The Story Behind Grounds: Why I Finally Wrote the Café Chocolat Book

Gjergj Dollani: Hello friends and welcome to this episode of Ristrat a Time, the about starting and running your own coffee shop. If you've been following the podcast for a while, I'm sure you have noticed that ⁓ this not a podcast that has a new episode being published every week or other week. I think the last one I I did was a few months back with the intention of Starting a season two, ⁓ interviewing different roasters, interviewing different business owners or coffee shop owners and kind of learning from from their experience or sharing their experience. And ⁓ been in touch with a few in in New York. There's a couple here. there's some interesting things that have have opened up, specifically in New York, mostly ⁓ on the ethnic side or or focusing on a single origin type of coffee from maybe Indonesia or from the Philippines and making that the differentiating space. However, I haven't been able to record any of the episodes because I've really been struggling ⁓ a bit what ⁓ this ⁓ ⁓ or ⁓ it wants to or has be. ⁓ And if you've listen to a lot of the podcasts. I mean, this really didn't start out as a podcast series on coffee shops, right? There's plenty of them out there. I think I've may have mentioned it in a previous episode where how this started is me after closing down Cafe Chocolat, I was interested ⁓ in jotting down while memory fresh, some of the things that I right, some of the things that I could have done differently. And some of the new things that I would need to incorporate the next iteration of Cafe Chakra. Again, when I started recording, I just closed the shop because of COVID. And my intention was, and my understanding was that COVID would go away in the next three, four months and ⁓ everything would open up like as it did before, right? But here we are, six years later, the space that Café Shokura occupied. had been empty until I think maybe a couple of weeks ago where another business came in and and just took the space over. So that goes to show that, some areas been really affected by COVID and have not come back or are not coming back. downtown DC has been ⁓ really hit specifically by the and then just COVID then just people changing their work habits and work behavior as well. Most people are working from home, especially in in a place like DC where you know 90% of the people work here, don't quote me on the numbers, but they're consultants, right? So they don't really need to be in an office. in any case, ⁓ the question is, well, what have I been doing for for the past ⁓ know few months and then the past years since I recorded my last real episode of the podcast? And I've been working on book which I called Grounds. ⁓ what a coffee shop taught me that a career never could and and I'm excited to have a a printed author from Amazon here for my review. ⁓ the book is going to be published on 1st. So as of June 1st, ⁓ you'll able to go on Amazon.com and and order the book. So the question is why write book? Why did I want to write a book when I have a podcast and and ⁓ what I to do was not really ⁓ Copy the podcast and turn it into a book format. And actually that's how the idea started. I had one of the ⁓ listeners sent me an email and said, Hey, this is really cool stuff, cool information you have here, but I'm finding myself trying to figure out episode and what minute you recorded, how many cups or how many aprons or just some specific situation that I'm dealing with and I'm trying to find the podcast on the episode and I'm trying to find the minute where it was said. So it would be awesome if this was in type of a printable printed format where I could just go page 54 and and find the information that I want. ⁓ I thought about that and I thought that was a great idea. Initially what I was thinking was why don't I just take the transcripts, you know, clean them out because Obviously I I use a lot of fillers and I go back and sometimes I regurgitate the same thing over and over. Again th this was not a podcast in the professional sense of things, right? This is just me with an iPhone and recording to myself and I felt like other people could find value with this and that's why I just put ⁓ all on on anchor at the time. ⁓ but not with the intention of me kind of doing episodes and interviewing people and ⁓ you know, turning this into a into a thing, right? so decided first to just take the scripts and I decided to, you know, them out and just use the same thing. You know, one chapter would be marketing, another chapter would be how to find the space or things like that. And then I realized as I was working on that, I realized that the podcast is not truly a how Right. in the sense of a book. There are plenty of books, and I mentioned a lot of them in the podcast series that I used myself on how to start a coffee shop, right? ⁓ are with bullet points at the end of the chapter. There's a here is the five things you need to do now before you move on to chapter number two, and ⁓ know, where to do this, who to talk to, and where to find that. So, and and mine was not. That detailed. So I felt like it wouldn't really be a valuable how-to, it would fall short. I realized that what's missing from the podcast that I think people would find valuable is how all started. Where, you know, both from a physical standpoint and also from a mental standpoint, you know, where was I? Right. How did I deal with my family? How did I deal with the naysayers? How did I deal with people that supported me? How did I deal with people that I had to beg for money and or people that didn't want to give me any money? ⁓ know, when I ran the shop, what are some of the situations that I ran into with the employees? And