“We sold our coffee shop in City Market in Bay City on January 1st. It was the right decision - it just wasn't meant to be. Then, on January 2nd, we got a message from the owners of this plaza, Lisa and her husband Bill, to come and 'take a look again'. I say, ‘again’ because I had already come out once before with the idea of opening a second location, but at the time, it didn’t make sense. It was too soon to think about opening back up after selling, but then March came around and I got another message, ‘Hey, come take a look.’ So I went and I looked. It still didn’t make sense for us then.
Then, in July, I got another message: ‘Let’s talk again.’
So I asked my sister to come look at it with me. She said, ‘You’ve already said ‘no’ twice, why keep looking?’
I said, ‘Because it just keeps coming back. If it’s meant to be, it will be, and this seems like it’s meant to be.’ It was an idea that just wouldn’t go away. I’ll follow anything through. If you said right now, ‘I want to start a truck company’, I’d say, ‘Let’s see how far we can go.’ I’m a firm believer that either things work or they don’t—if they don’t, you try something else. If they do, it was meant to be.
And it was—we opened Excited Goat Coffee Company in December of 2021, almost a year to the day that we sold our business.
It was meant to be.”
"The coffee we serve at Excited Goat Coffee Company is roasted by Creation Coffee in Midland, and they literally changed my life as far as coffee is concerned. When we started at City Grind, I was drinking Maxwell House. I knew nothing about coffee. In fact, somebody said that we should try to get Creation Coffee in the shop, and on our way over there, I said, ‘They're not going to let us carry their coffee. I don't know anything about coffee!’ We tasted some of their coffee and they were wonderful.
The morning after, I opened my jug of Maxwell House to make coffee, tasted it, and thought, ‘That’s horrible!’. So I went to the store to buy another jug thinking that mine was stale. Same thing! Your palate changes when you finally taste great coffee, and Creation Coffee changed mine forever.
More than that, every time I’ve opened a location, the owners of Creation were there helping us. The day that we opened this location, we had an equipment failure…and they were there pulling shots the first day."
“Around 2008, I started DJing with my business partner at the time, Sean Doyle, here in Bay City. We didn’t have a business plan and we had no idea what we were doing. But then somebody approached us and said, ‘You should join the Chamber of Commerce’. We didn’t have the money for it, so I went to Mike Seward’s office, who was the Chamber president at the time, and said I'd like to join the chamber but asked if we could do some sort of trade. Thankfully for us, they had just had an Eye-Opener Breakfast with terrible issues with the sound.
So I said, ‘We’ll do all the sound for all your Chamber events in exchange for a Chamber membership.
And he said, ‘Done.’ There was no, ‘Well let me get back to you….’ He took a chance on us and believed we could do it. Pretty soon we started doing sound for events like when the governor came to town and for Dow. Magen Samyn when she was at Bay Future did the same.
I think it’s those early investments of trust that made me so appreciative and supportive of this community. They believed in us when maybe he shouldn't have, you know? But they did, and put us into the community and that helped us in such a huge way. How can you not want to give back after something like that?”
—Josh Sharrow, Excited Goat Coffee Company in Bay City and Essexville
