Coffee Beanery’s Founder Sniffed a Trend Early On

Inside the Coffee Beanery’s unassuming headquarters, where the air is thick with the fragrance of coffee, one white wall seems a little off. It’s dotted with picture-hanging hooks--but no pictures hang from them.

The artwork that once was there now graces a new Coffee Beanery franchisee’s store--on loan from company President JoAnne Shaw, one of her many efforts to help her franchisees succeed.

“I try to share as much as I possibly can. I owe it to people,” says Shaw, who’s also been known to co-sign loans and help managers get their own stores.

“If I can build a $20-plus-million business on a high school education and a shoestring, anybody can do anything.”

At 56, Shaw is the co-founder and president of Coffee Beanery Ltd., a chain of about 190 coffee shops and kiosks in 32 states that grew from a challenge to sell gourmet coffee at a time when people didn’t exactly flock to coffee shops.

In February, she was sworn in as the first chairwoman of the 40-year-old International Franchise Association of 30,000 members.

“She has been a strong mentor for women,” says Terry Hill, the association’s spokesman. “When they see a woman leading in an organization like this, it will open up information and lines of communication that women can be active in franchising.”

Shaw attributes her success to persistence--the kind she and her husband needed when they put up everything, including their house, as collateral for their first store.

“I’ve seen people just get so close and just give up--and if they’d have just gone that little bit more they’d have really been successful,” she says. “I think people limit their abilities.”

As a teenager, Shaw was intrigued when a speaker told her senior class that five students in the room would make their mark. One, the speaker said, would be very successful.

“I wanted to be one of those five,” she says.

But she didn’t really have a plan. Thinking she might want to be a nurse, she volunteered at a hospital. She discovered it wasn’t for her.

“I could do the work, but I couldn’t handle the emotional part of losing a patient,” she says.

She got married a week out of high school to Julius Shaw and went to work for his parents’ catering and coffee service company. There, her husband says, the young woman who was shy at the time began to build her business savvy.

“She got out there and could see that she could do this,” he says. “The little successes started adding up.”

After nearly 15 years helping her in-laws, Shaw wanted to start her own business. But it was 1976, and blocks of coffee shops filled with people sipping lattes didn’t exist.

“People not only didn’t understand that there was quality coffee, No. 1. The fact that it should cost more money, it was an incredible thought for people,” she says. “I couldn’t give away espresso and cappuccino.”

Determined to develop a base of coffee-craving customers, Shaw created and marketed dessert, iced and flavored coffees at a mall in Dearborn.

It meant 80-hour workweeks, and she didn’t take a paycheck for more than a year.

“When we opened that first store there truly wasn’t enough money,” Shaw says. “I said ‘whatever it takes, we’ll just make it happen.’ ”

Gin Clausen, now a franchisee with three shops in west Michigan, was with Shaw when she opened that store. Even on that first day, Clausen says, Shaw was talking expansion.

“Even back then, she was very exciting, very dynamic--really innovative ideas. . . . Her wheels were always turning,” Clausen says.

Shaw can do nearly everything in the company--she’s even taken part in the roasting process, and often acts as taste-tester for the coffee the company sells. Early on, she fixed the coffee brewers.

“I always wanted to be the very best at everything,” Shaw says. “I wanted to be as good a franchiser as McDonald’s, and then give customer service as good as Nordstrom.”