“But what intrigued me about coffee in general was that there were so many facets of coffee. This green bean came from some place far away that I never heard of or didn’t even know that coffee was grown there. It’s brought over here on some old rickety schooner ship. That’s the fantasy in my head versus some big commercial container ship.”

This is Taylor Sparks of the Raleigh-Durham MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs to bring you, hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful. Joining us today is Larry Larson, the Head Bean and Founder of Larry’s Beans, an organic and fair trade coffee bean company in Raleigh, NC. Larry is also the founding member of Cooperative Coffees, the first and only cooperative of independent roasters importing 100% fair trade coffee directly from fair trade farming cooperatives.  Larry, Thank you for taking the time to speak with MO.com.

MO:
You were introduced to coffee roasting while you lived in Seattle, home of the well-known coffee servers, Starbucks.  What about coffee roasting did you find intriguing?

Larry:
I didn’t do any coffee roasting in Seattle.  I didn’t start doing that until I was here in Raleigh, NC.  But what intrigued me about coffee in general was that there were so many facets of coffee.  This green bean came from some place far away that I never heard of or didn’t even know that coffee was grown there.  It’s brought over here on some old rickety schooner ship.  That’s the fantasy in my head versus some big commercial container ship. It shows up on some old wood creaky dock in Seattle, which is not true it landed in SF or NYC and made its way into some neat little coffee house in Seattle.  This is Mecca.  I love this feel.  It’s like the fantasy that I’m prone for has just ran amok.  That’s one of my starting points.

Fast forward, I move to North Carolina to go to graduate school and I start hanging out in one of the first coffee houses in that opened up in Raleigh in 1991.  I got a job there and they roasted their own coffee and I was the first employee there that was allowed to roast coffee.  That’s when I really developed deep into coffee at that time.  I was made aware of the huge varieties of venues that I could explore and my natural insatiable appetite of curiosity.  Then I went back to Seattle to all of those places I used to go with a completely different eye.  Asking, what makes this work or why are people coming here?  So no longer was I going into a house, thinking I just like being here.  I was trying to completely comprehend why people come into this store versus that store.

MO:
What made you want to roast coffee for a living, as opposed to serving it?

Larry:
I’m going to graduate school and in finance class I have an awareness that I’m going to get a job with this degree doing something that I didn’t intend to do. Why would I keep getting this and after a couple of days the only solution was to drop out.  I had to stop pursuing my graduate degree and I’ll be happier. 

The next question was, well what are you going to do?  I didn’t know because I wasn’t qualified to do anything because I had only been in school forever.  And after looking at the help wanted ads I realized I’m definitely not qualified to do anything.  I was still working at the coffee shop and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.  I really liked the coffee industry, what I had seen about it, especially the ability of this industry to keep me interested.  So I decided that I needed to start my own coffee company.  I decided that I was going to do a bunch of coffee houses and a roasting operation.  I’m just going to do it all.  This has always been my historic challenge, thinking way too big. You gotta rein it in and figure out what’s actually doable.

 

MO:
How do you start a coffee roasting business?  What are the initial steps?

Larry:
It’s actually pretty easy.  You need to buy a coffee roaster, you need to get your inventory and you need to roast it up.  When I first started you didn’t need to have any concept of roasting.  You just needed to go to the manufacturer of the equipment, you would tell them that you needed to roast the coffee and they would give you their thoughts on roasting and that was it, done, see ya later, good luck. 

That’s what so many people did back in the early 1990s. That’s why there was a lot of lousy coffee out there.  However, roasting coffee and having no idea how to roast it was still better than what was in the can, the Folgers, the institutional stuff.  Fast forward 10 years to 2000-2002 now a lot of coffee have a better idea of how to roast and you get more consistently decently roasted coffee.  So it is really simple.  You need about $30,000 and to find somebody to buy it.

MO:
In the beginning, what roles did you take on to get the business up and running?

Larry:
Everyone one of them and I wouldn’t do it that way again because it’s too much work.  In the beginning I was working 120 hours a week.  It was pretty intense. 

