The History of Cafe Evoke (Part 1)

This is a multi-part series discussing the history of Cafe Evoke -- from the time I started this blog to today. The posts are rather long which is why I am breaking them up into several parts. Many of you joined me back in January of 2005 as I set out to document our journey and planning of Cafe Evoke -- an art and coffee house. Over the course of a year and seven months, we have had our ups, downs, and turnarounds but have come out stronger each time with more information and experience which help us make better decisions the next time around. I want to give a history of Cafe Evoke with this post. From the very beginning to today -- what we have gone through and what we have in front of us. I hope this helps those of you who are new readers to A Thought Over Coffee. Here we go... This blog began on January 28th, 2005 in Nashville TN. I was a student of entrepreneurship at Belmont University. This was 4 months from the end of school and the time that I began to first put thought -- dreams really -- to paper. I as anxious and excited all at the same time. My professor kept telling us that this was our chance to fail on paper before starting our businesses. I did not want to fail. By February 10th, 2005, we had our mission statement. This was a big step for us as we finally had something to write about. Yes, it took a few weeks to get that down and I think we are in need of a revision of sorts but that is a different post for a different day. On Thursday, March 3rd, 2005, I turned in the rough draft of the business plan and headed to Bozeman for our first market research trip. The idea here was to get more information to help us revise our plans when we returned. We received the first draft back on March 18th, 2005 in better shape than I could have thought. I turned in my final business plan on April 18th, 2005 and presented it on 25th. It went great. I graduated on May 14th, 2005 and prepared myself for the big move to Bozeman. From here on out, I knew everything would be "for real." We had our first meeting with a building owner on May 27th, 2005. This was a space that we had our eye on from Nashville -- right on campus and what we thought might be a great location. This meeting was promising and got us off on the right foot in seemed. After several months of ups and downs, we had to move on and cleared all of our boards in the office in early August of 2005 to regroup and prepare to find a new location. On August 19th, we found a new possible location that we really thought would work for us. We took a lot of the things we learned from the first attempt to lease a space into this one and felt we had a nice position on the negotiations. By September 28th, we had signed the agreed upon terms and the agents were drawing up all the legal documents needed for both parties to make it official. This was exciting for us as we finally had a location -- or so it seemed. ..be bold Tagged: Cafe Evoke, coffee catering, oklahoma, oklahoma city, coffee, tea, espresso