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Contact: Liz Carroll
Phone: 413/775-1420
E-mail: carroll@gcc.mass.edu

Media contact: Liz Carroll
Marketing & Publications
413/775-1420 | carroll@gcc.mass.edu

Release date: March 28, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Business club members launch successful campus coffee bar

Profits from Café Academia fund scholarship, trip to Wall Street

"Better grades through coffee!” says the business card for Café Academia, the new coffee bar serving the East Building. The jury's still out about whether customers are getting better grades, but there's no question that the first student-run enterprise at Greenfield Community College is a big success. In its first month of operation this spring, Café Academia's sales topped $1,000, generating a profit of $939.00. Five percent of profits go to the Robert Mugar Yacubian Transfer Scholarship fund; the rest will fund special activities for Business Club members, like a spring trip to the New York Stock Exchange, and potentially provide seed money for future student-run enterprises.

It's an auspicious beginning for a new club that already boasts 40 active members who meet once a week to apply their classroom learning to real-world situations. The Business Club started one year ago, says advisor Thom Simmons, Professor of Economics and Business. "A group of students in a tourism class had gone to Martha's Vineyard during spring break,” recalls Simmons, "and came back talking about having something that wasn't related to a class that would teach them more about business, and the idea of a coffee bar came up.”

In the East Building, there was no access to fresh-brewed coffee, so the idea seemed like a no-brainer: to sell two brews of top quality coffee made from 100% organic, 100% fair trade Dean's Beans to caffeine-starved students. Implementing their plan, however, required all the planning and perseverance necessary for any business venture, according to Simmons. "They had to get permission from the facilities people, they had to get a plumbing hook-up changed, they had to work through Bell Foods, which has a contract for food and beverage service here on campus; they had to work through Student Life, which decides how student spaces are used. So there were a lot of different layers of permissions and approvals and just working through things to make it happen,” says Simmons. "The students last semester set their sights on opening this semester, and the first day of this semester the venture was open and running and hasn't skipped a beat since.”

Spearheading the effort is Business Club President Eli Higbee-Glace of Hadley, who hopes to apply the skills he's learning through the Café Academia to starting his own coffee-roasting business. "It's not just how to crunch numbers,” says Higbee-Glace, "but also how to work with other people and communicate with other people in an effective way.”

Chief among those skills is teamwork. "It's important!” says Higbee-Glace. "I quickly learned that you can't do anything by yourself; you have to have a team. And I also learned that you can't dictate to people what needs to be done. People need to have the opportunity to bring their own talents to the table, and if they are allowed to do that, then you are able to utilize your human resources in the most effective manner.”

Jessica Cahill of Shelburne Falls, who is Vice President of the Business Club, recalls the biggest challenge as "getting all the permissions that we needed. There were a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, this can't happen' for various reasons. But we tackled one reason at a time, pushed through and got permissions from the appropriate people, and finally got it together.” Cahill applies lessons learned as a server at Applebee's to scheduling work shifts; she takes three shifts a week herself. "And then on top of that, keeping the business running by bringing it up to the group saying, ‘OK, this needs to be fixed' or ‘We need to do this better,'” says Cahill, who plans to transfer to UMass's Isenberg School where she will major in international business studies.

"There's two things that jump out at me,” says Simmons. "One, is that they're taking what they learned in class and putting it to real practical use. We talk about doing marketing surveys and managing employees and scheduling deliveries and keeping track of inventory, and instead of just reading about it in a textbook, they're actually doing all those things right now!

"The other thing that is really neat to see happen is that people are doing things without being asked. I originally expected a certain amount of my time would have to be spent with this project, but I haven't had to spend much time overseeing it. Part of that is my management style: I've always believed that you hire people who are good for the job and you let them do it. But these students are doing a better-than-expected job. We're making more than expected profit, and we have more than expected enthusiasm in the club. We had to move the meeting from a smaller conference room to my classroom because students fill every seat, every week.”

Word about GCC's Café Academia is getting out. The Grinspoon Foundation, a private foundation in western Massachusetts that seeks to encourage entrepreneurship among college students, is putting together a full-day seminar this fall on entrepreneurship, inviting venture capitalists, bankers, patent lawyers and, now, Greenfield Community College, to teach students how to go into business. "We have been invited as one of the guest speakers because we have started from scratch and opened a successful business on campus, and that's just not something that's done every day,” says Simmons. "I think that is a big feather in the students' caps here.”

And probably not the last. "The coffee bar is a focus of ours, definitely,” says Higbee-Glace. "But our success with it has empowered us to want to take on other projects. I believe that's going to strengthen our positions individually when we get out into the world. We're already thinking in business terms, and I really believe that puts us ahead of the game.”