Community is everything to Salvador “Sal” Sanchez. The Michigan native lived and worked in the Great Lakes State and in Texas in coffee-related corporate positions before seeking a favorable location to start his own enterprise. After an extensive search, he ultimately landed in Lexington in 2013 for its quality of life and growing reputation as a supportive environment for small business owners. Sanchez has since found Lexington to be a very receptive environment for the style in which he’s chosen to run his businesses and has become deeply ingrained in the local community through his involvement and outreach. “I have found that the community here wants to see you succeed, so they’ll support you and be there for you if you believe in community, in service, in culture, and try to do right and do good by others,” he said. “Extending goodwill is paramount in Central Kentucky.”
Bill Straus
Salvador “Sal” Sanchez opened A Cup of Common Wealth on Main Street in July 2013 and has grown the business to include Chocolate Holler and Magic Beans Coffee Roasters, as well as a second A Cup of Common Wealth location in downtown Georgetown.
Sanchez experienced a taste of this goodwill soon after setting up shop. Sanchez, along with his business partner at the time, Chris Ortiz, opened A Cup of Common Wealth on on Main Street and Eastern Avenue in downtown Lexington on July 1, 2013. Five months later, there was a break-in. With a boarded-up window and no money in the till to make change, the store was prepared to hand out coffee for free. Instead, patrons told A Cup of Common Wealth baristas to keep the change. The community rallied around the local coffee shop, and every Dec. 9 since, the business offers free drinks to its customers.
Bill Straus
Both A Cup of Common Wealth and Chocolate Holler offer a “pay it forward” board where customers can buy drinks for another customer—sometimes with amusing stipulations.
A Cup of Common Wealth recently observed its sixth anniversary in Lexington with a week-long celebration that, not surprisingly, focused primarily on supporting and celebrating community. A Cup of Common Wealth also hosts a Nonprofit Friday once a month, donating 10 percent of sales to a selected nonprofit, such as Seedleaf or DV8 Kitchen Vocational Training Foundation. A representative from the nonprofit also serves as a celebrity barista for the day.
In January 2016 Sanchez acquired Magic Beans Coffee Roasters, a small facility located inside the Bread Box on Sixth Street that supplies premium, ethically sourced and locally roasted whole-bean coffee for A Cup of Common Wealth and Chocolate Holler, the chocolate-and-coffee bar Sanchez opened in 2017 on Old East Vine Street. Magic Beans also supplies numerous stores and restaurants in the region, as well as sells its beans online and through a subscription service that offers a different coffee each month.
Bill Straus
On June 27, Sanchez opened a second A Cup of Common Wealth location in downtown Georgetown. He’d been seeking out a new location when the landlord of the Georgetown spot, on Main Street and Broadway, reached out to ask him to take a look at the space, located on the ground floor of a building that dates from 1877. “It felt good right from the get-go,” Sanchez said. There’s around 2,900 square feet for the coffee shop, and it has the same type of décor and vibe as the Lexington location.
The coffee shops, along with Magic Beans and Chocolate Holler, all follow the same mission: embrace community; serve others; create culture. “We make all of our decisions based off of that mission; it’s our guiding light,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez considers A Cup of Common Wealth a “community of businesses.” The coffee shops, along with Magic Beans and Chocolate Holler, all follow the same mission: embrace community; serve others; create culture. “We make all of our decisions based off of that mission; it’s our guiding light,” Sanchez said.
Bill Straus
New employees are interviewed by existing team members and participate in a thorough training program. “This builds accountability and ensures that once we bring someone on, we all said ‘yes’ and want to do our best to make sure they do well,” Sanchez said.
There’s also a thoughtful design to the hiring process throughout his businesses. Before the current 33 employees were hired, every one went through three levels of interviews—group, panel and shop. “They have to be interviewed by at least five employees and the decision to bring someone aboard must be unanimous,” Sanchez said. “This builds accountability and ensures that once we bring someone on, we all said ‘yes’ and want to do our best to make sure they do well.”
After being hired, each employee is equipped for success through 75 to 90 hours of training that consists of an orientation, customer service expectations, policies and procedures, cafe operations, and learning the register and the coffee bar. They take part in “practice” barista shifts and then a review shift, an evaluation shift, a written test, a review with the shop manager and a hands-on drink-making test. “We view training as an investment into the people that come aboard, always hoping they’re better off than before they worked for us,” Sanchez said. “We set high expectations but work with each individual to reach them.”
These high expectations mirror those Sanchez has long set for himself, and many of his methods are adapted from ideas that worked well for other companies for which he’s worked or consulted with, he said.
Bill Straus
Before he was old enough to have a driver’s license, Sanchez knew he wanted to own his own coffee business and set out to learn all he could. Born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, he earned a Bachelor of Arts from Western Michigan University in 2006, where he studied business management, creative writing and Spanish literature. While in Kalamazoo, he was the business manager for the college newspaper and worked as a barista and then manager at Water Street Coffee Joint, a microroaster that today, along with Magic Beans, supplies single-origin coffee to A Cup of Common Wealth. He left Michigan for Amarillo, Texas, in late 2007 to become a director at Hastings Entertainment, a chain with more than 100 coffee cafes across 20 states. Within five years he’d moved to Austin, Texas, to become regional coffee coordinator for Whole Foods Market. “I’ve done consulting for a few companies and have opened over 100 coffee shops now,” Sanchez said.
He moved to Lexington from Austin after researching different cities in which to start his own company. “Lexington kept being in the top of every category,” he said. “It’s felt like home since the day I moved here. Central Kentucky is extremely supportive of small business and has such an incredible spirit of celebration.”
Sanchez spends most of his time these days at A Cup of Common Wealth in downtown Lexington, visiting Chocolate Holler two or three times a week and checking in at Magic Beans several times a month. “In general, most of my time is focused on people development, strategic planning, building bench strength, strengthening our family culture, and finding solutions to holes that may be popping up in the business,” he said.
Bill Straus
With a compassionate and unflaggingly positive attitude, Sanchez encourages an all-hands-on-deck approach “to ensure we all work to make each other better, to improve, and to live up to our own unique potential,” he said. “No one has ever done anything alone.”
A strong team, a caring village and compassionate community are all essential ingredients in lasting success, he said. “I’ve never worked with a more talented, service-oriented collective group of people in my career,” Sanchez said. “We’ve been extremely lucky, and we’re extremely grateful for the incredible people who have chosen to work with us and the amazing people who have chosen to call A Cup of Common Wealth their coffee shop.”