In 2008, third-wave coffee giants Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia were brand new to the California scene. Vernon Lindholm and Andy Dispun quickly became fans of the unique, high-quality roasts, and they started sending each other bean shipments between Los Angeles and San Francisco, where they both worked corporate jobs.
“We were coffee pen pals,” Lindholm told Square. Exchanging blends via snail mail was the early catalyst for their cafes. In late 2018 the pair turned their hobby into a business and launched Offset Coffee, which has since become a local pillar in the South Bay region of Los Angeles, where both men are from.
Today, Offset Coffee has five brick-and-mortar cafes and a roastery that ships beans nationwide. Each month, they churn out tens of thousands of items, such as vanilla lattes, avocado toasts, and their very popular Dirty Horchata — an espresso beverage inspired by their coffee operations manager’s family recipe.
It’s also a true multihyphenate business. Offset Coffee also roasts in-house for wholesale, a choice the team made to stay productive and earn revenue when they experienced delays with contractors and licensing when opening their location in El Segundo during Covid. They also provide catering services and participate in local pop-ups — a strategic effort to grow the brand’s visibility.
The challenge: Correcting a past of ‘pointing fingers’
Scaling a business with multiple revenue streams isn’t simple. The Offset Coffee team has to track different types of orders from multiple entry points, online or in person. On top of fulfilling orders quickly, it’s critical for management and staff to understand how sales are trending, and what items are in stock at each location while they manage other lines of the business. Lindholm, who came from a decade-plus career in the automotive industry, was used to frequent technology mishaps due to disconnected tools. When he was looking for a technology partner, he knew it was critical to choose tools that integrated well with each other for Offset Coffee to successfully grow.
“In the corporate side of things over the years, there would often be technology breakdowns where something would stop working,” he explained. “You’re relying on third-party vendors to find solutions to all these things, and a lot of times we get into issues where everybody’s pointing the finger at each other.”
Without a single team managing your technology, it’s easy for problems to snowball, which can quickly derail any plans for growth. “We really wanted to avoid that and really be able to focus on the business rather than all the backend stuff. We also really wanted to try to automate as much as we could,” he said.
The solution: Connected technology your team can rely on
Offset Coffee uses Square Point of Sale, Square Payroll, Square Marketing, Square Loyalty, and Square Team Communication to run almost all aspects of their business, from taking payments from customers to paying out their team.
Having tools that speak to each other makes all the difference in avoiding mistakes and getting staff what they need. “For example, with Square Payroll, the team has the Square Team App where they can make timecard adjustments if they forgot to clock in or clock out. All the payroll is run seamlessly through that. And on the backend, we don’t have any issues with our team getting paid,” Lindholm explained.
“The majority of our team, I’d say, are under 25 years of age. For some, it’s their first job, they’re 18, and some of them don’t have bank accounts, but they have Cash App. So they could get paid through Cash App and not have any issues there.”
Current outlook: Offset Coffee says it achieved 40% YoY growth, every year
Historically, Lindholm has only had access to sales reports at the end of the day or early the next morning, preventing his team from being able to understand current trends. “Obviously, one of the things we all obsess over is the Square Reporting app. It’s cool to be able to check it all in real time,” he shared.
40%
YoY growth since 2018.
By being on a flexible, cloud-based provider, the team at Offset Coffee is able to work seamlessly. The outcome? More time spent serving their community – and ultimately growing their business.
“Customers being able to reply to receipts or let us know if there’s an issue that we can jump on real quick — that’s all great in helping us get ahead of any sort of issues or vice versa. If there’s something that we’re doing right, it’s great for us to keep that pulse on customer sentiment. To give you some growth metrics, since 2018, every year we’ve been averaging 40% growth year over year,” he said.
Powering growth through unpredictability
A singular tech setup that Offset Coffee can depend on makes executing growth goals that much easier. In fact, as part of Offset Coffee’s scaling, they were able to add three new locations within just 10 months between 2023 and 2024. Despite this, any food and beverage business owner knows it’s important to be prepared for anything.
“We just had an issue recently where a construction crew hit a fiber line and we were down for two days, I think it was. The team was really having to figure it out and pivot, and we were all putting our heads together to find solutions. But the one thing we didn’t have to worry about was Square. We just ran it in the offline payments mode for a few days. The customer experience was seamless,” he explained. “That piece of it has been a huge relief, especially when we see other businesses around us not being able to process things or trying to tether it to a cell phone or anything else.”
By avoiding any hiccups with the internet outage, Offset Coffee wasn’t able to just continue to bring in their sales, they were able to ensure their team was taken care of. “Like most service industry workers, a good portion of their pay comes from customer tips and things like that. So being able to operate and not having to sacrifice all of that for the team is huge and keeps all of them going. Like I said, a lot of our team members are younger people trying to make their way in the world, and every dollar counts. For us, being able to still keep everything going, even in the midst of some complications, really helps us support the team,” Lindholm said.
Reaching more customers by keeping up with online demand
While Offset Coffee has massively scaled its retail footprint over the last year, growth is still on the horizon. Now the team is pivoting the focus on expanding their wholesale, ecommerce, and catering businesses, relying on Square Online and Square Invoices to increase orders and track accounts payable.
“Every time we open up a new store, we usually hold off on turning on online ordering just to allow our team a little bit of time to get acclimated. But our customers are always beating down the door: ‘When are you turning on mobile ordering? When are you turning it on?’ So that’s definitely become a critical part of the business,” said Lindholm.
