We recently connected with Samantha Epperson and have shared our conversation below.
Samantha , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear how you think where to draw the line in terms of asking friends and family to support your business – what’s okay and what’s over the line?
Opening a coffee shop was a very intimidating process, and I 100% asked my friends and family to support! To be honest I really leaned on my village just to get the shop up and running, We really couldn’t have done it without the incredible support I received from them. At times it can seem really overwhelming to start or run a business, but in the end you only get the help you reach out for. I think you do need to draw the line at not respecting other peoples time, it’s your business, and in the end the responsibility is on you! I honestly believe that your friends and family do want to help, you just need to make sure your asks make sense for who you are asking!
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?
Hallowed Grounds Cafe and Gifts is definitely a coffee shop with unique style, we aren’t shying away from that! We focus on delicious drinks, both coffee and otherwise, but we also have some incredible food! Within the las year I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, and it has been wild, to say the least. So our focus for food is serving incredible breakfast, lunch, and quick snacks that are so good, you can’t even tell they are gluten free! I didn’t want to sell anything I couldn’t eat, and I know how hard it can be on someone who has to eat gluten free, so we wanted to be a safe space for people to come get some delicious food.
We are so proud to watch our menu grow as we experiment with our recipes and as we discover new local places to source our gluten free food from!
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I met my business partner almost eight years ago, when I was a bartender at his favorite bar. We hit it off and were casual friends for four years, then one day he asked me out on a date. We have been together for four years now. I feel so lucky to be running this business with my partner, we work together so well, balancing out each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Building our social media following has been one of the funnest parts of this journey! We just talk to people, we connect with them as we take their order, make their drink, etc. Then we ask them to give us a follow, and we have a QR code they can scan right at the register. In the first two weeks we had over 1,000 followers and we also were so touched because SO MANY people would post photos of their lattes or breakfast sandwiches and say great things about us! In the end I think what people really want is to connect, and we just do it in a genuine way!
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