Grand Closing

The end of what 1006 Hall Street was, and what comes next.

"Ideas are easy. Execution is everything." — John Doerr

In March of 2019, we published a post on Medium called The Plan Version 0.1. It laid out a four-year roadmap for a company called Equity Cafe: the only coffee shop in the world that would give you a piece of the business every time you bought a cup of coffee. We wrote it up like a white paper. And yes, we meant every word of it.

Consider this the final version of the plan. Written by the person the plan made.

Saturday, August 1 was our last day at 1006 Hall Street.

I don't want to go full Kanye here, but I do want to be as honest with my truth as I can. So before I tell you what's closing, let me tell you what we were actually trying to build. Because for a lot of you reading this, this will be the first time you're hearing about Equity Cafe. And that may be precisely the problem I'm calling out.

The Calling

Some of my earliest and best memories are drinking coffee with my grandmother. As an adult I kept looking for spaces that felt like that, welcoming, good coffee, somewhere my friends and I were genuinely excited to be, and I struggled to find them. That itch became a much bigger question: what if the business itself could be built differently?

The vision was never just a cafe. The vision was to transform the economy, starting with one block in Grand Rapids. Build a company that put every person who touched our product, from the farmer to the barista to the customer, at the center of our decision making. Commit 10% of all revenue to charities our customers voted on. Pay every employee a living wage. Make all of it public, because our thesis was simple: more transparency means more power for the community.

I used to joke with my closest friends that the idea had nothing to do with socialism. It was capitalism 2.0. Everything needs an update eventually.

The Pivot

Every time we pitched the whole concept, people would split. The restaurant and retail folks got excited about the cafe and lost the thread on the technology. The tech folks got excited about the platform and glazed over at the coffee. So we made a call. If we wanted the cafe to launch and gain traction, we needed a name that didn't carry the whole thesis on its back.

That's when we started brainstorming, and Last Mile Cafe was born. We'd tell people it was about the last mile of a race, the hardest stretch, the highest stakes. That was true too. But underneath, the name was a compromise. In hindsight, it was absolutely the wrong call. We traded the clarity of our mission for the accessibility of our brand, and the mission faded from public view exactly when it needed to be loudest.

At the time, though, it worked. We went back to first principles, built the website, secured product, and put it up for sale. We gained traction fast. Pop-up events. The farmers market. Retail opportunities, some of which we accepted and some we turned down because we knew our capacity.

Then we found the building. 1006 Hall Street had sat unused for about thirty years. No water, no heat, no electricity, no floors. I grew up in 49507, and I was intentional about that block, because kids from my community needed to see someone like them open a business where they're from. Turning that shell into a cafe took more than a crowdfunding campaign. It took someone willing to bet on us before there was anything to see. Our landlord believed in what we were trying to do enough to fund much of the buildout himself and roll it into our lease, taking a space with dirt where the floor should be and making it something we could open. We handled the finishes, the equipment, the details that made it ours, but the leap of turning a thirty-year-empty building into a real possibility was one he took with us.

The community showed up too. We ran an Indiegogo campaign to launch, kicked it off on the first day of Black History Month and closed it on International Women's Day, and we blew past our first goal. Community development lenders stepped in where traditional banks wouldn't, funding our first coffee purchases and, piece by piece, our roaster, with Amplify GR helping cover part of it. Owning that roaster gave us real control over our product. On December 4, 2022, we opened the doors as the first retail business on that block in over three decades.

The Warning I Didn't Take

When we prepared our taxes after the first year, the numbers told a sobering story. I'll be honest that I can't give you a clean figure even now, because we never had clean financials. We had a handful of rough P&Ls from a few different accountants that never quite reconciled, and that blurriness turned out to be part of the problem. But the shape of it was unmistakable: our loss for the year was roughly the size of what we had given away.

Really take that in. Had we not donated, we would have been close to breaking even. Not made a profit. Not paid me a living salary as the owner and operator. Just about even.

Maybe I should have taken that first warning sign. But my ego had something to prove. I adjusted the model instead of the thesis, bringing our giving to 1% for the planet and 1% for the community. I was certain we would make more money the following year, and we did. I was certain we could reduce our costs, and we did. I was certain that meant we would be profitable, and we were not. Payroll stayed ahead of what we were bringing in. And this is where I know my mom is laughing if she's reading along, because I still didn't take the warning sign. I doubled down again on my belief that we could make this thing work.

