Guest Speaker: Stephanie McKenzie

For class, we have Stephanie McKenzie as a guest speaker. She is the owner of Metro coffee at the UW Tacoma campus and with her presentation, she talked about how she runs her business and the process of how she got to where she is now.

She took ownership of the shop at the age of 24 when the previous owner, Charlie, was not able to work due to a brain tumor. She talked about how stressful it to run Metro Coffee and various stories about her experience. To go off topic, one story was about a man who used the public restroom as his own personal bathroom and walked out without any clothes on. I swear, the most absurd stories I hear about come from people who work in the food industry or retail.

To take from her experience, she told us that it was very important to have support. McKenzie went through tough times. Having support like how her husband helped her out was important for her persistence in working hard to keep the Metro up and running. Another thing that was important to know was knowing your worth. Knowing how much the work you put into a service or a product should be payed for. Also, knowing the worth in yourself is important to keeping any business running. As McKenzie continued her presentation, and another thing that stood out was how she stated it is good to keep your workers happy. This was a similar topic that was also discussed about during the presentation by guest speaker, Brian Forth. 

As long as you are persistent and work hard with a positive attitude, you can get through the various trials of starting a business. Overall, McKenzie telling us about her experience of taking over a business was a great learning experience for myself that I enjoyed listening to.