Welcome to Tetherball, and Why "Tetherball"?
Welcome to our website, and sincerely thank you for being here.
This post is going up on the first day our name and social media is public. We're official with Florida as of yesterday after months of work, and hopefully with the IRS too by early next week. So it feels like a good time.
I'm at Brass Tacks Coffee, where a large amount of the work so far has been done via my 5yr old Chromebook and the google cloud. I'm drinking an espresso on ice, and listening to Equip's Cursebreaker album. I come here every Saturday morning with my boyfriend Dakota, and we work on personal projects. Dakota is actually doing his first public art event at the Vagabond Coffee Flea this Sunday, please come and buy us out or at least say Hi.
the point of this blog is to chronicle the journey. To show what it takes to open a coffee shop or your own small business, and my thoughts along the way.
Since I just announced the name let's start there. Why "Tetherball?"
It started with the mission. Two things I wish I would have done before starting any of this, that are super central to everything:
1. decide on the mission
This is your why. It's not because you want to make money or because you want to make coffee every day, as cool as those things are. Your friends, family, and followers don't care about you making money or having coffee. they could go to McDonalds for that.
They want to stand with you because you're doing things that are great, and changing the world. you're making great coffee and being great company. you're being their rock or being their rocket fuel.
in our case the mission is just that. we want to give people the energy to keep hitting that ball, both literally and emotionally. The tools they need might be coffee, a good conversation, or this blog to tell them what the difference between and LLC and an S corp is; so they don't give up when they hit a specific wall.
2. decide on a name and theme that go along with that mission
So what makes sense for our mission? Well I want to be relentlessly positive, fun, colorful, energetic and a little punchy. I don't want to be too serious but I want to keep it simple and effective.
I spoke with family, friends, and eventually a friend who happened to be a designer to outline a brand (Shout out to Mike Csorba)
Eventually I was split between "love yr" and "tetherball", but there were a few reasons why "love yr" couldn't work out. It was actually the favorite of just about everyone I told, I think having "love" in the title really helped haha. but it was difficult to google (thanks auto correct), it was too mellow, and I didn't love the color or branding prospects of red, hearts, etc. Too bad, I liked the idea of having branding slogans like "love yr friends" / "love yr coffee" / "yr gonna do great things".
So I stuck with my gut, to me the yellow tetherball is smiley face, it's getting knocked in the head, it's jumping up and hitting back, it's jumping over and over again to keep hitting back until you win the game, even if you're Napoleon Dynamite'ing it alone. It's stupid fun in the best way, it's energetic, sporty, authentic, and you can always walk away if you get tired.
It's not easy to get these things down
What I did originally was layout the spaces and aesthetics that inspired me in a long list, and then wrote out why I liked every space, and then narrowed it down to a top 10. (We are currently following all these Inspirational shops on Instagram if you're interested) Once I had the look I liked, I worked backwards towards a mission. This was really hard, it was like trying to pluck a balloon out of thin air. What I'd recommend you do instead is start with a couple of ideas that are important to you as the owner, and try to turn them into a goal that you can work towards. a mission!
this mission can be super short, one of my favorites is Cat and Cloud Coffee's old mission of essentially "leave people happier than we found them" (I think they've updated this)
this should not come before the ideas that make it up in my opinion, but everyone has their own process. TLDR Your mission and your name are hella important to the rest of the process, more posts to come.
thank you for reading, have a great weekend. Peace
- Elias