obviously if you've owned a business, managing staff is going to take ninety percent of your time, right? The the business just kind of once you set up the structures, it it run itself, ⁓ it itself and And lot of times problems that you that you run into are either employee-related problems ⁓ are supplier-related problems and they kind of affect your business and they ⁓ could be detrimental to your business or could boost it up. So ⁓ I wanted to write the book grounds as ⁓ a companion to the podcast. So if you've been listening to the podcast, ⁓ think you'd find it interesting because I I talk about and I again. you you you know me, ⁓ I share a lot of details and and people are have have told me that I share too much, but I ⁓ think that's that's how I bring value. but is is really more about you know of the the the the struggles, the inner struggles that I went to and and and the people around me. And even when we shut shut it down, ⁓ obviously we to deal with a fallout ⁓ of not the shop but still having to ⁓ take care of the the loans that we had accumulated and and how we went through it, right? So, and then I think it's of the things that I have in here that I don't really have on the podcast is really I talk about how I even came up with recipes. Like how did I take bits of conversations or things that I heard from other people and just use that to create this, ⁓ Because there's there's so ⁓ that can come from just even a a short conversation on on the street with some random person you run into and you go, ⁓ that's a great idea. I should, you know, change something at the shop or change this or change a price or something like that. So I've included a lot of that information here ⁓ in in the book. And and I've started working on this book about three years ago and it took me a long time, one, 'cause ⁓ obviously I'm you know, writing is is I really wanted to make sure that that I put in here is ⁓ genuine and and it's real. So ⁓ you ever go on Amazon and you pick up the book, which I would love you to, I would love to hear comments and and what your thoughts ⁓ are on on it and are some things ⁓ that you found interesting. ⁓ of the interesting things the book ⁓ is I'd given it to few people. I've given the manuscript to a few people to read. And wanted to get their feedback ⁓ started getting an editor to review it and and ⁓ know, kind of put some money behind it, right? ⁓ I gave it to a friend of mine who owns a marketing agency here in town. And ⁓ he done, we we go up to his office, you know, calls me up and ⁓ we we sit across the table from each other in the conference room and he said, Listen, I gotta tell you. There's a point in chapter four or five of the book where it hit me really hard because it's something that I had to deal with myself. ⁓ specifically, he said core drilling. and ⁓ drilling is basically when you have to drill into concrete to either put pipes or wires or things like that. And it's extremely expensive. And it's one of those things that ⁓ did not know until I'd already paid the money and somebody said, Hey, we have to core drill. ⁓ and it's not in your f financial plans here. and he's he ran into the same thing as he said we moved into this new office and my understanding as a ⁓ owner of a marketing agency is we need laptops and plugs everywhere. And I felt ⁓ because seen plugs on the floor all the time, so I felt, okay, well that's something easy to do. So I never considered ⁓ what what it takes from an engineering standpoint to do that. And once we signed the lease and got everything ready, ⁓ I said, well we're gonna put tables here, here, and here. So I would need some electrical outlets. And I was told that for each one of them I would need some core drilling, which is extremely expensive from from a from a build out standpoint. So he said here I am having signed the lease, having gotten everything ready. Now I've been told that it will be double the cost of setting up because I did not know that there's a thing called cold core drilling. That I would need. And it was the same thing with me, because when I got the space, it didn't really have the piping that I needed to have or the wiring that I needed to have, which meant I had to do cord drilling, ⁓ which really bumped up my cost the shop. ⁓ ⁓ was awesome to me that this resonated with somebody who's not in the coffee industry, but it's a business owner himself well. And and he had to deal with the same issues that ⁓ I to deal with ⁓ at the shop. So I feel like There's a lot of application to to the book outside of coffee shop. And it's also if if you've wanted to, if you're kind of like on the ledge, it's an idea that you have, it's a thing, I think this is what this book talks about. It talks about taking that leap, right? Like what I did, meaning having no idea what I was doing and leaving a very comfortable job ⁓ do something that I was really passionate about. And obviously, I would have loved for for me to be talking to you almost nine years later now saying, Look at me, you know, there's thirteen other shops ⁓ around the city or ⁓ the US. But ⁓ but I think there's value in kind of having something, building something going through the that complete arc of having to close it down and having to deal with the fallout than it is to just say, Hey, look, it's it's just working, it's profitable and it's it's expanding. ⁓ we hear a lot of those stories, but unfortunately are very far and and very few and far in between. And sometimes you you forget that for every Starbucks there's a hundred other businesses that ⁓ didn't get right? That were big and and didn't get to that point. So ⁓ so I hope this is a book that's Not just to people who have a shop, want to open a shop, but even people that are