Our Business Plan (1/5)
Official Biz Plan hot off the press! Ending our Intro Series via Instagram last month of WHO we are, we’d like to introduce WHAT we are! This will be a multi-part blog post series to introduce what our business is all about, along with transcribed live text (below) to pair with pages directly from our business plan. ¡Versión será traducida a español próximamente!
Without being part of a larger start-up program, incubator program or a wide social net we had to start our business plan from scratch. This meant a year and a half of conducting our own research on weekends, after long hours at our full-time jobs, and relying on our immediate family members and peers for feedback. A big thanks to the following:
Peer Review & Feedback
Moriah Bailey Stephenson, Elena Olivera alias “Elena Moneda”, Erica Polacek, Eric Wodder, Dennis Richeson, & Jerimy Logan
Editing Services
Jennifer Patiño & Reuben Westmaas
Book Design
Natalie Sowa
Photography
Lauren Reese
For full transparency, the resources that we used while writing our business plan was from a combination of publications that we have listed below:
Publications
Espresso! Starting and Running Your Own Specialty Coffee Business, Joe Monaghan, © 1995. (ISBN9780471121381)
The Food Truck Handbook, Start, Grow, and Succeed in the Mobile Food Business, David Webber, © 2012. (ISBN 9781118208816)
How to Write A Business Plan,14th ed., Mike P. McKeever, © 2018. (ISBN 9781413325454)
Write your Business Plan, Get your Plan in Place and your Business Off the Ground, Entrepreneur Media, Inc, © 2015. (ISBN 9781599185576)
Services
Chicago Public Library - Harold Washington Library, Business Plan Handbooks 4000+ actual business plans available as resources
Live Text:
Anticonquista Café
Family Farm-Owned and Operated Specialty Coffee Roaster
Chicago’s first family farm-owned and operated coffee micro-roaster, Anticonquista Café is a sustainability-conscious business owned by Chicago-based couple Lauren Reese and Elmer Fajardo Pacheco, whose family are coffee farmers in Guatemala and Honduras. Our vertically integrated ‘cultivo to cup’ or ‘cultivation to cup’ business model seeks to end exploitative intermediaries within the current supply chains in the coffee industry. In the United States, coffee can only be grown in certain parts of California and Hawai'i, so most coffee in the country must be imported. In fact, the U.S. is the top importer of coffee in the world. We aim to close the gap between coffee farmers and U.S. consumers by bringing farmers to the forefront of the industry. We are the farmers who harvest, roast, and brew your coffee.
Lauren Reese & Elmer Fajardo Pacheco