Running a small business is no easy feat, especially in the beginning. Cool Beans Coffee Cart, a mobile pop-up business started nearly six months ago, is owned and run by Makayla Boring, a coffee lover with an entrepreneurial spirit.
She and her husband take their cafe-quality coffee all over the Greater Houston Area, from markets in Old Town Spring to Katy. Boring describes her business as “a beloved hobby that’s turned into a service for others as a mobile coffee cart business.”
It is common knowledge that the beginnings of a business tend to be the hardest, having to build something like that from the ground up. It takes time and always starts with just a dream.
When asked where Cool Beans began, Boring said, “Between discovering my love for crafting coffee, enjoying customer service, and my husband and I having a type of entrepreneur bug, it’s something that’s been a dream since seeing it done a couple of years ago in Southeast Asia . . . We made small steps here and there. With each next step, our efforts seemed to pay off for the next bigger step to a point where the dream, we hope, will last: sustainably and profitably.”
However, running a business of any kind comes with struggles. The pressure can be tremendous, and there are always financial risks being taken. Boring describes risk-taking as one of her greatest challenges: “We constantly have to ask ourselves, ‘Will we get a return for how much time and money we’ve spent?’”
As everyone tends to have personal goals, business goals are also crucial for small businesses—whether for personal fulfillment or profitability, there are always goals to be reached and something to work toward. Although they may be simple at heart, they rarely are in the grand scheme of things.
“Once we hit a point where we can hire people to do the work for us, we’d love to pass on the baton and train others to attend events, serve quality coffee and give delightful service,” Boring said. “Another big one is to keep up checkpoints as we go so that we can keep track of the true cost and be able to compare it to the payoff, not just monetarily but also personally.”
“We want this to always be something that makes us happy and blesses our family and our community. If it becomes overbearing and more of a life-sucker than a life-giver, we want to reevaluate whether we should continue or not.”
Despite the challenges, Boring continues to run her business with pride, bringing coffee, teas and hot chocolate to all kinds of events. When asked if there was any advice she would like to give to those considering starting up their own small business, she said, “Start with a business plan . . . We have gone back again and again to the business plan we drafted, which we found and adapted from a Canva template!”
To help Cool Beans grow, readers can check out their Instagram page @coolbeanscoffeecart or visit their mobile coffee cart at events and markets they attend.
