Pause Coffee House

My name is Paul Magda. I am one of the co-founders of POS Coffee House. Originally started here out of Fair Oaks, California. My parents came here from a communist country. Had no formal education. They didn't even understand how to speak the language. They came here, fought very hard, and raised myself and then three other brothers. Probably about ten years old. I started working, wrenching on cars with my dad. He was a mechanic. He'd find a car that was a little beat up. We'd wrench on it, fix it, and sell it. And we did that for quite a few years. I was always finding myself hustling something on the side, buying something, flipping it, selling it. I can't say coffee was Business absolutely is. My fix is in the building of the organization, creating the opportunities for people. One day I was talking to one of my best friends and were at the gym actually and he asked me if I'd be interested in possibly opening up a coffee shop with him. I really can't pinpoint a specific reason as to why. Because it seems simple. It seems But don't let that fool you because it's not. It will require a whole lot of work. Maybe ten years. Are you willing to put in the work for ten years? And so that naturally kind of prompted me to expand my network. Go meet new people. Go ask questions. Put yourself out there. Be vulnerable. After a couple years of doing that and simultaneously starting to get some traction on our coffee shop, my naive self thought that was it. Get the shop, build it, get to the point where you can have the opening day. Looking back almost three years after we first opened our cafe, it was actually the easiest part. Even though I worked 20 plus hours a day, most days that first 18 months of having this space to build it out, fund it, buy all the equipment, put in the labor to build everything yourself, right? Because you're a startup. You have no experience. You don't know what you're doing. All these things kind of hit you at once and it's Or do you push forward? Even though you don't really know what you're doing. I kind of understood and found that you don't necessarily need to have answer to every question that's thrown at you. But how can you deal with these daily problems that come up? Another question that I asked myself is How do they do that? One common thing I found was there was a vision. There's common ground. There'something that everybody sees. You have to be a part of the team and have to work within the organization to kind of see. Investing in the right people, picking the right people one by one, takes a ton of effort, a ton of time. When people walk through those doors, we want them to pause the madness of their life and come in here and have an experience that separates them from the anxiety, the madness, We just happen to do that through a medi People see that, they feel it, they understand it, and I think that might give us an edge. I would define success as being 1% better every single day. So if I'm 1% better today than I was yesterday, I find that a successful day. When you have the absolute best product, best customer service, the best that you can put out there, people come to you. I don't need to go get them. The idea is to push as hard as you can and always be at ground zero. Develop the business as best you can as much as you can. And in five years, I believe we'll still be at that point. Now, at a much bigger level, absolutely. How many cafes I don't know. Revenue, I don't know. But the mindset will always be the same.