Published April 2004

BREWING UP SUCCESS
Christian Kar has built Espresso Connection
into regional coffee retailer

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT Deanne Roughton, left, manager of the 47th Street Espresso Connection store on Evergreen Way in Everett, prepares a customer’s latte with employee Jaclyn Brantner during a drop-in visit from company President Christian Kar. One of Kar’s first stores, it’s still his busiest.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

If something works well, keep it around. If it doesn’t, learn from it and move on.

That has been Christian Kar’s business philosophy since he opened his first Espresso Connection Gourmet Coffee Bar in 1990. It has paid off for him.

Today he owns 14 outlets from Yelm, Tacoma, Orting and Bothell to Everett, Sultan, Monroe, Marysville, Smokey Point, Mount Vernon and Oak Harbor.

Another outlet is being prepared for construction in Bellingham and two other sites are being evaluated. By year’s end, he expects to have five more Espresso Connection stores open in Washington state.

He’s also president of Silver Cup Coffee, his own coffee-bean roasting business that started eight years ago to supply not only his own network of coffee bars but also fledgling espresso stands that open up as new competitors.

Sharing his energy, ideas, experience and products with others has helped him achieve rapid growth in his own business. Last year, Espresso Connection sales — including Silver Cup Coffee Co. — were up 28 percent in December over a year earlier and 15 percent for the year. Already running 28 percent ahead of 2003 revenues so far this year, he expects 2004 gross revenues to be in the $8 million to $10 million range for both companies combined.

Also last year, Silver Cup Coffee — with its award-winning coffee brews — was named one of Washington’s fastest-growing enterprises by a statewide business publication.

Not everything Kar has touched has turned green coffee beans into green cash. He admits he overstepped his vision when he expanded a drive-through espresso bar in Marysville — and another in Anacortes — by adding indoor, sit-down meals.

“I soon realized I’d just moved into a new market — restaurants. It was a totally different kind of market and not what my customers wanted,” he said, adding that he backed out of both of those expansions as soon as he could and returned to his best-selling venue, the drive-through espresso stand.

Now he’s growing again, using top-quality ingredients, a varied menu of drinks, fast and pleasant service and Espresso Connection-branded cups and other products. The menu at the 47th Street store on Evergreen Way, his busiest, offers 59 flavors, with 12 of them available in sugar-free versions, plus Italian soda and delicious espresso milkshakes and hand-roasted coffee in 1-pound bags.

His roasting manager at Silver Cup Coffee, Allen Downing, works with stacks of burlap bags shipped with beans from Kenya, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Brazil, Indonesia, Sumatra and the prized Kona beans from Hawaii. In 2001 and 2002 the company won the top micro-roaster award, the Best Cup honor, at McCormick & Schmick’s annual M&S Cup competition in Seattle.

But the story of Kar’s success as chief executive of two businesses isn’t measured in sales and growth alone, it’s measured by how he treats his employees, how he builds loyalty, how he innovates for new ventures and defends his solid niche in the espresso coffee business.

“The market is definitely changing. It took off so fast. After I saw the first drive-through open in this area, I immediately began the quest to get a drive-through permitted in Monroe, and by the time I opened there were four more operating. Now there are over a hundred in Snohomish County alone and probably a thousand in Western Washington. In just Marysville they number in the mid-20s now. There was a huge wave of growth in the mid-’90s,” he said.

In the past two years, he said, the “stands” have become so well run and so profitable that people with money are investing in them as serious businesses, compared to startup entrepreneurs and people looking for a side-business.

To stay competitive, he has made three major moves: concentrating on creating great training programs for his employees to enable them to offer the best customer service possible, forming his own roasting company to serve Espresso Connection and other coffee marketers and hiring top-quality people to help him run an expanding business.

“We discovered we were spending over $50,000 a year on training people who moved on and didn’t work for us anymore. We set up a training facility in Everett for the basics and another training center at our Mount Vernon store for on-the-job training. Before, we used to spend three days training people. Now we have a two-week program to give them operational and customer-relations training as well as raising their self-esteem and keeping them challenged and happy,” he said.

He also raised starting pay to $7.50 an hour, added benefits and appointed a full-time trainer to run the new program.

Employees not only stayed longer, they began to look at career possibilities, not just temporary employment. Also, they learned to boost sales by sticking to Kar’s courtesy tips: don’t talk with other employees when customers are being served, don’t close the drive-through window on a customer even if it’s raining and learn to engage them in conversation without feeling they have to unload their own personal life stories.

Starting Silver Cup Coffee and roasting his own beans enabled him to better control his coffee quality and supplies such as cups, syrups and espresso equipment, getting betters buys and eliminating several vendors. Realizing other coffee marketers had the same problems and knowing that he couldn’t put an Espresso Connection stand in every good location he found, he convinced other coffee businesses that he was more of a friend than a competitor and began signing them up for beans, supplies and even pay-by-the-hour consulting advice on starting their own stands.

“Hiring more excellent people to help us grow was a major step forward,” said Kar, who was finding that his expanding business was getting more and more challenging with the same number of hours in a day and with a family at home. Times were changing and he needed help managing success.

“Just hiring Bryan Mooney as director of operations was a tremendous step forward. He’s integral to the success we’ve had, along with a whole team of other people of exceptional caliber, including our trainer and sales team. They’re the reason we’re meeting challenges and doing so well,” Kar said.

Editor’s note: Christian Kar was presented with his award as the Snohomish County Business Journal’s Executive of the Year 2004 by the journal’s publisher, Steve Hawes, at the March 24 quarterly meeting of the Snohomish County Economic Development Council at the Everett Events Center.

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