Summary: Nick grew up in Melbourne and was recruited to play Australian football at Collingwood at the end of 1999 when he was in year 12. He also had time at Hawthorn and the St Kilda which culminated in a 6 year AFL career. This is an incredible achievement in itself, and Nick says during those years he learned a lot. He mentions that as there’s no segmentation in AFL like there is in a lot of American sports (where it’s common to have separate offensive and defensive teams) you have to get used to working and communicating with different people. It also taught him about dealing with pressure and scrutiny and the importance of self belief and hard work. As he studied whilst he played AFL, it gave him the opportunity to move straight into his next career, investment banking. After a period of working in Australia Nick moved to New York with his partner Alexandra (now wife) to finish his MBA at Fordham Business School. It was during this time that he first identified the opportunity in New York to provide an improved coffee experience than what cafes currently provided. He studied Starbucks and was fascinated with the brand that they had built. Whether you like their coffee or not I think it’s still an incredible business. However, he had noticed that their average customer was getting older and the Starbucks brand wasn’t resonating with younger customers. Nick identified the gap in the market he wanted to serve… he wanted to have a coffee brand that resonated with younger customers. Nick was working full time in investment banking so this cafe venture would be managed on the side as a kind of side hustle. He and his partners put up $170,000 and he opened up his first cafe in 2013, a small location that was cheap as it was hidden underground so people could only really find it through word of mouth. The location of this first cafe was quite strategic though with Australian banks NAB, ANZ and Westpac New York offices all nearby. At the time most Americans didn’t really know what a ‘flat white’ coffee was so on the first day sold $1 flat whites. They sold over 1000 that day. Not long after, he opened up another cafe that was equally popular. However, when they opened up their third cafe (which had a food menu) it was that Nick really knew he was onto something. Over the years Nick continued to work full time in banking and be CEO of the growing Bluestone Lane business. However, in mid 2016 when he had 14 cafes (12 in New York and 2 in Philadelphia) he made the call to go all in with Bluestone Lane and step away from banking. Bluestone Lane has now been going for 6 years and now up to 44 stores. In the next six months they’re opening up a further 13 stores which will take them to 57. Nick always focused on the power of branding with Bluestone and took the coffee culture from Australia to the US, with uniformity and consistency. The name Bluestone is in fact an honour of the cobbled bluestone laneways of Melbourne which are littered with great cafes. Nick takes us through some of the stories that have happened over the six years, including the times when Taylor Swift and Victoria's Secret models put them on the map when they’d come in for their coffees. Nick has steered the business through different stages of a startup and transitioning it to the growth stage it’s now in. He currently employs 700 staff which comes with stress, and as hard as the process has been but he says that football gave him an introduction to opening yourself up to pressure and mass scrutiny. This episode is brought to you by Six Park, Australia's leading robo-adviser. www.sixpark.com.au
