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I'm good for about...
20 or 25 shots of espresso
in the morning,
and then I am just absolutely
calm, cool, and collected,
but if I don't have
20 to 25 shots,
I can't operate very well.
♪
Welcome to the Roasterie
coffee roasting plant,
and this is all inspired
by a trip I made to Costa Rica.
I lived for a year
as a high school
foreign exchange student,
and my friends in high school
down there
took me coffee-picking.
That was back in 1978
when I first started
picking coffee,
and later through finals,
my first set of finals
at Iowa State,
I started drinking coffee,
and I've been drinking
an obscene amount of coffee
every day ever since.
Mm, that is delicious...
and it really is.
The advice I would give somebody
who wants to get
into the coffee business
would probably be similar
to any business.
I would just say make sure
it's your passion.
You know, it's been 20 years,
I still dream about coffee
every single night,
usually multiple times,
and you would just--
you'd be surprised
at how difficult business is.
No matter what your business is,
it's gonna be so much more
difficult than you think
it's gonna be.
Somebody said,
"Did you bet the farm?"
I said, "Yeah,"
and I said, "you know,
I bet the farm when we started,
too, but it's a lot harder
to bet the farm
when you have a farm
than when you don't,"
and so people startin' off
will often say,
"Well, I bet everything I have,"
and if you kind of dig
a little bit,
there's probably not
that much there
that they actually,
and that was the--
I bet everything I had
when I started off in 1993,
but in retrospect,
I had 17,000 dollars
and it wasn't all that much
to bet.
It's not this notion
of dollar signs that's gonna
take you through it.
You know, if you're in it
for the passion--
There's a friend of mine in town
who says, you know,
about entrepreneurs,
we're just too stupid
to know when to quit,
and I think there is
some truth to that.
All the evidence would tell you
you're an idiot not to quit,
and I guarantee you
just about anybody
who's been in business very long
has gone through that,
but if you're--
it's like being a parent.
Quitting is never an option.
So we're in what we call
"The Green Mile."
This is a small portion
of the coffee that we have.
We keep most of our coffee
in Oakland, California,
and we keep it there
in the warehouse
because the temperature's low
out there,
and the humidity level
is a lot lower,
and we just get--
we get shipments each week.
This is our cupping room,
and this is where we decide
which coffees we're gonna buy,
and there's enormous number
of tests that we do
before we purchase a coffee.
And this is where we do
all of our packaging.
♪
There's really
three key differences
or tenets, if you will,
that differentiate us
from everybody else out there
in terms of coffee roasting.
Number one,
we buy the best coffee
that we can find in the world,
we roast it the best way
known to mankind,
and then we get it
to the customer
as fast as humanly possible.
And for us, the best way
to roast coffee
is with an air roaster,
and this is--
I know it's not much to look at,
but we've come to believe
that it's actually beautiful.
And this heat gun
was our first sample roaster,
and it still works.
If you put green coffee
in there and turn this on--
there's a little dial here--
we would be able to roast coffee
using this heat gun.
This is our first roaster,
it's a twelve pounder,
and we had it installed
actually the end
of September of 1993.
We'll never get rid of it.
I save everything,
and I still have
the 40-meg laptop
that we started the company on.
♪
And every bean is perfectly
roasted and...
oh my God, that--
actually, I just had lunch,
but every time I smell that,
it actually makes me hungry.
I'm not hungry
but it makes me hungry,
it smells so good.
We have a mantra--
be easy to do business with.
Just be easy to do business
with, so...
And sometimes we'll just say,
"Just say yes."
It's so much easier,
just say yes.
At the end of the day,
that's what--
I think no matter what
is going on,
how life changes
and whatever gizmos
and electronics,
people want to do business
with people they like,
they want to do business
where it's easy,
and we just try to make it
as easy as we can.
♪
Yeah, we modified our factory
in a number of ways,
but it was--
the starting point for it
was really just
simple good housekeeping
and lean manufacturing,
and we took everything
off the floor
that we did not need
to roast and package coffee.
And you might think,
"Well, duh,"
but there were a lot of things
on the floor that we needed
once in a while,
and so what happened was,
at the same time we increased
our volume by about 50 percent,
40 percent,
we shrunk the size
of the footprint of the factory
by over half.
So then what that
allowed us to do
is we opened up
a whole big area here
and we were getting
lots of calls from people
who wanted to have parties here,
meetings here, weddings here,
so now we created an event space
we call the Bean Hangar,
and we're havin' events
two or three times a week.
The space that we're lookin' at
right now,
there's gonna be a big event
tonight with, I think,
a couple--300 people
will be here.
A local bank is
havin' a party here.
So you see this wall
across here?
