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

Hi Jacob, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I’ve never been a coffee drinker – but never really liked tea growing up either. I didn’t quite understand it back then. I had taken a job with Carnival Cruise Lines some 7 or 8 years ago and was in the Caribbean for a full spring sailing season. Almost all of my co-workers were from the Eastern part of the world, where tea is the drink of choice. I would watch daily as my friends would walk around with these incredible looking drinks and when I would ask what they were drinking they would tell me tea, but this wasn’t the tea that I knew from back home so I was confused.

When I came back to the States full time I started getting into tea quite a bit more and it became a favorite drink of mine. My biggest issue was that if I didn’t make it at home and bring it with me on the road – there were few to no places to get good tea in a drive thru setting. It became one of those “stop complaining about it and just fix the problem yourself” situations… so Dashboard Tea Company was born. I am a drive thru only tea hut, selling loose leaf hot and iced tea options to my local community 5 days a week. I also exist online and ship loose leaf tea to all 50 states!

Jacob, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My business is a solution to my own problem. While working in the corporate world, I had become quite picky with the type and quality of tea I wanted to drink and I rarely could find it ‘on the go’, so if I didn’t make the tea myself at home and bring it along with me – I was often out of luck.

I would have LOVED a place like Dashboard when I was commuting every day. So I just decided to fix a problem I assumed others had as well :)

Starting a business is everything you hear it to be. It is fun and scary and confusing and gratifying and sleep depriving and all of those things. But after three years, I think the most proud aspect for me is acceptance to the local area. This idea was unconventional and even though I knew I was going to love it – I wasn’t positive how the concept would be received by others. To hear my business’ name be used in every day conversation by others now and know I am just a ‘part of the family’, so to speak, is really cool and something I am oddly proud of.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I don’t necessarily advise others to follow the same path I took to handle the start up costs – but I had to do what I had to do :)

I had approached banks about a new business loan but the response I got was apprehension. We live in a coffee driven society and so the idea of a tea only drive thru business didn’t compute with potential lenders. I wasn’t mad, I understood that I was likely the only one who saw the path :)

Because the building I was going to be leasing was small (lower overhead) and therefore the costs of a build out and equipment fitting was also going to be smaller – I was comfortable financing the entire start up cost on a business credit card with a runway of 12 months of interest free build. I spent that first year throwing most of the profits back at the credit card to successfully pay off that balance.

I would consider myself conservative with my finances – so I had to be pretty confident in the idea to pull that move off and thankfully it worked out in my favor.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

Part of the reason for my cautious optimism that I could make this work was that I knew I was going to have a physical product that I could also offer online. Loose leaf tea is easy to pack/store/ship and has a long shelf life – so I hypothesized that if I got active online and found success building any kind of community – it would be able to supplement the dry spells or off seasons in the physical location.

So far that has turned true for me and it has become a surprisingly enjoyable part of the experience for me. Building out a small community on multiple social media platforms (IG, Tiktok, Facebook, etc) is almost like running a second business and the successes that are found in those undertakings, whether small or big, have helped the lulls and strengthened the swells of the physical location.

It has been a fun and never ending learning experience how to handle each and when to pull back from or push the buttons to both of them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.DashboardTea.com
• Instagram: www.Instagram.com/DashboardTeaCompany
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/DashboardTeaCompany
• Other: TikTok: @JakeandtheTeaHut