We were lucky to catch up with Nick Clancy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Nick, thanks for joining us today. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?
Family businesses are the foundation of any economy. It started with a person who chose to sell something that another person valued enough to want to trade something for it. The item helped the buyer survive or thrive in some way. The person selling the item had a name, and most likely a family of his own. When the demand for whatever he’s selling increases, the need for trusted help also increases. Who can he call on in the here and now? His family members. And there you have the genesis of family business. Families coming together to build value through offering a good or service for the community they are situated in. When the community is provided for the family business branches out further and further-extending their value to whomever else may need their product or service to survive and thrive.
With family comes familiarity, and with familiarity comes frustration. Familiarity simultaneously allows you to see the best and worst sides of a person. And when you live with someone, you see them in their truest form- no guile, no facade, habits, character, etc, This is helpful in one sense because you can determine more easily whether or not you’d ever want to work with that person, but it still does not eliminate the risk of not being able to establish a kind of familial relationship that will be conducive to the workplace- and that can be very frustrating.
The secret to this kind of unique situation is respect and humility. Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself its thinking of yourself less. Families want to assert their value to one another- naturally. One wants to feel like the others need him maybe more than he needs them. But that’s the trap and that’s where family businesses can begin to dissolve. Humility would say, we have different roles, because we have different strengths, therefore we all need each other! It’s a constant battle- but it’s a choice. Choose humility and watch as your family business grows beyond what you could have ever expected.
Nick, 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?
After my football career ended in 2014, I had this itch to start a business. My first attempt was a failure of decent proportion- Second attempt also failed. Talk about heartache- After back to back fails, you start to have doubts about your own abilities and dreams. But the truth is, Clancy Bros. Coffee would not be successful had I not learned from the lessons those failures taught me. It’s not win or lose, but win or learn as they say!
I got into coffee after sipping the best cup I’d ever had in 2015. It was the first time I had tried Specialty Coffee- the main differences between specialty and commodity coffee is the quality across the board. The crop itself is grown in conditions that produce better flavors, it’s not mass produced, It’s processed and stored with more care and intentionality and finally it’s roasted and brewed in small batches- the end result is coffee that has reached its full flavor potential.
We give the people in our community access to Specialty Coffee they wouldn’t otherwise have. In addition, we roast our own beans…If you ask the average coffee drinker when or where their coffee was roasted, chances are they won’t be able to give you an honest answer. We roast daily, on-site so that you’re never guessing when it comes to freshness.
I am most proud of our staff. We have baristas that truly know what it means to serve. I always say, it’s not just about the coffee, it’s about how we make our customers feel when they’re here. Coffee drinkers center their day around their favorite beverage- they deserve our best effort across the board- our staff believes in that, and it’s a big component to what makes us different.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Less, but better. Social media is such a powerful tool when used in the right way. We knew from the start that we didn’t want to oversaturate people’s feed with our content or dilute the brand through over-posting. Instead, we capture content that we feel adds value to our audience’s lives in some way- Educational, Inspirational, and Entertaining. If we hit any of those three buckets and do so with quality video and photo, we’re in good shape. And thus far, it has proven to be a good strategy for us.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Starting a business is a journey of resiliency in and of itself. But when you finally open, and the customer reception is ten-fold what you expected and you run out of every item you need to stay open, just to try and meet the demand, you see what you’re really made of. We opened our coffee shop the last weekend in November, right at the beginning of the Christmas season. WE. WERE. SLAMMED. for about a month straight. When I say “slammed,” I mean a line out the door for 2-4-3 hours straight every day and even more so on the weekends. In those stressful moments, it’s easy to panic, shell up, and worst of all get burned out- our staff showed so much resilience during that first month that as we began to slow down a bit, busy days felt like a piece of cake in comparison. The key was having a “fun under pressure” mindset. We can either be busy or slow- we think busier is better- so why not smile and have fun while working? That mindset and some really good music playing helped too!
Contact Info:
- Website: Clancybroscoffee.com
- Instagram: @clancybroscoffee
- Facebook: @Clancybroscoffee