Business perks: From dealmaking to job interviews, plenty is brewing at coffee houses

A television advertising campaign in the 1960s hailed coffee as “the think drink.” Judging by the amount of networking, interviews and just plain work being done at coffeehouses up and down the Front Range, the moniker still applies a half century later.

“Coffee is a cognitive stimulant,” said Aaron Patterson, associate director of the nonprofit Everyday Joe’s coffee house along the Mason Street corridor in downtown Fort Collins. “It attracts people who are interested in flavor palates that are going to help them focus. That caffeine makes them more likely to talk because they’re actually awake. The connectivity that happens here is an intention, but coffee is definitely a stimulant for that.”

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Coffee houses always have been conducive to thinking, Students immersed in their studies are common sights at shops near the area’s college campuses where the heady brew is always perking, but the venues also are a welcoming gathering place for business people. A decade ago, entrepreneur Tom Chenault even hosted a live “Business for Breakfast” radio show at a coffee house he owned in Longmont.

“I think an inviting, alive vibe is the key to it, and people respond well to it,” said Justin Hartman, who founded Ozo Coffee Co., in Boulder in 2007 and now has three locations including a roaster there and opened his fourth shop on Aug. 3 at Village at the Peaks in Longmont.

“We always seem to attract a lot of great business networking, people organizing their startups,  ‘think tank’ kind of people,” Hartman said.

Although Ozo’s is open from dawn until 9 p.m., Hartman said the business people “start coming in at 8, 9, 10 in the morning, and then after lunch at 2 or 3.”

Space and connectivity also help make coffee shops conducive to business meetings.

“We have a lot of space, and we welcome people who want to come in and make use of it,” Patterson said. “They’ve got comfortable corners to do interviews, have meetings. A rep from Uber comes in here and does all his training sessions.”

Hartman sees it as well.

“We have a little more table seating, so that makes it easier to plan a meeting,” he said. “And they come. It just started happening, and kind of snowballed.”

Hartman believes the availability of the rapid connection speeds offered by NextLight, Longmont’s new municipal broadband system, also have helped his new business there. “It’s stellar service and really fast,” he said. “You’d better put your head back or you’ll get whiplash, it’s so fast.

Super-fast WiFi is pretty much a necessity, especially if you want to attract techie sort of people,” he said. “They want to get into their dropboxes, onto the cloud, do their presentations.”

A coffee house that becomes a gathering place for business people also can stimulate business around it, Hartman said.

There wasn’t much development around Ozo’s original shop near 55th Street and Arapahoe Road when it opened nine years ago,” he said, “but then east county kind of exploded. We likle to think we helped east county evolve into a much more foody, flavory kind of destination.”

Patterson echoed the “If you build it, they will come” philosophy.

“We don’t really do anything specific” to stage business networking events,” he said, “but startup businesses will rent out the space to work on their new designs, plan fundraisers, come up with new ideas.”

One of the ways Everyday Joe’s, an offshoot of Fort Collins’ Timberline Church, leveraged the “thinking” aspect of coffee was with an Oct. 13 event called “Q Commons,” a live learning experience that “challenges attendees to stay curious, think well and advance good in their communities,” according to the shop’s website.

It’s a speaker series “about gathering leaders or other prominent people to talk about issues important to the Christian community and the community at large,” Patterson said. “It’s about things like engaging our divided nation, underserved neighborhoods.”

“I think coffee just breeds creativity,” Hartman said.

Dallas Heltzell can be reached at 303-868-6631 or gdallas@aol.com.