We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nick Tyler and Amanda Piteo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Nick and Amanda, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
We found our purpose in our coffee shop when we were both unhappy with our current career/jobs. We were both managing restaurants, but had a passion for coffee. You could even say that we were addicted to coffee. We decided to take our passion for coffee and turn it into a business in our childhood hometown. In 2020, during the Covid-19 Pandemic, we started our business by traveling to different festivals. We wanted to make sure that the community would support what we were doing. By 2021, we had gotten enough support to have a brick-and-mortar store in Warrior Alabama. Currently we are about to celebrate our 4th year as a business and our 3rd year in our building.
Our purpose is to have a place where people can meet, drink coffee, chat together and become family. We are reminded of how powerful this can be when people recognize each other from the coffee shop. We have regulars who are consistently coming in at the same time, where people ask about each other if they haven’t seen other regulars. We have had people comment that we are like “Cheers but with coffee”. We never want to lose this passion and love how our business has brought people together.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
What makes us different than most coffee shops is: 1) We are siblings owning a business and 2) we operate it like a bar. The age gap between us is seven and a half years. We have different interest and different areas of expertise. Nick handles business paper work and the accounting communication, while Amanda handles the decor, merch and apparel. We allow each other to handle what we are best at. This is key because we allow each other freedom to create and do what we are good at. We still communicate with each other about what is being worked on. We know that most siblings can’t work together, but we are close sibling’s and have worked other jobs together. The best person to work with is the one who knows you the best. We are able to work around each other and communicate with out saying a word.
We have over 24 years of restaurant experience with mostly related to bartending. We have a bar-top at our coffee shop and we have people come up, sit and talk to us and to other people. We love getting to know our community and even about people who are passing through. We hold conversations with everyone while we are making their coffee or drinks. Some people just want to be heard and we have the best opportunity to to brighten up people’s day.
Within 2024, we are hosting a Podcast, Friday Night Events, Coffee-fest and many other things. Follow us on Social Media or our website to see the exciting things ahead.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three skills are customer service, local people, listening to our customers.
The three most impactful areas are customer service, being involved in our community and listening.
Customer Service is more important now more than ever. Depending on how you treat people and interact with them will make the different in if they return or if they recommend you to other people. There are millions of coffee shops and hundreds in the Birmingham area, so customer service is the factor that set different one’s apart. We believe that this is important for us, because we are a small business and need everyone’s support. If people do not feel free and comfortable in a place, then they are most likely not going to return to that place. Making people feel welcomed is important
Being involved in the community. People seeing you interacting in the community helps people see not only you, but your business, People are willing to help and support local when they see you are involved in other people. The best is being involved in youth events or sporting events. People love when they see business owners helping the youth. It takes a village to raise children and seeing local business owners being apart of the village will encourage people to be more willing to shop in the business.
Listening. We enjoy getting feedback from our regulars and community. We do this in different ways online polls and conversations with people. The best way to get honest feedback without people feeling like they are going to be judged is online polls. We don’t want people to feel called out, so we do the polls online without collecting names. That way people feel more obligated to give feedback without feeling like they are hurting someone’s feelings. When we have new coffee items coming up we will test them on our regulars to see what we need to fix or change about the drinks. People love to be apart of the success stories. Allow your regulars to help build your success.
Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
Our biggest area of growth and improvement in the past 12 months have been our Drive-Thru, Personal Delivery Service and our Mobile Ordering.
People need quick and easy. Parents are the one’s who especially need quick and easy. It can be a chore to get all of the kids out of the car, order and then get the kids back in the car. These services help parents can get their coffee or drink fix without getting the kids out. The personal delivery is not through one of the apps, but we hire someone to do the delivery for us. We do this so that we can guarantee how the products are being delivered. When using one of the apps, you are not sure how the product is being delivered or how they will look. Our community knows our driver and even contacts them with any address changes. This is another level of customer service that we love to have. Mobile ordering makes it easy for people to order when they are headed to work and need to get their order working. We have developed our app to make sure that it is easy and user friendly to order. We still take feedback on the app and how we can help people order.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wrcoffeeco.com/
- Instagram: @warriorrivercoffeeco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WarriorRiverCoffeeCo/
Image Credits
Kari Marsh Photography