interested in or have an an idea or are interested to see also from from a from a psychological standpoint, from a mental standpoint, what what are some of the things that you have to deal with and how do you deal with. And I've tackled a lot of them in in the in the book itself. I wanted to do just to give everybody a little bit of a taste in terms of what the book is like and and how it is written, I'm just going to read the first page and a half of chapter one of of the book. You can actually get the chapter on PDF format yourself by going to ⁓ the website ristretto time dot com, basically the name of the podcast. ⁓ there's an ⁓ there's a a place there where you can just type in your email, you know, verify it, and then you'll automatically get the PDF ⁓ in the mail. So you can read the first chapter yourself. I'm just going to read the first kind of page and a half. ⁓ the set of the scene here. And I would love to hear from you what you thought of the first chapter. but also that's how the book follows through ⁓ for for the rest of it. All right. ⁓ am starting. A walk through Adams Morgan. On the first day I closed Cafe Chokura, we made $15. After three and a half years of 16-hour days, after borrowing against everything we owned, after building a business that had been featured in The Guardian, Washington Post, The Times of India, Voice of America, and visited by governors and foreign officials, we made $15. I at my staff. Looked at the sales report and said the words I'd been dreading for months. Guys, this is it. We're done here. But that's not where the story begins. It began four years earlier on a walk through Adams Morgan with my wife when a simple question changed everything. small neighborhood chocolate and coffee shop was tucked away in the basement of a two-story building, the kind of place you'd walk past a hundred times without noticing. Lori and I Only found it because we were taking one of our evening strolls through Adams Morgan Admir, a neighborhood in DC. The kind of meandering walk that had become our routine since moving to the city a few months earlier. It was 2016 and everything in our lives felt transitional. Lori was deep in her residency at Georgetown University, pulling 24 to 28 hour shifts. I was unemployed and restless. Having left my marketing job at Uno, Pizzeria and Grill's Frozen Food Division, where remote work from DC proved impossible. Brand management, I had discovered, required too much hands-on collaboration. Being detached from the office, production facilities, and products made me feel unproductive and disconnected. I took advantage of my newfound freedom to pursue some of the things I had always wanted to, but couldn't in the past. I made a list of books I had always wanted to read and spent the days working out, cooking, cleaning around the house, and keeping an eye out for any job opportunities that seemed interesting. gave me space to work through the decision on my own, which felt very liberating. We descended the steps to the chocolate shop, drawn by curiosity more than anything. Two people stood behind the counter. I was especially interested in finding Manjari, a chocolate line for Valrona. A brand both Lori and I loved from my days working in the chocolate industry. They had it. I had started my brand management journey in the chocolate industry, working for both consumer and business-to-business chocolate products. And I was excited to see what this little specialized shop was carrying. I struck up I struck up a conversation about their chocolates, drawing on my experience with Lint and Barry Calabout. we talked, I mentioned several chocolate brands I thought they should carry. Artisanal products I knew from my years in brand management. People whose contact information set in my phone and email. Our distributor doesn't carry some of them, the woman said. I know people to some of these companies, I thought to myself. As we had completed our purchase and were walking up the steps to the sidewalk, something shifted in my mind. I turned to Lori and said, why don't I just try to do something like this myself? She smiled and said jokingly, Yeah, sure. Let me call a couple of people and see what happens, I said. What started as a throwaway comment became something more serious with each step we took towards the street. So that that was the the first page and a half of of the chapter and and again, my goal here was to ⁓ my goal with with the book was to ⁓ really, you talk about how it all started and and what are some of the conversations. So there's a lot of those conversations ⁓ in there as well in in a lot of different situations. Again, like I said before, ⁓ you can actually get a copy of ⁓ the chapter, the PDF of the first chapter ⁓ by going to Risthredime ⁓ dot com and downloading it ⁓ or actually it will come directly via email there. So just ⁓ i in in closing as i'm getting close to closing this up j I just want to to say that ⁓ I'm I'm excited about the book. ⁓ it's been three years in in the making and ⁓ I hope that you people will find value in in the experience of Cafe Chocolat and if you wanted to build a shop This is definitely one way to do it. Or I hope this motivates you to go ahead and do it. But if you had to close it just like me, I hope you find comfort in the fact that there's that ⁓ other people just like me who have gone through the same thing. all ⁓ I will ⁓ follow up ⁓ next time with ⁓ some more information. But again, just a reminder, the ⁓ book goes on Amazon. Он June First So I'd love to if you're going to pick it up, and I hope you do, would love to ⁓ your feedback and get your comments ⁓ how you felt about the book and how you felt about the story as well. All right, until then, have a good rest of the day.