard Rohr.
Then, and this really surprised me. One day, during the worst days, I just opened the bible and started reading where I opened it in Corinthians. Then I just read it straight through. I found my way through the panic attacks without self-medicating was deep breathing along with prayer.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.weareupshotcoffee.com
- Instagram: @weareupshotcoffee @upshotroasting @conor_vanb
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareupshotcoffee
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-vanbuskirk-96161585/
- Twitter: @upshotcoffee
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USuTmysAego
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/upshot-coffee-cottleville?osq=upshot+coffee
- Other: nothing else
Image Credits
Chris Sesti, Drew Horton, Conor VanBuskirk