Nick Stone
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Nick Stone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I didn't have the requisite operation skills. I was going to be much better at overseeing a larger organization that had more complexity and different verticals. So I think I summed up that, well, ultimately, if I make this investment, this financial investment, If I lose it, it's not that much money where I can't recover.
And it's also, I'm doing it a period of time where time's on my side and I am going to be in my early 30s in New York City and I'll bounce back and I'll take all these lessons and I'll recover. And my way of thinking has always been a little bit contrary to some advice from entrepreneurs, which is you've got to go all in early.
I'm more of the view that you should go in when the signals are there and the business can afford you. I'm not saying to earn the same amount if you're working in another career, but I think having significant personal stress when trying to build a company is a huge distraction. If you can't pay your rent and you're trying to build an organization and put in the requisite I think that's tough.
Now, some people can fall back to home and leverage those benefits. But for me, I just summed up that no matter what, this is going to be amazing learning experience and I'm going to do something and operate a business. And I went from football to banking and I didn't have the tangibility and understanding of running a business. And my father, who's in property development,
And in construction, when I first told him, he said, oh, that's great. That's great. I assume you're buying the store. And I said, no, I'm going to be the tenant. He goes, oh, no, no, no. You can't be a tenant. You can't do retail. You can't be a tenant. This is not going to work. And I said, no, no, it's all right, Dad. Like, no matter what, I'm going to learn from it.
But, you know, that was his mentality. You're going to be a lessee? Are you serious? In New York? Good luck. So not everyone was 100% convinced. But looking back on it, I probably proved a few people wrong.
Yeah.
This is a fantastic question. Certainly when I was starting Bluestone Lane, I had an extraordinary amount of people that said to me, what do you know about hospitality? You've never worked a day in hospitality. It won't work. I just sort of blocked them out and just be really confident that I understood the market.
I'd spent enough time in New York observing the consumers and I could see how other brands had been successful in different verticals. I knew that we'd have a similar core customer.
And ultimately, I broke it down that if a value proposition is so strong, if we know everyone's name, make them feel like they're part of our community, like they're a local, if we've got great quality coffee that stacks up to the coffee you expect in Melbourne or Sydney, and if you've got food that you can't find in other coffee shops, the probability of success is, and the cost structure is understood, and you don't have to sell $2 million worth of coffees to break even.
I just thought there's a very good chance that this will work if we can execute well. Most businesses, the idea is the easy part. Execution is everything. As it relates to taking advice, It is a really, really challenging thing when you're building a company because a lot of people feel obligated or encouraged or excited to give you advice.
And it is hard looking out in because there's so many different machinations, your corporate culture, your understanding of people. Ultimately, we're just a people-centric business. Without people, there's no coffee being made. So I'm not really in the game of products on shelves that don't talk back. I'm in the theater of humans working together congruently as a team.
It's the same as playing professional sport. It's not about the balls and the boots and the uniform. It's actually about the people. Can you get them all aligned to know their role, execute their role, and do it often in a very selfless manner? And that's the art of hospitality. And I probably didn't fully appreciate it until we opened the doors and got going.
I was like, wow, it's nothing to do with the beans. It's all to do with the barista and how they're feeling and how aligned and engaged they are. So if I think about different lessons over the time, there's been some that are the advice I should have taken. Absolutely.
There's some that I didn't probably think deeply enough about their counsel, but there's others where I didn't trust my intuition and I went with their counsel. Some of those decisions have had some really, really challenging outcomes that you look back in time and go, wow, I wish I didn't make that call.
There's a few different examples. When we were looking to expand to outside of New York, we had gone to Philly, we'd gone to DC, we'd gone to California. There was the discussion about expanding to Florida. And there was also discussion about expanding to Canada. And we looked at Toronto and thought, wow, this is the fifth biggest city in North America. It's very similar to New York City.
It has this critical mass finance orientated, a lot of young people, young professionals, affluent, high spending, sophisticated culture. There's some commonality with Melbourne and Australia. It's close to New York. Why don't we open in Canada? And I did have a number of people say, no, maybe just stick to the US, like go to Florida or look at Texas. And we chose Canada.
And we opened two stores in Canada just prior to COVID arriving in the early stages of 2020. And Canada effectively quarantined the country, much like they did in Australia. We couldn't get anyone in. So Americans weren't able to go in. Australians weren't able to go in. And effectively, only Canadians. And when COVID hit, we shut both stores down. And we unfortunately laid off all that team.
We were stuck. We couldn't get in. We couldn't get our stuff out. We couldn't pack up the stores. And I think about it now, that that was a decision that In hindsight, it was the wrong call. It was too early in our life cycle to go internationally. And even though I thought, hey, it's closer to New York than Chicago. I think Toronto is closer to New York than Chicago. It's about the same distance.
It's closer than Miami, that's for sure. It was the wrong call. That's one example where I didn't follow the advice. I've received a lot of advice regarding spending and deploying capital. When we did our benchmark round in the middle of 2018, The thought process was to pretty much scale at whatever cost.
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