What Happens When Your Business Plan Has Other Plans?

If there is one thing we have learned during our first year of business, it is that building a business rarely happens in a straight line.

When we started Lone Cow Coffee, we had four big dreams:

1. Someday owning a storefront.

2. Having our own coffee roast and growing a wholesale business.

3. Serving events, weddings, and corporate gatherings.

4. Creating an online presence that could help us grow our business beyond Bend, Oregon.

At the time, we thought all four might grow together, side by side, each helping push us toward our ultimate goal. What took us a year to realize is that business does not always work that way.

Sometimes growth means trying something that doesn't turn out exactly as planned. Sometimes one idea succeeds while another struggles. Sometimes you have to let go of one dream to make room for another. And sometimes what feels like a setback is actually the thing that points you in the right direction.

A lot can happen in one year.

When we look back at everything we have done since starting Lone Cow, it’s honestly a little crazy.

We found a potential storefront and spent months imagining what it could become. We built an entire four-year budget trying to figure out if we could afford it. We bought a trailer, a coffee cart, an espresso machine, water pumps, equipment, syrups, and more supplies than we knew existed.

We woke up at 4:00 in the morning for events and spent entire weekends prepping, serving coffee, loading, unloading, cleaning, troubleshooting, and wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. We started reaching out to businesses about carrying our coffee and got our first wholesale, yes. Then another. And, of course, we got plenty of no's too.

We've learned about coffee, equipment, events, customers, wholesale pricing, packaging, margins, and all of the tiny things that go into running a business that you don't necessarily think about when you're dreaming one up. We have had exciting moments, disappointing moments, terrifying moments, and plenty of moments where we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

And somewhere in all of that, Lone Cow started showing us what it actually wanted to become.

The business we imagined versus the business we're building.

We started this business with a lot of ideas and not a lot of resources. We were working full-time jobs outside of Lone Cow while trying to figure out how the heck people start a business with very little money and somehow make it lucrative enough to survive.

We wanted a storefront. We wanted events. We wanted wholesale. We wanted to grow online. We wanted all of it.

What we are learning is that wanting all of it doesn't mean we need to do all of it at the same time. Over the past year, some parts of the business have shown more potential than we ever expected. Others required an incredible amount of time, energy, and money without necessarily moving us closer to where we wanted to go.

That doesn't mean those things failed. They taught us, and those lessons are helping us make better decisions about where we go next.

The part we don't always see people talk about…

We want our honesty in these blogs to be our way of telling the full story. Social media is really good at showing the polished version of starting a business: the exciting announcements, the pretty packaging, the events, the first orders, and the shelves stocked with something you created. Those things are real, and they are worth celebrating.

But so are the spreadsheets, rejected wholesale partnerships, 4:00 a.m. alarms, equipment problems, self-doubt, unexpected wins, and occasionally a trailer coming detached from your car.

Yes, that happened. More on that later.

We want to share the successes, the failures, the funny moments, the terrifying moments, and everything we have learned while building a women-owned business with limited resources, a lot of coffee, and an even bigger desire to serve our community. Our hope is that sharing our experience gives an honest look at what it is actually like to start a business from passion, determination, and perhaps a little bit of delusion.

Because one year in, we certainly don't have everything figured out, but we know a lot more than we did when we started. And maybe one of the biggest lessons has been realizing that the business we started a year ago doesn't have to be the exact same business we have a year from now.

We're allowed to learn, change our minds, figure out what works, what doesn't, and what deserves more of our attention.

So over the next few posts, we're going to share the stories behind some of the biggest parts of Lone Cow's first year: the storefront we thought we were ready for, the wholesale business we never expected to take off, and the coffee cart we poured everything into before making the very difficult decision to let it go.

There is a lot to unpack, and honestly, that's where the best stories come from.

Our first tasting session!

Turns out, finding the perfect flavor profiles takes time (and a lot of coffee). Nearly three months of tasting and tweaking later, we finally landed on our roasts.

Cascades Wedding Show

Our first public event and the first time we introduced Lone Cow to the world! We made connections that still serve us to this day and learned just how valuable getting out into our community could be. While weddings and events may not be part of our business forever, some of the relationships that started here hopefully will be.