This article is part of a series on people who have made successful careers for themselves without having a college degree.
Rachel Nieves was 19 and working part time at Armani when she met someone who said her personality would do well in the car business.
At first, she had no idea what that meant. Ms. Nieves had started attending Fordham University in 2008 on a full scholarship, but her new job as a call center representative for an auto business soon earned her $120,000 a year. She realized that her major — first math, then psychology — was unlikely to quickly get her an equivalent salary, so she dropped out of school.
She stayed in the auto business for about a decade, eventually making $200,000 in a year. When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, Ms. Nieves began to question her career.
“Money’s important for us to survive, but it’s no longer worth missing life for,” Ms. Nieves, now 34, said. “Starting a coffee shop was a risk I wanted. I’m grateful for my past, but wanted something more fulfilling.”
Starting a food business can be immensely difficult because the high cost of rent, food and labor often results in slim profit margins. But coffee businesses are easier to start because coffee can sell at high-profit margins and operate in smaller spaces. In addition, coffee shops can make themselves known for their specialty drinks and use their menu as a marketing tool.
Ms. Nieves and her husband, Taylor Nawrocki, a former professional skateboarder, opened a coffee cart, Buddies, in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood on Dec. 26, 2020. They paid rent for 110 square feet inside a pool hall that Mr. Nawrocki’s former boss ran. Their coffee cart was mobile for pop-up events, too.
The couple bought a used Slayer single-group espresso machine, which they liked because of its aesthetics, for $7,000 from Craigslist. The seller threw in a $2,300 grinder for free. Mr. Nawrocki used Instagram to amass skateboards, repurposing them for the cart’s countertop.
“Taylor sanded them down — I ripped the grip tape off,” Ms. Nieves said. “That’s how we cut down costs.”
Ms. Nieves is a born-and-raised New Yorker with a Puerto Rican heritage, and she offers a coquito latte in the shop that has become popular on social media.
When Buddies started, there were days when the couple made just $80.
Occupation: Coffee Shop Owner
Salary: As little as $19 to over $6,000 per day, but two of the three shops’ owners don’t take a salary.
Something to Know: Two of the four owners in this article have high school diplomas, with one having some college education. Another owner has a high school equivalency diploma. Another has an 11th-grade education.
In September 2021, Ms. Nieves and Mr. Nawrocki did their first pop-up after a production agency reached out to them. The client ended up being Nike. They served over 200 people a day for four days. Partway through, they renegotiated their flat $2,000 day rate to $4,000.
Two months later, Buddies was forced to move. In just three days, the pair transformed part of another pool hall into their new coffee shop.
“We didn’t have time to think,” Ms. Nieves said. “We started again from square one. Taylor taught me to go for it. Try new things. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed, then you have a really amazing trick you land. That’s how skateboarding ties into Buddies.”
Buddies became profitable in its first year because she and Mr. Nawrocki run the shop themselves and don’t deal with hot food, Ms. Nieves said. They don’t formally pay themselves a salary.
“Our everyday activities and expenses are low,” she said. “We save everything. On a day-to-day basis, the shop can bring in $1,500 a day, sometimes $3,000.”
Ms. Nieves taught herself how to roast coffee for the shop using a company called Shared Roasting. Buddies now sells coffee to seven locations.
Theresa Cashman, who owns a coffee shop in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., where she has lived all of her life, started working at age 13 by busing tables. Later, she cooked, hosted, waitressed, worked as a bartender and had other customer-service-related jobs.
“I was home-schooled,” Ms. Cashman, 46, said. “It was easier to work and wait on people to make money than to go to school.”
After Ms. Cashman got her high school equivalency diploma, she took business classes at a technical college and dabbled in real estate and insurance, but didn’t feel those jobs were a good fit.
Around 2010, she started managing a local coffee shop owned by friends.
Ms. Cashman went through a divorce in 2016. “I needed to become financially independent,” she said. “I wasn’t making enough there to accomplish that goal.”
