ON SHOWING UP

March 23, 2020

So here’s a story, about a small business who was losing money while confronting the biggest global pandemic in years, but then banded together for a radical idea to open a new business in 48 hours and flip this narrative on its head. Yes, this is a true story. Here’s how it goes:

It was 6:45am on Saturday, still dark outside, when the first wave of amazement came over me. We were 15 minutes out from opening our “Drive To” Summit location in Davidson, which had become a thing no more than 40 hours earlier, and traffic was at a standstill. From the north and from the south, cars on Main Street were lining up about as far as eyes could see, headlights shining toward our 170-square-foot outpost that hadn’t seen a visitor since Wells Fargo closed in 2018.

I ran up North toward downtown Davidson counting the cars one way, and then sprinted back down the hill the other. Seventy cars, we figured, were lined up before we ever served our first cup of coffee. My phone was blowing up with texts and Slacks, people wondering if I could hold them a spot in line and others curious if anyone had showed up.

There were now six of us dancing around one another in a tight space — maintaining social distancing while trying to figure out how in the world do you operate a drive thru, especially one that already has hundreds of people in line. In that moment, when the first wave of amazement came over me, I took a deep breath as if to inhale the goodness of the community surrounding me.

It was go time, off to the races, and we weren’t through our first 30 cars when I saw that ominous reflection of red and blue lights shining off a car’s windshield. “Oh shit,” I said out loud (sorry, mom, but it’s true). I had figured that stopping traffic on Main Street, aka state road 115, wasn’t going to be great, but 7:07 was a little earlier than I had anticipated getting in trouble. But instead of condemning us, or writing a ticket (though I hadn’t a clue what I was doing wrong), the police officer urged us to “find a solution” and asked if he could help.

And this moment is a microcosm of everything that’s happened to Summit over the last week. Seven days ago we were confronting the reality facing every small business in America — how can you keep doors open, and how can you pay employees? Now we were opening a new business. Last week I wrote in this very journal my intention to “Do the Next Right Thing.” I didn’t know what that was at the time, but urging myself and my coworkers to find a solution to the problem staring us down led to a lot of phone calls and emails and, suddenly, a Drive To Summit.

So these three Davidson police officers showed up on Saturday, and so did everyone else. That’s the lesson here — that even when you have a good idea, and get some good breaks, it requires so much community and support for it to come to life and be something amazing. We owe a remarkable amount of gratitude to everyone who showed up for Summit.

We owe a thank you to the Town of Davidson, in particular Kim Fleming, Jason Burdette and Trey Akers, for giving the green light to this audacious idea. Davidson has never had a drive thru food business — it’s against the town bylaws — but we worked to set this up as an auxiliary service location so we could keep jobs and money in the Davidson economy.

We owe a thank you to Robert Maynard, the owner of the Famous Toastery business and developer who owns this vacant Wells Fargo drive thru. He’s allowing Summit to use the space, and stay in business, with not much more than a “thank you” owed to him — that’s a really selfless act, and I’m forever grateful for it.

A thank you to Ken and Lisa and Franklin at PostNet for turning our menus around in about 45 minutes, and to David Boraks at WFAE for broadcasting our story.

A thank you to Joe and Katy Kindred, and their do-whatever-we-can attitude, who spent Friday night baking milk bread donuts on a scale they’ve never attempted. They put their craft and love for this town on full display by baking for us, helping to tell our story, and cheering us on. Joe and Katy, Blake and Kevin, and everyone else at Kindred, they’re good friends, and great people.

A thank you to our staff, who has had to remain SO nimble in the past seven days as we’ve adjusted our business model and hours time and time again, and then threw a new business on their plate. To Wes, who seven days ago was managing our Outpost location and then jumped all the way in to managing our Drive To. To those who raised their hands when we needed MORE staff, and more hours covered, on Sunday.

To our crew in Asheville, who had the hilarious and brilliant idea to dance all weekend and encourage customers to do the same — and as a result, people kept showing up. Dancing, drinking coffee, and enjoying our own little world.

A thank you to our families, to my family, for rolling with the punches and working double-time as parents and home-school teachers and caretakers while so many of us spent countless hours pulling this thing off. We are who we are because of you.

A thank you to Tim, who on quarantined break from his teaching duties in Connecticut was in gloves on Saturday, pouring coffee with us in the trenches like he’d never left.

And the biggest thank you to our community. We had this wild idea, and got a few people on board with this wild idea, and then put it on social media and asked for you to support it. We had hit our “break even” point by about 7:05am on Saturday, and the lines kept moving. And better yet, people kept smiling. They kept cheering, saying thanks TO US, wishing us luck and wiping tears out of their own eyes. Never before has a traffic jam on a Saturday morning made so many people cry from joy.

I was talking with Tim last night about why Summit pulled this off, and he circled back to our ethos. Our three biggest goals as Summit Coffee are to be a good employer, bring community together, and create remarkable things. It’s because we’ve chosen to run Summit in this way that allowed us to pivot in a matter of hours, redirect our objectives, and pursue them with reckless abandon. It’s that ethos that lives within our staff that makes Summit so great, so timeless, a company that will persevere through any adversity to not only stay alive, but stay thriving.

We don’t know what the next week has in store — if it’s anything close to the last one, I’m not sure I can take it. But I do know that we’re going to show up tomorrow morning, with more donuts and more smiles and more hustle, and do the next right thing. For if we do, if we ask our community to support us, to continue to show up, we will be just fine.