We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carley Kammerer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Carley, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
I’m honestly not sure. I think I was born with a fair amount to begin with. When I was younger, my family visited a pumpkin patch. My parents told us we could each pick one to take home. I found one in the middle of the patch that was just giant. It was bigger than me. My dad said I could bring it home if I could get it out of the patch to the car. Of course, he didn’t think I could or would do it! I spent the entire day getting it out of the patch. I had to sit against it and use my feet to push my body back into the pumpkin to roll it, then just kept repeating that move repeatedly. I’m not sure why I was so fixated on it, but there was something about the challenge I couldn’t pass up, and once I’d set my sights on the goal, I was compelled to reach it. I’ve just always been like that.
However, life circumstances have also made me this way. My mom was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in middle school and passed away when I was 19. When I was 29, my husband left the marriage and disappeared. I spent several months trying to figure out what was going on before receiving divorce papers out of the blue. These experiences created a lot of resiliency within me. I had no choice but to keep going.
I wouldn’t wish my life situations on anyone, but they have given me the grit to succeed in the entrepreneurial world.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m an entrepreneur at heart. When I was 25, I co-founded Wildflyer Coffee, a nonprofit coffee company that creates employment for youth experiencing homelessness and housing instability. I began my career as a Case Manager, Shelter Advocate, and Street Outreach Worker with youth experiencing homelessness. While I worked in these roles, I witnessed my clients struggling with employment stability, which prohibited them from earning a consistent enough income to find stable housing and exit homelessness, trapping them in cycles of poverty and instability. I saw a gap in services designed to address this specific barrier and began envisioning a new solution: a business would exist solely to help youth cultivate the personal and professional skills needed to be successful.
The coffee piece came from my own love of the drink, my history as a barista, my mom, and the community I know it can create. I am a coffee fanatic. I love it, drink too much of it, and am interested in all aspects of the craft. I also had a background as a barista and knew that the interpersonal skills learned from the job would benefit youth no matter what industry they entered. My parents had also started a coffee shop when I was younger, so I grew up around it. At my mom’s funeral, so many people’s stories centered around interactions they’d had at the coffee shop that left them feeling loved, seen and welcomed. It was then that I really started to see the community that coffee and coffee shops can create. I knew coffee would be the perfect platform for a youth training program.
Wildflyer has grown from a small coffee cart working pop-ups and farmers markets to two brick-and-mortar coffee shops, a wholesale service, and an e-commerce platform. It’s really something to see your humble start-up turn into something extraordinary. Wildflyer takes up most of my focus, but I’m also branching into other opportunities. I’ve started a small consulting business to help others in their own start-up endeavors. I love working with passionate dreamers who want to change the world.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
It’s a little cliche, but grit or perseverance is essential for an entrepreneurial journey. I’ve been working on Wildflyer since 2015, and it’s not until this year (2023) that it’s felt like things are actually coming together and working well. In between, there have been many disappointments, setbacks, “no’s,” closed doors, reroutes, and moments where I felt like it was all over. It takes a lot to keep going despite the odds. Sometimes, you just have to keep waking up and trying something else until you find what sticks, and that can take a lot out of a person. My only advice here is to keep at it and keep pushing until something works out for you.
The vision was vital, too. I didn’t have half the skills needed to run Wildflyer. Much of what I know has been self-taught through our best friend Google or by taking classes, reading books, listening to podcasts, and meeting with experts to learn from their experiences. What I did have was a clear vision and passion to back it up, which attracted people with the right skill sets to join our team and be a part of building Wildflyer into what it is today. You can learn skills and compensate for your weaknesses, but you must have passion and a vision first. Be sure to hold onto your dream. You can be flexible on how you work it out, but don’t let others persuade you out of the ultimate goal. It’s yours and yours alone.
This sounds weird as a skill needed, but it is. I have learned the hard way that learning how to grieve and let go is the only way to run a business successfully. There were so many people, ideas, partnerships, and projects along the way that ended up not working out like I thought they were. I wasted so much time and energy fighting to keep them long past when I should have just let go. To succeed in this world, you must learn how to recognize when that relationship or project is no longer working, acknowledge the grief that ending it could bring, and then let go. Once you do this, you free yourself up for so much more, but until you can grieve well, you’ll be stuck with people and projects that no longer serve you and probably take you further away from your vision than you know.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
My parents instilled in me the value of love. For me, this comes from my Christian faith, but it’s not specific to a religious belief. I don’t think you can lead, or at least now well or for long, without love. First and foremost, I try always to see my team and the youth we serve as people, not as direct reports, not as employees, not as clients, but as human beings worthy of dignity and love above all. This belief helps me treat people well by default, which is the basis for building a thriving company or fulfilling our mission. People aren’t just cogs in a machine here to serve our purposes, and I think that gets lost in the day-to-day. Leading with love is the only way to lead.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wildflyercoffee.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wildflyercoffee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wildflyercoffee/
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/carley-kammerer-10998399
Image Credits
Anne Woster