This whole area,
this wall wasn't here last year,
and this was--
all this was our factory space.
So now what was backstage
is now frontstage,
and what was invisible before,
now people come in
off the street and they're
right in our living room,
and that's exactly
how I wanted it.
♪
We create custom blends
for all of our customers
who want them,
so a lot of local folks
in Kansas City
have their own blend.
Most every local chef
that we do business with
has their own blend.
We probably have
2000 active blends
at any given time.
♪
We would love people
to see that plane
and then think,
"I want coffee,
Roasterie coffee."
Well, first and foremost,
it's symbolic for us
of air roasting--
so air roasting, airplane.
It just kind of made
a lot of sense for us.
Plus, about the only design
I really, truly, absolutely love
is Art Deco,
and so the DC-3
was designed in the '30s
and it's totally Art Deco.
For us, kind of personally
what is represents
is adventure,
so we love travel,
we love adventure.
We see the DC-3s
in Colombia and Africa.
They're still up and down
Central America.
And of course we think
they're beautiful,
but they're just enduring,
they're tough, and for us,
it just--it's total adventure.
♪
I never aspired to have
a national brand,
and somehow if it were
in the cards,
I wouldn't stand in the way,
but I'd never see myself
getting on planes
and making sales calls
in other parts of the country.
We kind of put a stake
in the ground
here in Kansas City,
and that's--we proudly do that,
we proudly are not
on either coast.
It's not 'cause we can't be
but because we choose not to be.
We're doin' business
where we wanna be,
we're living where
we wanna be.
We proudly focus
on Kansas City.
♪
♪
♪
I was in college
and I was at DeVry.
I was working at Sears,
had a car dealer come in
to buy a computer from me,
and it was something about
all these problems he had.
So I ended up helpin' write
some software for him.
Matt and I met--
originally he had a company
called VinStickers,
and VinStickers,
our dealership ended up
being the first customer
for VinStickers.
And it was an on-lot service
company.
What they did is post
the vehicles online
and put stickers on the car
with the prices
to make sure everything matched
car prices online on the lot.
That kind of led
into starting VinSolutions
a couple years later
when we had some
really good business ideas
for how we'd create a product
for dealers
that a lot of dealers
could use.
How VinSolutions came along
is my partner--
Matt and I's partner,
Mike Dullea.
Mike and I started a company
called AES,
Automotive E-Solutions,
and what we did is
we helped car dealers
run their internet departments
better.
We used the model that had
worked at my dealership
and used it for other dealers.
Well, once we did that,
we had it run, it was good,
we needed a tool to prove it
to the dealer,
something--they could see it.
So we looked around,
there was nothin' out there.
At that point, we went to Matt,
'cause we knew Matt
at VinStickers, and said,
"Hey Matt, here's what we want.
We want a program that does
this and this and this,"
and Matt said, "No problem,
no problem, no problem."
He said he could do any of them.
So the company actually came
from Matt's company VinStickers,
our company
Automotive E-Solutions,
put the two together,
you got VinSolutions,
so that's how the company name
came about.
What we were doing
was we were able to give
all this relevant information
to the customers,
I mean, all the things
they really wanted,
not just, okay,
if you came in to buy an F-150
and we sent you information
on a hybrid,
you don't really care.
That's not relevant to you,
you don't care.
Well, we don't know that
as dealers unless you tell us,
so this tool helped
gather that information
to make sure we're givin'
the right information
to the customers,
we're contactin' 'em,
callin' 'em back,
sendin' 'em emails, whatever,
however they wanna be contacted.
And it's kind of fascinating
to go from, you know,
went from being in high school
to DeVry to--you know,
being this 22-year-old kid,
right, to starting
this great company
that really took off
and became very successful.
Was kind of just fortunate
to be in the right place
at the right time.
VinSolutions started out
as a simple company
in my basement.
My dad was my first employee,
my best friend was
my second employee,
and it just rapidly grew
into this huge business.
It grew quickly,
and that's a tough thing,
a really tough thing to do.
There's two ways to go
out of business,
not enough and too much,
and when you get
that fast growth like that,
it's very expensive to be able
to maintain all that growth,
but we lucked out.
We fought our way through it.
We doubled in size
every year.
In 2010, we were
on the Inc. 500.
We were the 33rd fastest-growing
software company in the country.
So it was just--
it was rapid growth.
I had a couple other
business partners.
What was really fascinating
about us is we never took
any outside capital.
The company was bootstrap
from the very beginning.
When you think about it,
we're a startup company
that does software
in the automotive sector.
In '07,
when automotive and software
were not good words,
so I mean, any banker office
that we walked into,
they were jumpin' out the window
to get away from us.
