This article is part of a series about people who have had successful careers without a college degree.
Rachel Nieves was 19 and working part-time at Armani when she met someone who told her that her personality would make her successful 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 a car company soon paid her $120,000 a year. She realized that her major—first math, then psychology—was unlikely to quickly yield an equivalent salary, so she dropped out of school.
She stayed in the car business for about a decade, eventually earning $200,000 a year. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Ms. Nieves began to question her career.
“Money is essential to our survival, but it is no longer worth giving up life for it,” said Ms. Nieves, now 34. “Starting a café was a risk that I wanted. I’m grateful for my past, but I wanted something more fulfilling.”
Starting a food business can be immensely difficult, as the high costs of rent, food and labor often result in slim profit margins. But coffee businesses are easier to start because coffee can be sold at high margins and operated in a smaller space. In addition, coffee shops can make themselves known through 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 called Buddies in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood on December 26, 2020. They paid the rent for 110 square meters in a pool hall that had belonged to Mr. Nawrocki's former boss. Their coffee cart was also mobile for pop-up events.
The couple purchased a used Slayer single-group espresso machine on Craigslist for $7,000, which they liked for its aesthetics. The seller donated a grinder valued at $2,300 for free. Mr. Nawrocki took to Instagram to amass skateboards and use them for the shopping cart countertop.
“Taylor sanded them down – I ripped off the grip tape,” Ms. Nieves said. “This is how we reduce costs.”
A born and raised New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage, Ms. Nieves offers a Coquito Latte at the store that has become popular on social media.
When Buddies started, there were days when the couple made just $80.
Profession: Coffee shop owner
Salary: As little as $19 to over $6,000 a day, but two of the three shop owners receive no salary.
Something to know: Two of the four owners in this article have a high school diploma and one has a college education. Another owner has a high school diploma. Another has an 11th grade education.
In September 2021, Ms. Nieves and Mr. Nawrocki did their first pop-up after a production agency contacted them. The customer ended up being Nike. They looked after over 200 people every day for four days. In between, they renegotiated their flat rate from $2,000 per day to $4,000.
Two months later, Buddies had to move. In just three days, the pair transformed part of another pool hall into their new café.
“We didn’t have time to think,” Ms. Nieves said. “We started again from the beginning. Taylor taught me to try. Try new things. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed, you've pulled off a truly amazing trick. That’s how skateboarding connects with buddies.”
Buddies became profitable in its first year because she and Mr. Nawrocki ran the store themselves and did not deal with hot food, Ms. Nieves said. They don't officially pay themselves a salary.
“Our day-to-day activities and expenses are low,” she said. “We save everything. On a day-to-day basis, the store can bring in $1,500, sometimes even $3,000.”
Ms. Nieves taught herself how to roast coffee for the store with the help of a company called Shared Roasting. Buddies now sells coffee at seven locations.
Theresa Cashman, who owns a coffee shop in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, where she has lived all her life, began working at age 13 waiting tables. Later, she cooked, hosted, waited tables, worked as a bartender, and held other jobs related to customer service.
“I was homeschooled,” said Ms. Cashman, 46. “It was easier to work and wait for people to make money than to go to school.”
After receiving her high school equivalency diploma, Ms. Cashman took business courses at a technical college and dabbled in real estate and insurance, but felt those careers were not a good fit for her.
Around 2010, she started managing a local coffee shop owned by friends.
Ms. Cashman divorced in 2016. “I needed to become financially independent,” she said. “I didn’t earn enough there to achieve this goal.”
She offered her friends to buy the company around 2020, but they declined. When Covid-19 hit, she was fired from the store.
Losing her job was scary. She was making $15 an hour. It wasn't a full-time position, but it was flexible and she had children.
Ms. Cashman struggled in a town of just under 19,000 people, but she formulated a business plan to open her own store and approached three banks for loans.
“I was told flat out that I wasn’t making what I needed to pay the bills,” she said. However, a bank loaned her $350,000, with her parents acting as co-signers.
She made an offer to build her 1,214 square foot store, constructed from a recycled shipping container, on a vacant lot and opened Out of the Box Coffee House on January 21, 2021.
“I used every square inch to keep costs down,” Ms. Cashman said. “I couldn’t have done it without my parents.”
As the sole owner, she saved wherever she could. Before opening, she sealed concrete floors herself, made menu boards and tested recipes in a former church basement. She gets her milk from a supermarket and uses the Tiny Footprint roasting company in Minneapolis.
A Starbucks closed in Wisconsin Rapids in 2008 but reopened shortly after Out of the Box opened.
“I was scared to death but I didn’t see any drop in sales,” Ms Cashman said. The shop made more than $6,000 in a single day.
It quadrupled its first-year sales projections, she said, and is expected to reach $1.2 million in sales in 2024.
From gift baskets to community
Born in France and now Canadian, Suzanne Smith, 54, is the sole owner of Biscuits to Baskets, a café and chocolatier near Toronto.
“I’m a mother of four and I don’t have a college degree,” Ms. Smith said. “My highest school qualification was the 11th grade.”
After a divorce, she turned to welfare and a food bank for help. “I had no money,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Ms. Smith entered a marketing program and got a part-time job at a tanning salon. She left welfare and founded Biscuits to Baskets in July 2002, selling chocolates and gift baskets from her home.
“My mom helped me so much,” she said. Coffee didn't come into play for almost two decades.
Ms. Smith met Colter Smith in 2008 through Facebook's now-defunct Hot or Not app. “We talked for a few months before we met,” she said. “It was basically a blind date.” They married in December 2009.
Biscuits to Baskets became a store in the Smiths' living room. In November 2018, the family moved the business to the garage. The conversion cost almost $14,000.
“My mother 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. While in college, he worked at Starbucks for two and a half years and helped the Biscuits to Baskets coffee business succeed.
Last April, Keith Lee, an influential food critic on TikTok with nearly 17 million followers, dropped by.
“My husband called me and said, 'You'll never believe what just happened,'” Ms. Smith exclaimed. “'Someone left us a $2,500 tip!'”
After sampling their delicacies, Mr. Lee introduced himself, praised the Smiths for their customer service and food, and left. Shortly afterwards he published a video about his positive experience.
“It got big – people waited an hour to get our cake and coffee,” Ms Smith explained. “We worked around the clock. The money had quadrupled, if not more.”
Before Mr. Lee's visit, Biscuits to Baskets was bringing in between $350 and $420 a day. After that, the company earned about $1,700 a day and stayed busy well into July.
Things became so hectic that local officials stepped in to calm the street and ordered the repair shop back to the Smiths' home. In early June, they purchased a vintage trailer to split the load. Converting part of the house into a business cost about $8,400. The trailer brought in about $17,500.
To cover the costs, Ms. Smith's son held a T-shirt sale bearing Mr. Lee's congratulations, which raised $700. Mr. Lee set up 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 they are still paying off.
“Most of my life I have been raising the children,” Ms. Smith said. “I didn’t have much education, so from a young age I had to do jobs that a lot of us had to do.”
Ms. Smith said she would buy money from her family any time. “The family is my biggest supporter.”