When I started I had a coffee house and the roasting operation.  With the coffee house I had a business partner, which was actually my mom.  My mom moved to North Carolina to help me get going and ended up staying for years.  She ran the coffee shop.  One of the roles I had was to manage the coffee shop, to be the barista, to be the cashier.  Another role I had was to go back to the war4ehouse and roast coffee for us and some other wholesale accounts that we had.  Another role was to be the delivery guy.  I’d roast the coffee, take it to the clients, go back to the coffee shop and go to work.  I was the accountant…I was everything, way too many roles.

MO:
Were there any times along the way that you thought of quitting?

Larry:
Yes there was a couple.  Doing the coffee shop and the roasting was overwhelming.  I decided to sell the coffee shop.  So my mom said, ‘I’ll buy it. You take the roasting; I’ll take the coffee shop.’  So I do that for a few of years and then I had this awareness that I can sell a lot of coffee. I had no doubt that I could be successful in selling beans, but it’s just another bean.  I didn’t have any connection to it at that point.  I initially started the coffee roasting about being a complete geek.  I was way into fascinating flavors.  I was messing around with roasting styles to deliver unique flavors.  That was an endless amount of fun for me.  Then I’d take it back to the coffee shop and see how it worked out and mess around some more.  But after a while you realize it’s just making the sauce in a different way and that just didn’t excite me anymore.  Around that time a colleague calls me up and says that he has this idea of starting an import company with people like us where we buy direct from growers.  It was one of the early moments in fair trade.  That’s when I remembered that that was one of the things that I wanted to do.  I had totally forgotten.  When I started in the whole coffee arena, I wanted to be big enough where I could travel and buy direct from the source and develop relationships with growers and I wasn’t there yet. Then this idea that collectively a bunch of small guys like me could band together and all of a sudden our volume makes sense.  We could transport a container from Guatemala or Mexico or Sumatra from the country to the United States and divvy it up amongst ourselves.  But more than just overcoming economies of scale, it was to develop the relationships with the growers.  I thought that this was great and that put the fire back into me.  So we became founding members of Cooperative Coffees.  I’m one of the original seven who came together, put money up to create this organization.  That kept me in the game.

MO:
Was there one thing that all of the other coffee roasting companies were doing that you decided to do differently?

Larry:
Yes, during that time there were very few coffee roasters out there in the 1990s. All of them out there were doing a very lousy job, in my opinion.  They didn’t know how to roast coffee.  They were just roasting beans.  They were following the manufacturers’ manual on how to roast a batch of coffee beans.  They weren’t doing anything to roast good coffee beans.  It was just better you’re your options of Folgers.  I feel like what I did right from the very beginning was that I started experimenting in 1993 and opened in 1994. It was having the audacity to not follow the manufactures recipe and have the confidence to experiment.  So what I did differently was endless experimenting on how to roast.  I’ll put it in terms of cooking.  It’s like endless experimenting in making your putenesca sauce.   How you apply the heat to the tomatoes. How you cut the tomatoes.  How you cool it off or warm it up.  These things make a difference in the way putenesa tastes.  The same thing is true in coffee.  The way you apply the heat it changes the chemical process that goes on.  Now this type of information is easy to come by today.  Back in 1990 it was impossible.  There were no public forums, the internet didn’t exist.  There was nobody that roasted coffee that would share their information as to how they did it.  The only people who had information worth sharing and they worked for the big guys and those guys weren’t talking.  You couldn’t even get them to call you back.  I take my hat off to the Maxwell houses of the world and the guys roasting coffee there because it takes an incredible amount of work to make the coffee taste the same year in and year out.  It’s amazing that they put this stuff on the shelf and they make it taste this bad year in and year out.

MO:
How long was it before you were profitable?

Larry:
Well, let’s define profit.  I didn’t pay myself for a year and a half, but we were profitable.  But if I paid myself, we’d be unprofitable.  I think it was many years before we legitimately made a profit. I’d say by the late 1990s I was profitable.

MO:
How many employees did you have when you had your first profitable year?

Larry:
There were just four of us in 1997.  By that time I had gotten out of the coffee house business.

MO:
How many types of coffee did you start with and how many do you have now?

Larry:
We started with single origin coffees and a couple of blends, about 6 coffees.  Today I have about 13 single origins and about the same amount of blends.  We are pushing about 30 varieties.