So this thing was totally funded
on our personal money,
our credit cards,
everything we could do
to keep it afloat
at the beginning.
And it started with three of us,
one employee in the office,
wondering how we're gonna cover
our 600 dollars rent,
to where we had 350 employees
and we sold.
And then in 2011,
we were lucky enough
to sell the company
to AutoTrader.com
for about 150 million dollars.
Well, you know,
our goal was--
there's a couple exit strategies
with it.
I knew I wanted to continue on
with my family business,
so it wasn't anything
that we really thought about
handing over to our kids,
so selling was one option.
Taking it public was
another option.
It happened way faster
than we thought it would.
We had not planned at all.
When we talked to AutoTrader,
it was because another company
had made an offer to buy us
and we said we didn't wanna
sell.
And the number kept gettin'
higher and we said, "Okay,"
but we didn't like the company
that was makin' an offer,
and that's when I contacted--
I had a relationship
with AutoTrader.
I contacted their CEO
and told him,
"Hey, we decided we are
kind of in play here,"
and it all started from there.
So one of the common
questions I get is,
how does it feel like
to sell your baby?
And in a lot of ways,
after doing it for seven years,
it's not really your baby
anymore.
What I always say is
it kind of feels like
your baby went off to college,
got married.
It's not really your baby
anymore,
and in a lot of ways,
I was ready to do somethin' new,
ready for a new challenge.
So it's just part
of the evolution.
You know, the second time
around of having
your own business,
it's great to draw upon
your past experiences.
I started off as just
a simple software developer,
and now I've gained
so much experience around sales
and marketing,
legal and accounting,
and all these different things,
and so it's great to be able
to apply those
to the second time around here,
and if anything,
it just gives you
a lot more confidence.
In January 2012,
I started Stackify.
Our goal is to help companies
support their applications,
so we wanna help--
we wanna tell them
when their applications
aren't working correctly
and give them all the tools
they need to evaluate
why they're not working
and solve those problems.
One of the best things
about technology startups
is you don't need
a lot of capital.
You really need a lot of time
and you just need
really smart software developers
that can create the product.
You don't have to have
hundreds of thousands
of dollars, you know,
to open a storefront
or buy inventory
or do other things
like you do other businesses.
Even the best part
about software companies
is they're extremely profitable
once they get up and running.
They can sell product
and doesn't initially have
a big cost to get sold.
It's just extremely profitable,
which make them very valuable
long-term.
Yeah, I stayed automotive
based.
Mike, Matt, and I kind of went
our own ways,
but we still stayed friends
and had an involvement,
so I left from VinSolutions,
came back and stayed
in the automotive.
Bought my family's business out.
Mike stayed with VinSolutions
for two years
to make sure everything went,
and Matt started with Stackify.
So now we're just comin'
back together
with a new endeavor.
♪
♪
Come on in here
and catch up with these guys.
They just came back
from a mentor meeting with one
of our corporate sponsors
over at Black & Veatch
Engineering.
♪
What we're all about here
at CAPS is aligning
economic needs
or economic development
with educational structure.
So high school students
get an opportunity
to fast forward
into their future
of high-demand, high-skill jobs
while employers--
large businesses, small,
startups--
are able to help mentor
us educators into a pathway
that aligns with business needs,
thus the partnership
of education and business
is so solid
and a win-win for everybody.
We take two to three days
of connecting with the kids
and discovering their strengths,
what they're built to do,
and then we align those up
with, hopefully,
the future end user.
And we're finding
that these kids
actually have more
than we ever expected they had.
You know, this untapped
potential.
I'm designing a product
for the education system
using technology.
Sometimes there's kind of
a disconnect in the classroom,
when you learn something
in a classroom,
and then you go home
and you forget how to do it,
so I'm trying to solve that.
I'm working on
a little background research
for our problem where--
our sort of problem area
is finding or assessing
kind of the needs
of foster care children
in the foster care system,
and like the pain points
and the weaknesses
of that whole process.
♪
And you'll notice
a lot of graphics on the wall.
That is really who were are
at CAPS.
It's lots of fun.
Sometimes every rule and policy
and regulation can
kind of bind you up
to not be free to think.
Sometimes we slip into that
in our traditional methods
of education,
and so we really wanna orbit
around that,
taking the great things
that we're doing in our schools
and then applying those
in a space like this.
In the connect space,
this is where you have
that informal gathering,
the large meetups,
so that people can
really interact.
Rather than one to many,
it's almost many to many
so that you can interact.
So it's not your traditional
classroom, if you see.
♪
One of the first things
that we did as a program was
go to the business environments
and say, "Tell us what we should
be teaching our students."
I think the connections
help a lot, and working
with business partners
from actual companies
and talking to them
and getting their experiences
will help you to build
your business later on.
