Summit Coffee CEO Brian Helfrich decided to sell two of his previously corporate-owned cafes in Asheville, North Carolina, to a new group of franchisees. The sale was driven by Helfrich’s philosophy that cafes are best when they’re locally owned—which Helfrich admitted he wasn’t abiding by in a LinkedIn post last week that garnered more than 100 reactions.
“While broadcasting these beliefs, I also had to look squarely into the mirror: Why do I own two Summit locations in Asheville? It’s two hours from my front door, I’ve never lived there, and I don’t particularly like I-40,” he wrote.
Though the deal closed last week, Helfrich and his team have been thinking about selling the two locations since spring of 2021. “We didn’t want to publicly advertise it because we wanted to make sure we found the right buyer thoughtfully, and we also didn’t want to send the wrong message that we were trying to get out of our café business,” Helfrich told Franchise Times.
Brian Helfrich bought coffee roaster and retailer Summit Coffee in April 2016 and started selling franchises in 2020, with the mission to fill the gap between national players such as Starbucks and high-end independent coffee shops.
He agreed to terms in October with the new group of franchisees, JT and Kendall LaBruyere and John and Annie Bolton—“two couples who are best friends,” Helfrich said. One couple lives in Asheville while the other lives in Davidson, North Carolina, where the flagship Summit is located.
Though the new ‘zees have small business ownership experience, they’re new to franchising and the coffee industry. That tends to be a theme for Helfrich, who said out of the 11 franchise groups Summit has signed, “no one had any experience with franchising,” but were entrepreneurship-minded.
The new group will have a local ownership presence in the stores seven days a week, which Helfrich hopes will push the cafes from good to excellent. Plus, the refranchise deal will enable Helfrich and his team to focus on their two local corporate cafes in Davidson. “In some ways, this completes the transition to being a franchisor,” he said.
“All our other franchisees deserve a franchisor that is clearly focused on running a franchise business,” Helfrich said. “The split model where we have four corporate stores and four franchise stores was splitting our focus and energy. We can now put that into being a great franchisor.”
Helfrich had to “get over the stigma of franchising” when he first started looking for ways to grow Summit Coffee, which originally opened its doors in 1998 in Davidson. Helfrich, a former journalist, bought the coffee roaster and retailer in April 2016 and started selling franchises in 2020, with the mission to fill the gap between national players such as Starbucks and high-end independent coffee shops.
Summit Coffee custom designs every café tailored to each community, which “means we create really beautiful and memorable cafes and café experiences, but it’s really hard to do that at scale,” Helfrich noted.
“It’s really hard for a corporate empire to feel like they’re making a genuine connection at the local level,” Helfrich told Franchise Times in March. “By bringing in franchisees, they’re stakeholders on the ground building genuine relationships with customers in ways we can’t.”
That mindset naturally led to slow and thoughtful franchise growth. Summit just opened its eighth location in Charlotte’s Villa Heights neighborhood, where Helfrich was sitting drinking iced black coffee the day of this interview.
“We’re not going to franchise trade shows, we have not retained a broker to help us sell, because we’re looking for a pretty specific buyer,” he said, adding that their conversion rate is above average at about 10 percent because they have only generated 100 to 150 good leads over the last decade. That approach will shift as Helfrich aims to open eight to 10 stores per year, which will likely necessitate getting hundreds of leads per year.
Summit custom designs every café tailored to each community, which “means we create really beautiful and memorable cafes and café experiences, but it’s really hard to do that at scale,” Helfrich noted.
With six stores in various stages of development, Helfrich said “this is a good test of our bandwidth.”