We were lucky to catch up with Michael Wyatt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission is simple. Take care of each other, the customers, the neighborhood, the equipment, and our fair trade suppliers. The rest will take care of itself.

By this, we mean that we put our operational and leadership focus on service, quality, and ethics rather than growth, brand, and efficiencies because we’re aiming to build collective value rather than just owner value. A few examples:

1) We roast with the most environmental coffee roasting equipment available. Additionally, we were certified by the City of Dallas as a Green Business at the Gold level and continue to maintain and advance our standards.

2) Full City Rooster provides liveable wages and hours and additionally we offer health benefits, mental heath financial assistance, and tuition reimbursement by paying for books if an employee wants to take classes.. We also work to develop our employees in a holistic way, not only with their buying, roasting, and brewing skills but also in terms of networking and developing skills and connections in the larger hospitality ecosystem. Full City Rooster participates in and sponsors via fundraising for the Dallas Community College Culinary arts program. Additionally, we work with the International Rescue Committee to hire refugees, who are in-turn mentored by the owner and other employees.

3) Full City Rooster actively hires, donates, showcases goods/art, and buys from individuals of color, from minority-owned businesses, and has a fair and equitable compensation policy. Our roastery is a collection site for coats for homeless adults and children, and every summer we build fresh cold water stations in the neighborhood for people and their pets to make it through the heat here in Texas. We are also a certified Dallas Safe Place for victims of hate crimes.

4) Full City Rooster has an open door policy with our colleagues and we regularly invite home and industry roasters in for coffee and conversations in which we share and learn from each other. We take a “rising tide lifts all ships” approach to industry.

5) We do not engage in traditional paid marketing, proactive public relations, paid social media, nor influencer marketing because we believe our coffee and our business should be something people discover organically and come to holistically. Our way of spreading the word is reflecting our neighborhood and customer values by opening up during deep freezes, offering more than 10,000 boxes of NARCAN to the community and feminine hygiene products free of charge, and being a judgment free place for everyone in our community. Full City Rooster contributes to the Stew Pot 501c3 homeless art program. This may not be an advanced approach to marketing, but it suits what our customers want from us.

6) We subscribe to a “your brand is as your brand does” form of 1:1 building of our reputation. We greet people with warm hospitality no matter their background or needs. Whether large restaurant accounts or homeless asking for a cup of coffee, we treat them with warm connection and serve them in the same way.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We opened in the Cedars Neighborhood in South Dallas in 2013 as a small family business, initially open for pick-up only, mostly using our facility to roast onsite. Everything we do is centered around quality and people, and that starts with the coffee. From how we source the beans to how they are roasted, packaged, and even through education of each customer—we aim to ensure that they get the best product and experience we can deliver. We go as far as we possibly can to protect freshness and quality, we committed to not selling through grocery stores or markets in which the coffee could be sold beyond our two week target, for instance. We “cup” (a method of sampling as we roast) constantly to ensure the profiles are up to standards. We view our role in the roasting industry as one of ambassadors and want to model quality, humility, and service. Importantly, we don’t lecture our baristas nor customers on the details of coffee, but rather we take the time to listen to what they are looking for, what equipment they have available, and then we see how we can enhance their visit and what they are bringing home.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

A few years back, Dallas experienced a deep freeze as the electric grid in Texas failed, leaving many in our neighborhood without power and scrambling for resources. Using the tools and space we had available, we opened up to serve coffee to the neighborhood for free, also inviting anyone to come charge their phones and other devices with the generators we had, and just share a little camaraderie. We didn’t promote this during or after as we didn’t want to appear to be self-congratulatory but this is an example of similar instances such as the COVID lockdown and other community crises where our resilience became part of our reputation. People have come to understand that how we respond to our community’s needs is part of what they are supporting, why they come back, and the stories they tell when they refer us to others. It’s very humbling.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

By far and away, word of mouth is the most consequential and enduring way new customers come to us. We roast and serve the very best coffee we can, which people innately respond to, and also people get a sense of sincere connection when they buy from us, which is very real. In many respects, coffee can easily become a commodity where customers are always looking for a similar quality at a cheaper price or a more convenient location or delivery method, so people’s personal endorsement of the WHY they prefer Full City Rooster is extremely meaningful to our bottom line and to our sense of purpose.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fullcityrooster.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fullcityrooster?igsh=NWVqZGwyemlxMDQ3
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeRoastingStudio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/full-city-rooster-llc/about/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/full-city-rooster-dallas

Image Credits

All photos courtesy of Full City Rooster