NEWS

We're about five weeks deep into our chapter with 21 open cafes, and yet the one novelty that has never worn off is the initial feeling once we open new doors of "Where did all of these customers come from?" Yes, we are pretty meticulous in site selection, and of course we try our darndest to drum up excitement in neighborhoods when we're coming to town. Nonetheless, you never know who's going to show up, and how many of those people, and how often they're going to keep coming back. All 200 or 400 or however many new friends were all drinking coffee somewhere else last week, and now they're here, and that is a beautiful, mystifying novelty.

Every growth, and every success, has a shadow. On our summer trip to Europe, my wife, Tyler, and I talked a lot about the shadow sides of our strengths, our passions, etc. And it spiraled me into an assessment of Summit, that with every new cafe opening and benchmark hit comes a new, often surprising, shadow trailing right behind it.

I am a student of lots of businesses, and in the 15+ years of wins and losses with Summit, I've studied brands of ALL sizes. One that I was fascinated by for a long minute was Sweetgreen, the bougie salad company born out of Georgetown by three guys my same age. They graced all the magazine covers that I subscribed to, won all of the awards that I coveted, and by every measure were succeeding on steroids where we were not. They said all the right things, too. "Intimacy at scale" is a particular phrase that resonated, and that I coopted in my own meetings for years. What an awesome way to describe growth ambitions with humble foundations.

Except, there's always a shadow. Sweetgreen scaled, and then REALLY scaled. The INC Magazine covers became Wall Street Journal features, and Georgetown rowhouses turned into L.A. highrises, while a dozen salad shops turned into 100+. Their business model scaled, but the intimacy did not. For years I'd travel to cities that had a Sweetgreen -- New York, Denver, Atlanta -- and make our Summit team all go for lunch. It never quite hit like the original M St location in Georgetown. As you can imagine, the years since have led to an IPO, robot salad lines, branding themselves as a "tech" company, and ultimately ... the victim of the "slopbowl" slowdown. All this growth, mirroring Summit's years in business, the lots of fame and LOTS of fortune -- at what cost?

I don't for a minute think the SG founders regret much, but what it has allowed me to realize from afar is that I'm not ready to let go of the "Intimacy at Scale" ambition. It still fires me up as much as it did 10 years ago, and never has it been more important for this to become, and stay, a priority. The Sandy Springs cafe, some 250 miles from our original Davidson flagship, has some of the same charm in its historic building and expansive outdoor space. Summit works in neighborhoods like Sandy Springs, just like it continues to in Davidson, because Summit is rooted in these communities. We're a neighborhood coffee business, and genuinely scaling intimacy requires being locally loved.

Somewhere in the last year or two, perhaps in tandem with our Charleston expansion, our own narrative seemed to flip. No longer was Summit a small, local coffee business, but rather one of the fastest-growing hospitality chains in the Southeast.

Not only did I drink that Kool Aid, but I probably poured, or at least stirred, it myself. I get what those SG guys were tantalized by, seeing your brand in headlines and winning awards. Except a lot of the time, it's a hamster wheel. More success begets more opportunity, more investment, more people, more customers ... and it's really, really, REALLY hard to scale intimacy in that way, at that pace.

We've been peeling back some of these layers in the last nine months. Slowing cafe expansion, shrinking our back-office staff so we can be closer to operations. There were SO many (mis)perceptions about Summit that made me ick. My favorite rumor I learned is that we opened our Creamery business for my son, Silas. By the way, he was 7 when we opened it, and no, he had nothing to do with it (although he loves the Root Beer floats with a deep passion). At the scale we quickly sped to, we lost control of the car a little bit and that -- for Summit and I imagine for Sweetgreen and countless other young brands -- is where you lose intimacy. When you don't actually know what's going on, when your baristas and bakers feel too far separated from Dora or Laura or Parker or me.

I once did an interview where I shared my goal to have 100 cafes. I no longer have that goal. I may be wrong, but my suspicion is that there aren't 79 more Sandy Springs grand openings out there for us. I certainly don't even want to try. There are so many moments in this growth phase where we've lost the plot, where we lost sight of the shadow side. But I have fallen in love with the idea of messing up, because we can learn so much. At various times we have failed customers, and our staff, and probably our investors, too. For those, I am sorry and want you to know that nothing gives me more sleepless anxiety than these shadow disappointments that come with growth.

Sitting today in my home office, however, I still ambition more than anything to continue working toward this "Intimacy at Scale" idea. We'll continue to fail, for sure, and I am excited to bring my shadow side along for the whole journey.

Brian