Why I Started My Business in Shawnee – And You Should, Too!

Café Equinox/Dustin Duewel

Born and raised in Shawnee, Bo Nelson and his three brothers grew up around their grandfather’s nursery, the aptly named Family Tree Nursery. His brothers now run the nursery, while Nelson, the self-proclaimed black sheep of the family, took an interest in coffee and decided to turn it into a business in Shawnee. 

“I was introduced to the farming side of coffee on a horticultural trip to Zimbabwe, where I met someone with a small roasting operation,” he says. “I came back, and after about a year, decided to go for it. I bought a roaster on eBay one night and started roasting for family and friends.” 

In just 10 years, Nelson has opened four locations of his coffee shop, Café Equinox, and scaled his coffee roasting operation, Thou Mayest, from a tabletop roaster to a 35,000-square-foot warehouse and roasting facility. 

How did you go from a nursery to running a coffee business in Shawnee? 
I started roasting coffee in 2012 in an outbuilding at the nursery. I was just doing little 1-pound batches that I would sell to friends and family. It was a lot of hard work and blood, sweat and tears, but it just really took off. We self-funded and bootstrapped and saved so we could expand.

We opened our first Thou Mayest (named for a part of John Steinbeck’s book East of Eden) in 2014, then in 2019, opened locations in downtown Kansas City at River Quay and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the location in the nursery.

And in 2020, we opened CaféEquinox (my dad came up with that name because it was supposed to be a seasonal pop-up in the greenhouse).

How has your business grown since you started? 
We have worked really hard, and expanding so fast was really challenging, but we now roast 50-pound batches at the Thou Mayest roasting facility. Though we ended up closing the first location, we opened two more Thou Mayest coffee shops and the two Café Equinox locations on-site at Family Tree Nursery. 

Most concepts that try to put coffee inside of a greenhouse are not successful. We thought we would try it out during the winter, which is the slow season for the nursery. We had two-hour waits every day, and my grandpa was just flabbergasted! He would sit and watch the lines of people. We usually have to lay off our seasonal help, but we had to keep them on. My brothers had been planning a vacation for that time of year but had to put it off because we were so busy.

People always think that downtown is the place for great coffee and that the suburbs aren’t ready for something like that, so they tend to get a lot of chains. But the people who work downtown are the people who live in suburbs like Shawnee, so opening there made sense – to be where they live.

What are some of the ways you’ve been supported by the city? 
When we came to Shawnee in 2020, the city really welcomed us with open arms. They’ve been very supportive and given us feedback. Shawnee is making an effort to get rid of the bureaucracy that slows businesses down, and they’re attracting younger entrepreneurs who are ready to break out of the box. 

What are some of the resources available to entrepreneurs in Shawnee? 
The Kauffman Foundation is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and helping people start and grow their business. I’d recommend talking to the Shawnee Economic Development Council – that’s where you want to be. They partner with the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce to help people develop their businesses. 

Running a business is a little like working out – you need to surround yourself with like-minded people, and you need to constantly push yourself to get to your next goal.

What makes Café Equinox so unique? 
Imagine that you get to get up in the morning, go get a fresh cup of coffee and go sit in the greenhouse surrounded by flowers. Even on cold days in the middle of a blizzard, it’s a nice, humid 80 degrees in the greenhouse – it’s almost surreal. How could you have a bad day? People love doing business in our coffee shops. We try to create environments where people can connect and collaborate and generate ideas. Historically, a coffee shop is a caffeinated gathering space.

The Enlightenment was born out of public gathering spaces like this. We’re going for something more inspirational than your average coffee shop. We host a lot of events that are mostly focused on health and wellness, which are great to have in the environment of the greenhouse. It’s the best-kept secret in Kansas City.

What’s next? 
Looking to the future, we’re looking more at health and wellness – things like kombucha, ready-to-drink items that are grab-and-go and incorporating botanicals into our drinks. We want to educate consumers about flavor, taste, parts of a plant and plant essences. We make a lot of tea; we make our own syrups; we are going to start our own tonics. 

I love being able to work with my brothers and source things like lavender right there – seasonal, organic products that we use in our drinks.