She offered to buy her friends’ business around 2020, but they declined. When Covid-19 arrived, she was let go from the shop.
Losing her job was scary. She had earned $15 an hour. It wasn’t full time, but it was flexible, and she had children.
Ms. Cashman was struggling in a town with just under 19,000 people, but she formulated a business plan to open her own shop, approaching three banks for loans.
“I was flat-out told I wasn’t going to make what I needed to pay bills,” she said. However, one bank lent her $350,000 with her parents as co-signers.
She made an offer on a vacant property to build her 1,214-square-foot shop, constructed from a recycled shipping container, and opened Out of the Box Coffee House on Jan. 21, 2021.
“I utilized every square inch to keep costs down,” Ms. Cashman said. “Without my parents, I couldn’t have done it.”
As sole owner, she saved wherever she could. She sealed concrete floors by herself, made menu boards and tested recipes in a former church basement before opening. She gets her milk from a convenience store and uses a Minneapolis roastery, Tiny Footprint.
A Starbucks had closed in Wisconsin Rapids in 2008 but reopened shortly after Out of the Box’s opening.
“I was scared to death, but I didn’t see a decline in sales,” Ms. Cashman said. The shop has earned more than $6,000 in a single day.
She quadrupled sales projections in the first year, she said, and was projected to make $1.2 million in sales in 2024.
From Gift Baskets to Community
Born in France but now a Canadian, Suzanne Smith, 54, is the sole proprietor of Biscuits to Baskets, a coffee shop and chocolatier near Toronto.
“I’m a mom of four, and I don’t have a college degree,” Ms. Smith said. “My highest completed level of education was Grade 11.”
After a divorce, she turned to welfare and a food bank for support. “I had no funds,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Ms. Smith enrolled in a marketing program and got a part-time job at a tanning salon. She went off welfare and started Biscuits to Baskets in July 2002, selling chocolates and gift baskets out of her home.
“My mom helped me so much,” she said. Coffee didn’t enter the picture for nearly two decades.
Ms. Smith met Colter Smith in 2008, over Facebook’s now defunct Hot or Not app. “We spoke for a few months before meeting,” she said. “It was basically a blind date.” In December 2009, they married.
Biscuits to Baskets became a front-room store in the Smiths’ home. In November 2018, the family moved the business into the garage. The conversion cost nearly $14,000.
“My mom helped us,” Ms. Smith said.
Three years later, the Smiths incorporated coffee into their business.
Ms. Smith’s son Andrew taught Mr. Smith and her about coffee. He worked at Starbucks for two and a half years during college and helped Biscuits to Baskets’ coffee business come to fruition.
Last April, Keith Lee, an influential food critic on TikTok with nearly 17 million followers, stopped by.
“My husband called me and said, ‘You’re never going to believe what just happened,’” Ms. Smith exclaimed. “‘Somebody left us a $2,500 tip!’”
After tasting their delectables, Mr. Lee introduced himself, complimented the Smiths on their customer service and food and left. He posted a video about his positive experience shortly afterward.
“It got big — people were waiting an hour to get our cakes and coffees,” Ms. Smith explained. “We were working around the clock. The money had quadrupled, if not more.”
Before Mr. Lee’s visit, Biscuits to Baskets grossed between $350 and $420 daily. Afterward, it made about $1,700 a day, staying busy well into July.
Things got so hectic, local officials stepped in to quiet the street, ordering the garage shop back into the Smiths’ home. In early June, they bought a vintage trailer to split the load. Converting part of the house back to a business cost about $8,400. The trailer added about $17,500.
To help with costs, Ms. Smith’s son held a T-shirt drive featuring Mr. Lee’s compliments, raising $700. Mr. Lee created a cash app account for donations and matched proceeds, totaling $3,000. Customers gave generous tips. Around $7,000 was raised. The family took out loans for the rest, which it is still paying.
“Most of my life I was raising the kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I didn’t have much of an education, so I had to do jobs many of us had to do, from the time I was young.”
Ms. Smith said she’d take her family over money any day. “Family are my biggest supporters.”