NEWS

I was coaching my son's 9-10 year-old flag football game on Tuesday night (it was freezing), and he threw an interception. His eyes immediately welled up and two things were immediately clear: 1) he cares, a LOT, and 2) this was an important moment.

How we learn to mess up, and even if we learn how to mess up, is maybe life's most underrated skill. We all throw interceptions, some of us literally, and those interceptions often make us want to cry ... or scream, or get angry, or perhaps embarrassed. We all respond differently to failure. And often the most emotional reactions are because of how deeply we care.

Failure sucks, and we all fail. It's that universal shared experience that makes it so important and such an opportunity, though. We. All. Fail. My 10-year-old son throws interceptions, and I take chances at Summit that often cost us headache, heartache, and sometimes a lot of money.

We're closing the baking operation in Charleston that we opened just about 12 months ago. While our three cafes in the Charleston area remain open, and are growing each day and working super, super hard to become profitable, the bakery's story ended this week. We've had a bakery in Davidson for 12 years, which at its worst was a convenient and affordable vendor for our cafes, and at its best (now and going forward!) is pushing our team's culinary ambitions. So when we launched into Charleston in 2024, our game plan included a central bakery that would serve our cafes and help us succeed.

Instead, we ran a bakery where labor was 85% of our revenue, and we were cutting corners and making short-sighted decisions to help make payroll. Sometimes, you just need to throw the damn interception and let yourself cry on the sidelines. Closing the baking business in Charleston sucks. We objectively did not succeed at something we invested in. We thought we could carbon copy our Davidson/Charlotte model, and we could not. There are myriad reasons why, and that's important for us to process — but we also needed to welcome 36 hours of pain once we knew what the right decision was.

Not everything scales, and even if it could, maybe we're not the right team to make it work. I own this mistake, more than anyone else. I thought the baking business would work in Charleston. We're still very, very committed to success in Charleston. Like I said, the cafes are slowly but surely coming into their own. Hannah, one of the best-of-the-best Summit employees who's managed both the Creamery and our Basecamp cafe, has moved down to South Carolina to lead the whole market. Summit-in-Charleston is going to work. Just not with a baking operation.

Like I said to Silas on the sidelines last night, we all fail. It's ok for it to suck, and it's ok to cry. But failures (small or medium or big) can also be opportunities to learn, to grow, to reinvest in what actually is working. Summit is built on thousands of failures -- a lot of them mine -- and so are all great 10-year-old football players.

Brian Helfrich

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