Business Q&A: Dave Levesque, Owner, Brewed Awakenings

Travel around Johnston even a little bit, and you're sure to learn fairly quickly about Brewed Awakenings, the family-owned coffee shops that now have four locations in the state, including the .

Dave Levesque, owner of Brewed, spoke during a recent interview about his start in the business, the successes — and failures — that he and his family have weathered over the last 15 years, and where he sees the company going in the future.

Talk about how you got started in the coffee business.

I was in the wholesale coffee business for about eight years prior to this. In this location, we had opened up a gift basket store as a side business that my mother and some other people were running, and we had coffee as a convenience for the people working here.

One day, my mother said 'Let's serve coffee to the people out in the plaza to drum up some more business,' and we did that, and soon we had people coming in form the stores that were around here buying coffee and snacks — then, we got talking about opening up a retail coffee shop and a space came available adjacent to the basket shop, and we took it over.

In that original space, we set up a couple of couches, a few tables, and a little counter, and started selling coffee and pastries.

How did you decide on where to open new shops? Yours was the first business in South County Commons, right?

I was the first retail coffee shop, or any business, on Main Street. There were two other businesses in there, Applebee's and the movie theater, opening up [and] they were separate buildings — but, yes, we were the first retail space to open up.

What inspired me to do it? I had been in this location () for two or three years, and then we decided to expand and build one down in Providence.

Providence was there for five years [and] when we were about two years into it, we had a lot of losses. We weren't making any money there.

When I did the Providence location, I lacked experience on opening multiple stores and education on opening multiple locations, and what we would need to do to make that location successful. What I did was take what we had here in Johnston and tried to open it up in the city of Providence, and that didn't work.

We couldn't produce what we needed to produce in terms of volume to be viable, that was the number-one problem.

How difficult was it to decide that you had to shut down the Providence store?

It's always difficult to close a store. After two years, into our third year, we were already losing a ton of money and this store, which was a profitable store, was supporting that store.

We had signed a 10-year lease with a 10-year renewal, so we were locked in to a long-term lease.

After running through those three years, I knew we'd have to do something else, because we could no longer have one store failing, one store surviving, and having them both cancel each other out.

The opportunity for the new development in South County was proposed to us [in 2003], and it was a matter of, 'We don't have a choice.' It wasn't that I wanted to do a third location, at that point, we just literally didn't have a choice, because looking down the road, we wouldn't have been able to survive another couple of years if we didn't have something else.

By opening up South County, we were able to stop the bleeding — it wasn't an exceeding amount of planning going into it, it was more like a necessity. We needed to take the risk and put everything on the line, or else three years after that we might not be in business.

Are you past that kind of decision-making, based on just surviving?

Oh, yeah, we're way past that. By the time we had South County open, we had two years left to get out of that Providence lease, it took me another two years to pay down that debt — we never skipped out on a bill, and we left on great terms with all our bank notes [taken] off.

We successfully paid off that debt, which allowed us to keep in good relationships with our vendors and our bankers, and we came out of that survival mode — and then, several years later, the opportunity came up to open the store up the street, and we said 'Hey, let's get into growth mode.'

How does the new Cranston location differ from the other stores, particularly in the fact that it was an existing business before you moved into it?

Cranston came along as an opportunity to buy the location. I liked that location for two things — one, the exact location and the traffic that goes by, and the second thing that made it valuable to me is the sign structure that was there from the old gas station.

I looked at this property and believed we could transform it. We could make it look beautiful, we wouldn't compete directly with anyone across the street or around the corner, we were strategically located right off the highways, and the signage that was there would give Brewed Awakenings some branding, some identity, to put us in a whole new league.

What's it feel like to be at this point after 15 years working at it?

Sometimes I might sit back and just smile when I think about how we started, but I don't feel any different from anybody else. When I walk in here, I don't think of it as my store, I think of it as the customers own it. I'm grateful, I'm thankful, I go around every day and shake every customer's hand that I possibly see, I value our customers, and I listen to them.

I think it's great — but let me tell you, it's a lot of work. People think it's easy, you've got a coffee shop, it's great [but] a lot of times, it's hard. We had cashflow problems when we had Providence and sometimes you think you're not going to make it, but you just don't give up and just keep going.

I think at some point, I'll step back and reflect.

I'm proud of what we have, I don't take any of it for granted, we've had great bankers, great accountants, the best employees and the best customers — loyal customers, who have been with us from day one. I'm just really grateful.