We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gao Lee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Gao thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

My husband, Saeng and I started Uprooted Coffee in 2022 in the middle of the Pandemic. It felt like a good time to venture into something we both had interest in. The company didn’t grow right away, first of all, there’s not a market for Southeast Asian-produced coffee in the U.S., the usual response we hear from people is “we didn’t know coffee was even being grown in Southeast Asia”. We knew we wanted to bring specialty coffee grown in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam into the spotlight but neither of us has a background in business, we were both working full time, and we had two kids who had busy schedules of their own.

I felt stretched thin working my day job and then working on our business in the evenings and weekends, and doing it all through a pandemic. In 2023, I did the scariest thing I had ever done and I left my day job to try to build our business. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, in fact I did over six months of coaching and therapy to get to the point where I felt I could take this risk. I kept saying to myself that I wanted to invest and work for myself and ultimately, that’s how I finally left my job to pursue our business. At this point, I wasn’t taking home any money from our business, everything we made went back into the business and we were scrappy and we worked with people who could provide free to low-cost services. This means, our family went down to one income, and we made a lot of sacrifices day to day to make sure we could still build our company.

I knew I wanted to spend more time with my kids and my mom, I knew I wanted to focus on my mental health and I wanted to spend some time thinking about building my future. I was so optimistic. But six months after I left my job, my twin brother unexpectedly passed away and I went into a deep grief period. And since I was my own boss, there was no one to tell me to get up and go to work, no one I had to answer to which was both a blessing and a challenge.

I felt like my big risk – leaving my job to pursue business – was failing because I no longer had the energy to think about social media posts, show up to vendor markets and put a smile on my face, or sitting down to do our financial reconciliations – all of it seemed so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It took months and months of having good and bad days (mostly bad days) until I finally felt like getting up and getting dressed and leaving the house to go into our office and focus on the business. I felt like I was a terrible business owner because business is about sales and being customer-facing. Did I leave my job just to give up?

But when I began to feel alive again, I did just that – began to focus on building relationships again with our customers and got out there to in-person vendor events again. I found that people were genuinely interested in coffee from a part of the world they knew very little about, or finding out that we carried coffee from where their parents once lived. Somehow, in the midst of all my doubts about business, and giving in to grief, I grew a lot. I learned to trust myself and trust the process; I learned to lead with my heart; and I learned how to live a (very busy) life that I can be proud of.

It’s not all easy though – very recently, I did return to a full-time job but with a better sense of myself, with better boundaries, and with a rested body. I still work on Uprooted during the weekends – the time that I was able to just focus on the business allowed me to build a good foundation so I wouldn’t feel burnt out or over-extended. I’m so very proud of my journey – the highways, scenic routes, valleys of it all because I am exactly where I am meant to be now.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am the daughter of refugees, my parents arrived in freezing St. Paul, MN in January 1980 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They had fled their home country of Laos after the Civil War in Laos and were granted a safe passage to the U.S. because of my dad’s service to the U.S. military during that conflict. Laos is a home they loved, until it was no longer safe for them – they were barely teenagers when the conflict began and that breaks my heart to think about the conditions they lived through. My first visit to Laos was when I was 21 years old, and it really changed my life. I couldn’t imagine my parents’ lives before coming to the U.S., but being there in person – in the same city my dad was once stationed in and in the same country of their birth was a feeling I can’t quite explain.

When our kids were old enough, we brought them to Laos and it was during this trip that we stumbled upon an annual coffee fest that happened to be held in the capital city that year. When we left to come back home to the U.S., we knew we eventually wanted to introduce Southeast Asian coffee to our friends and family and that’s how we started Uprooted Coffee.

We come from refugees and immigrants – and they fought hard to be here. We honor our families and others by sharing something familiar from “home”, we have had people tell us when they drink our coffee it places them right back in Laos, or Thailand, or Vietnam and that is so rewarding.

Uprooted Coffee sources high-quality specialty coffee from small co-ops or farms in Southeast Asia. Most of our coffee is grown in the existing forest floor and in shade – so the beans get to mature slowly and that helps it develop a deeper complex flavor profile. We are so proud to support the farmers, many of them ethnic minorities such as the Hmong, Lahu, and Karen, that grow and harvest the beans.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A hard lesson I had to learn was to listen to my body. I started working at the McDonald’s drive-through when I was fourteen so rest was something my body was not accustomed to. But as I got older and after my kids were born, I became more tired and daily things became a bit more challenging. I just assumed I needed to work harder to produce the same work, I didn’t want to be seen as “lazy” so I pushed myself over and over again until I broke. When I left my day job in 2023, I was depleted. I slept for over two days because I felt like I had been holding a box for over 27 years and I finally placed it down, and now I could really rest. I did take a month to not jump into the business right away – I spent time with my kids and my mom, I wrote, I exercised, I cooked meals from scratch, I did all the things I never had time for and I learned to enjoy my own company again. It’s amazing what you miss in the busy hustle and bustle of life. My body had been telling me to slow down but I was too stubborn to listen to it. I began seeing my doctor regularly and was affirmed my “tiredness” wasn’t just stress or exhaustion, there were medical reasons for it that I had ignored. Many people are ambitious and they push through so they can get to their goals faster, but with what I had gone through, I am finally prioritizing my health above all else.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

The best source of new customers for us are previous customers! When they come back and continue to purchase coffee for themselves or as gifts, it’s the most rewarding for us. Many of our customers come from our community, they have a direct connection to Southeast Asia and they are very supportive of our mission, they re-share our posts, they message us their reviews, and they show up at our in-person vendor events.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.uprootedcoffee.com
• Instagram: @uprooted.coffee
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/uprooted.coffee