I want to be completely clear about what this is and isn't. This is not an attack on putting people first in business. Along the way this model earned us B-Corp certification and a Young Innovator Award from the MSU Product Center, and I'd argue it earned us something harder to certify: a cafe where regulars kept discovering they knew each other. This is an acknowledgment that I could not find a way to make the economics work. That is a failure of my execution, and I'm sharing it publicly for the benefit of everyone who comes after me, in hopes that the next entrepreneur gets right what I missed. I know there are folks in this great city of Grand Rapids doing this same work quietly, and because of their values, doing it privately rather than publicly. I respect that. But public-first was our whole premise, and I'd be betraying it if I closed quietly.

The Mirror

Here's the harder confession, the one that took me longest to see.

One of the things I've loved most in every role I've ever had is training people, uplifting them, creating opportunities for them. Last Mile gave me the widest field I'd ever had to do that, so of course I threw myself into building leaders. But looking back honestly, what I was really trying to do was get other people to understand my vision and execute it, so that I could disconnect and focus on the other parts of the dream. With any business that's risky. With a cafe like Last Mile, where the identity and the energy of the place were so tied to me personally, it was a recipe for disaster. Not inherently wrong. Executed through the wrong lens, at the wrong time.

Every manager we ever had challenged me on this at some point, each in their own words: why do you have a cafe if you don't care about it? I always had an answer that felt true to me. The cafe was one part of a bigger business. We were also a roaster and a wholesale operation, with a technology platform still to build, and my attention had to move across all of it. Our first cafe manager and I eventually reached a real understanding on this, and I'm grateful for the depth of that conversation.

But there was a truth inside their question that took me years to hear. The cafe was the most visible, most loved part of everything we built, and it needed to shine constantly. I hired people for their passion for the craft of coffee, then asked them to be at peace with the founder's eyes pointed elsewhere. The lesson wasn't that I needed to care more. It's that in a business built on personal energy, presence is part of the product, and where a founder shows up is as much a decision as anything else. I made that choice by default instead of on purpose. That lesson is mine to carry into whatever I build next, and to each of those managers: you saw it before I did.

What Happens Now

Some practical notes, so nothing here reads as more dramatic than it is:

• Hall Street's last day was Saturday, August 1. I'd love nothing more than to find the right person to take over the space and keep a cafe alive on this block. The neighborhood has been nothing but supportive. This corner deserves more time and energy than I'm able to give it right now, and the door is open for someone who can.
• Our location inside HUB 07 remains open while we figure out the best path forward for it.
• Bags of coffee are still available on our website, and we'll continue fulfilling wholesale orders for our individual and corporate customers through the holidays.
• You can still find us at the Fulton Street Farmers Market. We've been there since close to the very beginning, and that community has been part of our existence from the start. We're grateful for every Saturday we get with you there.
• And there's something new coming. We have a collaboration in the works with a roaster we deeply admire. It's nearly ready. Consider this your first hint.

We hope you'll support us as we finish this the way we started it: intentionally, transparently, and with this community at the center. ❤

The Return

I mean, I had a great time! My sincere apologies if you didn't. ❤

These nearly four years of Last Mile Cafe will live in my soul forever. The relationships. The atmosphere in the cafe. The people who genuinely cheered us on and offered real support to get the doors open. For the sake of privacy I'll skip names, but thank you to every employee, every investor, every advisor, every partner, and every customer who ever supported us. You will always have a place in my heart.

And I hope that over the next decade, I blow past every conviction you shared on my behalf and validate everything good you saw in me.

I think of the education this bought me as tuition, worth every penny. But the right answer depends on what you measure it against. By one measure, this was the most expensive schooling I could have found, and I'd pay it again. By another, there's real debt that remains, owed to real people and institutions who believed in us, and I intend to keep working until it's honored. Some of the giving commitments we kept were made in that same fog I described earlier, on books too unclear to tell us what we could actually afford, with a stubborn faith that next week would be better. Sometimes it wasn't. That, too, is part of what the tuition bought.

I got to live inside a question most people only debate: I watched friends who are successful in business advise against our decisions on pay and giving, while my socially minded friends praised the work and lovingly challenged us to do more. Both were right, by different measures. Holding both is the education.

More transparency means more power for the community. I'm still not letting that one go. This essay is me keeping the promise.

And as for the plan itself: the cafe was only ever version 0.x. The idea that started all of this is still alive, and I'm still working on it, more carefully this time. When there's something worth showing you, you'll hear it from me first.

And if any of this stirs something in you, a question, a memory of the place, or just the urge to say hello, my door is still open. Call or text me anytime at 616-634-8589.

— Arick