MO:
Larry’s Beans is very involved in the community which shows your great love of people.  Where did you learn your leadership skills?

Larry:
This whole leadership skill thing has been heavy on my mind for a few years.  I feel like I still have a long way to go to be a business person but I finally have become somewhat of a business person.   I’m a real slow study.  I started in 1994 and not until 2009 that I finally really started to develop some skills. It’s a tough question for me to answer. I’m still learning how to lead but I’m starting to get better at it.  When I hire people, especially for the higher level positions, I want a better idea of how they lead and how can they get us to where we are going. My approach to business, I think in the beginning, was very coffee house orientated. So it was about the social environment.  It was a congregation point to have a fun time with one another.  It wasn’t so much about surviving in a brutal economy or relentless competition.  Every dude with a 401k with an exit plan from Nortel wants to start a coffee roasting company.  All of a sudden you have so many competitors roasting micro coffees, it is tough.  Where I’m at now is that I’m thinking constantly about the business.  What does it need from me and all of the people that work here to keep going where it needs to go.  Anybody who’s been in business school may be thinking, “Duh, you are just figuring this out Larry?” No, I knew that but somehow I just wasn’t doing that. Now I am doing it.  There isn’t a moment in the day where I don’t process the information coming through my brain with that filter. Whereas five years ago that filter wasn’t there, it was more about, how do we have fun or just hang out with each other.  But I don’t want to lose the fun.  I can’t do both and I tend to be reclusive.  So I go to my little cave and process the way I need to process and then occasionally go out and have all the fun.

The Final Five!  Five semi-random questions.

MO:
Proudest personal achievement?

Larry:
As a function of being one of the founding members of cooperative coffees and being the chairman of the board for a couple of years, I had the opportunity to speak to 800 people at a fair trade conference.  I didn’t really get to say much but my job was to reach the letter President Jimmy Carter wrote on their behalf.  He is somebody that I’ve had the great fortune to meet a couple of times and a number of us met at his library in Atlanta, GA about furthering the fair trade movement.  President Carter felt akin to this concept so I got to read his letter.

MO:
Title of last book read?

Larry:
We wrote a little book here at Larry’s Bean to help people brew coffee and that’s actually the last book I read.  It’s called Coffee’s Like Kissing.  It attunes the different varieties of brewing contraptions out there with the different varieties of kissing.   It’s a wonderful little guide.  Every time I read it I think that this is a lovely little book we wrote.

 

MO:
Three non-family members you admire?

Larry:
Ghandi, this calming spirit holding true to what’s right.  I have a good friend here in the triangle by the name of Jerry Stifelman.  I work with him he’s our brand engineer and he’s become one of my closest friends.  I’m constantly inspired by how he thinks about the world.  Lastly it’s more of a fantasy person; it’s the adventures of Baron Munchhausen.  You can take your wagon to the moon and each cheese and do expeditions.  Let the fantasy that you had in your head, at least it was in my head, when you were 4 or 5 be a part of your adult life too.

MO:
Dream vacation destination?

Larry:
One of the places I often go in the summer is Mount Desert Mountain in Bal Harbor Maine and I absolutely love it.  They are tiny mountains that butt up again the ocean.  In the fall you can be on top of these mountains and in one direction you are overlooking the Atlantic.  In another direction you are looking inland and you are seeing trees and valleys and really remote and pristine.  Add to that a nice big circus tent with a wooden dance floor and a waltz playing…whew…you could just kill me!

MO:
If you weren’t in the organic bean roasting business, what career would you have?

Larry:
I would be a motivational speaker.  Live wide open, figure out what you want and go do it. I’d talk to high school kids.  I think that’s what I would like to do.  They are highly informative but quite often corrupted by their parents thinking telling them that they gotta be this or they gotta be that.  They don’t get to be who they are.  It’s a unique opportunity to help them think about what they want.  When somebody like me comes along, I try to be mindful and work within the realm of school and what their parents are saying.  But that they can decide to do anything.  They may go on their parents path or some other path for a while.  But if they can remember this one little talk that lasted about 20 minutes where I tell them that it is okay to fail, they just have to decide what they want and pick yourself up and do it again and again and again.  It doesn’t just show up, it doesn’t come naturally for most people; you just have to work hard.