We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nathan Hamood. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nathan below.

Nathan , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the toughest parts of scaling a business is maintaining quality as you grow. How have you managed to maintain quality? Any stories or advice?

I find it important to know why it is you’re trying to grow something. To me, the focus on the growth of my businesses is not just growth for the sake of growth, but for our ability to better accomplish the things we strive to as a company. One of these things is quality. Having scale can allow a greater investment in things that might not be possible at smaller scales, so growth becomes necessary to achieve goals. However its common that the reasons for growth can become forgotten, and as a business grows it starts to lose its quality control. I think its immensely important to never let growth impede quality, but to instead focus on ways to utilize it to achieve untapped potential levels of quality and care. This applies to the people behind an organization as well, and an investment in them, the creation of more opportunities for them, and an empowerment of those teams to do work that matters, and helps achieve these goals.

Nathan , 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’ve been in craft coffee for about half my life, which is pretty crazy. I got started in what was a small family business, and just became fascinated with everything that went into it, and with both the worlds of coffee and business. I used to go to my Dad with these profit analysis charts of why we should begin roasting our own coffee, and eventually I saved up and bought this little Ronco rotisserie oven that had been converted to a drum roaster, and thats how I got my start roasting. I learned however could – youtube videos, attending conferences, and lots of trial and error. That was really the beginning of the company, Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, evolving into what it is today as a coffee roaster. Despite my hours in school, I became increasingly more involved and saw the potential to grow something much larger than we’d originally thought. I eventually dropped out of my honors program at college to focus on the growth of the company, and I haven’t looked back. We’ve since grown to 3 locations, with a new Headquarters and 4th cafe slated to open in early 2023, and plans for expansion beyond that. I also started my other company, Ace High Co., around 2016 and have just had a really bootstrap growth model for all of it. I’m really proud of the work we do, of course the products we create, but also about how we’ve done it, and about the opportunities we’ve been able to create for our team, and how the team has grown into the roles they serve today.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The pandemic was obviously the time for pivots, and we all had to work so hard and so fast to find ways forward. We’d set out that we weren’t going to lay off any of our employees, though sales were obviously falling off dramatically. So we set out to just lean into the things we could while sit down service was reduced. This meant leaning into e-commerce and developing a whole e-commerce strategy in less than a week really, and doing things like bottling our lattes to sell by the 6 pack. Those types of pivots played a role in getting through, and had to be implemented swiftly.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I met the co-founder of my hair products company, Ace High Co., actually through Dessert Oasis. We’d hired him as a barista at one of the locations, and he and I hit it off. He was in business school, and I’d recently dropped out of business school to pursue the growth of the company, so I used to joke that he was my business degree. He began taking on more and more responsibility in Dessert Oasis, eventually becoming our Director of Finance, and during that time we decided to start a small hair products company on the side, that we grew from some really humble beginnings.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.docr.coffee www.acehighco.com
• Instagram: @dessert_oasis_coffee_roasters @acehighco @natehamood
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheDessertOasis
• Linkedin: Nathan Hamood