Have You Ever Thought About Starting a Business with Your Best Friend?

It all started in October 2016, when we met while working at the downtown Starbucks on Wall Street in Bend, Oregon.

Our friendship quickly grew, and almost 10 years later, it launched a business that would forever change our lives, our communication methods, and have us navigating challenges two regular friends should never have to deal with.

Our love for coffee, our genuine connection with others, and our work ethic as a team was very apparent from the beginning, and it set the foundation for an amazing friendship. As the years passed, we grew together through life and navigated all the ups and downs that come with it. We found ourselves spending a lot of time in local coffee shops, catching up on life, talking through whatever was going on, and, of course, trying new coffee. They became our place. Looking back, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that somewhere along the way we started dreaming about creating a place like that ourselves. A place where our community could gather, slow down for a bit, and hopefully leave feeling just a little better than when they walked in.

Fast forward nine years into our friendship, we took a life changing trip to Ireland. On a random stop, we came across a little café that had the best espresso we had quite literally ever tasted.

In that moment, it all started to come together. What had always been a “what if” or a “someday” suddenly felt possible. For the first time, we started believing we could create an espresso that tasted that good and actually build the coffee shop we’d been dreaming about.

There was just one small problem. We had absolutely no idea how we were going to get there.

The dream was always a coffee shop, but as two broke girlies on a budget, we had to figure out the most financially realistic way to start building it. Our goal was to get our coffee into people’s hands as soon as we could, so they could taste what we had experienced and realize that coffee could be incredible without anything added to it. We wanted our coffee to stand on its own.

Then reality set in.

Starting a business is incredibly time consuming and required far more financial and time commitment than we originally thought. Once we realized how expensive opening a brick and mortar would be, we knew we needed another way to start Lone Cow Coffee as quickly as possible, while giving ourselves time to grow the brand over the coming years.

We sat down more times than we can count and brainstormed how to make that happen. Eventually, the mobile coffee cart was born.

The cart would allow us to go virtually anywhere and start making connections with people in our community. It gave us a chance to showcase our coffee, our personalities, and what Lone Cow Coffee was all about. More than anything, it was our chance to make our dream a reality, one step at a time.

Of course, we couldn’t do it ourselves, so we roped in just about every family member and friend who was willing to lend a hand. We poured evenings, weekends, and every bit of free time into building this little cart while balancing full time jobs.

*Trust us, the coffee cart process was an experience of it’s own. We’ll save those stories for another day, but let’s just say there’s plenty of hilarious content coming your way.*

Looking back, it’s kind of wild to think how much has happened in just one year. Lone Cow Coffee has become so much more than just a coffee cart.

Now that we’ve had a year to reflect, we’ve realized we have way too many stories, lessons learned, and laughable (dare we say embarrassing) moments to keep to ourselves.

So that’s what this blog is for.

We hope these stories inspire you, make you laugh, and maybe remind you that building something meaningful is rarely glamorous. It’s messy, exhausting, rewarding, hilarious, and completely worth it.

This journey is just getting started, and we’re excited to share all of the unfiltered moments that have shaped Lone Cow Coffee along the way.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,