The Accelerator
has basically taught us
a lot about building companies
and building businesses
from the aspects of like,
the connections
with the partners,
the business partners
in the real world
that we get to meet up with.
I've definitely learned a lot
about the businesses
and how to start businesses,
the whole design process
in general,
and the main thing
I hope to pull out of it
is definitely the connections
that'll help me
maybe start up a business
in the future.
And in this room right here,
you've heard a lot about
the students connecting
with the outside world
and business environment.
We love that when they get out,
make those connections,
and are influenced.
But this is also a safe place
for the mentors and business
partners that come here
to meet with students.
And so, that's basically
what you have here
is a subject matter expert
that's coachin' 'em up
through their process.
Because those mentoring
and networking connections,
that's how people
are getting jobs.
We can't have kids graduating
from college, waving a degree,
saying, "Come hire me."
Those days don't exist anymore.
We have to work really hard
to connect those young people
early on,
maintain those networks,
grow those networks,
so that by the time
they're coming into
their junior/senior year,
people are waiting for them.
♪
The learning atmosphere
at CAPS is way different
than at a normal high school.
You know, like,
at a typical high school,
it's kind of like you can tell
the differences in the groups
of types of people and things,
and at CAPS, just everybody's
kind of under one blanket.
It's not, "Oh, those are
the popular kids,"
or "Those are the engineering
kids," it's just kind of
everybody respects
everybody else
and we're all here
for the same reason.
The CAPS program
is a lot different
than a typical home high school.
It's very hands-on, interactive.
I think you learn more
and benefit more
from the CAPS program
than you would
at your regular high school.
I mean, you just
get to do things,
you get to have
your own experience
instead of just--
More freedom.
Yeah, instead of just, like,
studying in class,
you get to actually do things
that you would have to use
in the future
if you wanna go into
the medical field.
And we're seeing students
leave with a heightened sense
of confidence to face
a college-level environment
with the knowledge of what's
on the other side of college
so that they can pursue
very focused,
'cause they've discerned
what they like,
what they're good at,
what they have context in,
and they're able to do that
all here without paying a cent
of college tuition.
They leave here
with that sense of confidence,
they leave here
with a strong focus
of what their future could be.
They leave here with mentors
and connections to the industry
that they're interested in.
They leave here with a set
of professional skills
that would--
would surprise you
for 17 years old.
I think some
of our business partners
would like to have employees
that have some
of those professional skills.
So they leave here
with a toolkit
and a level of self confidence
that's very unusual
for a high school student.
Having the opportunity
to work with the real world
and real businesses,
unlike a lot of kids
in the college experience
would even have,
even with some internships,
we're getting more experience
here than they really get.
CAPS helps us with
the real-world experience
by giving us sort of
a professional etiquette
or like an understanding
of how the professional world
works,
and also getting used
to public speaking
and just on-the-spot talking
in front of audiences.
There's a dress code
basically in order to bring
a more professional feel
to the environment
and make it more of
a professionalized workplace,
and so--and it actually does
help with the attitudes
of the kids
and keeps 'em more on task.
Well, at CAPS,
we try to follow
and really align ourselves
with the future of industry
or the economic trend,
and what we're seeing nationwide
is an uptick
in entrepreneurialism.
Two out of the three jobs
are created
through small business
and small business startups.
So what we began seeing
are students
that were creating products
that were provisionally
patentable,
and we were amazed
because they had pushed
that far.
And then we saw
entrepreneurial students
that said, "Hey look,
I'm thinkin' about I need
to start an LLC.
I oughta be runnin'
my own place,
and I'm a 17-year-old."
So this trajectory
just got faster and faster,
and we know
that not all students
are gonna start
their own business
and be that entrepreneur,
but we heard from industry
that even if they aren't
in a startup,
that's the kind of behavior
they want,
that's the kind of innovation
that they need
in their companies,
so regardless if they're
launching their own startup
or they're immersed
in a highly-evolved
corporate environment
or a research firm
around Kansas City,
they want entrepreneurial
spirit,
and so that's what we saw
naturally happening
with these young people.
This one here, actually,
the Maji Straw,
that is a filter system
that actually has been
fully patented,
that is out there.
They started an LLC also
called Clear Water,
and so those two students,
one at Illinois
and one at Cal Poly,
are still partnered up
and running that company,
and so those are
wonderful success stories
of kids going to that level
and sticking with it.
It's not the same for everybody,
and it's multiple paths
that you need
to put these kids on,
but inspiring that
and that creativity
and that imagination
and lettin' them then run
with that
is really what we're about.
♪
A coproduction of KCPT
and Outpost Worldwide,
at home in Kansas City.
♪
Captioned by