I Co-Founded a Collective Business to Get a Second Job

by Cara Dudzic

A few days a week, I get on my bike early in the mornings, sometimes beating even the early brightness of summer dawn, and I ride through a neighborhood of million-dollar houses to a neighborhood that people have started saying is up-and-coming rather than actively dangerous. If I’m the first opener, I unlock the shop, turn off the alarm, mix up a batch of muffins, prep the espresso machine, and check in the bread order.

What I fuck up are the details. I forget to up-charge for an avocado substitution on a phone order for a veggie powerhouse. I forget to set the timer for brewing the iced tea, and it comes out bitter and has to be wasted. I forget to count the coins in the cash drawer first when I close, so I have to add the total in to the bank for the next day and take out an equivalent amount of bills. My co-workers correct me politely, over and over again.

I’m the fumbling rookie, but I’m also a key holder and an owner. It’s weird. The shop is weird. The weirdness is the only reason I’m able to have this, my second job.

It’s hard to explain my involvement with the café without a backstory. At parties, I tell people that I’m a hair stylist, which is true. Sometimes I’ll let on that I also make lattes, which is also true. If it seems like they’re ready for a truth avalanche, I’ll mention that I’m a partner in a café, but I always feel weird about it. I’ve made a few sacrifices to get this business open and keep it running, but it’s always been my second job, when some of my colleagues have put in much more time and effort.

The elaborate origin story: My friend D. opened an earth-friendly furniture store with an attached café in 2005, and I went to work there, first as a barista, then as a rather inept e-commerce specialist. In early 2009, the tanking of the economy became the tanking of the store. When the old store was in its final days, D. had a meeting to let the employees know what was going to happen, and to say that he would like to work with all of us again at a new business. Those of us who were interested started meeting to plan what the new business would be. I went to the meetings, because I was unemployed and bored. I didn’t think the new shop was really going to happen, but unaccountably, it did, after a year and a half of meetings and struggles.

The founding partners, all nine of us, decided that ours would be a worker-owned business, and we wrote a series of by-laws that laid out our structure. Our buy-in was a certain amount of money (about a third of a year’s salary at my old administrative job), either in cash or in hours worked. If you weren’t fully vested, you had to work at least 8 hours towards vesting a week, so 8 hours unpaid in wages, but put towards shares of the company instead. I put up about 2/3 of the cash (money my parents had added to a savings account for me over the years. I hung on to it by pretending it was not mine.) Because I was working full-time in an office job by the time we finally opened, I elected to work all of my hours towards vesting for about the first year we were open. I eventually switched to doing just my 8 vesting hours a week until I hit the magic figure.

We exist through the benevolence of a lot of people. We are able to have people vest through working rather than directly paying for their ownership because we were able to raise cash, and we got that cash in the form of bitter nickels. That is: We received funding from a variety of small investors, including people who bought single shares of the company, and bless them, every one. Many of us hit up our families for investments, loans, or labor. We held a lot of bake sales, had a “tasting party” for potential investors, wrote cute blog posts and wish lists. People donated all kinds of weird old muffin pans and kitchen things. What we actually needed was money, but it seemed rude to constantly beg for money, so I may have exaggerated our need for in-kind contributions. People engage more with the idea of giving each other physical objects, I think. It kept our plans for a café in people’s minds, so that by the time we were able to open, they already felt a connection to it and to us. And then our bemused contractors just looked sadly at us as we tried to pay them with sacks of dented muffin pans. Kidding, obviously, but I will say it was pretty nice of our contractors not to sue us. I can joke about it now that the debts are paid.

Business is good at the moment, and may it ever be so. We are a café with super fans, and I cherish them all, even when I’m 10 or 15 days out from my last day off, and I want to shake every customer and yell, “Have you no homes to which you may return? Have you no hobbies? No cats?” Like, that is obviously a personal failing on my part, but I think it’s the lot of any small business owner who takes an active part in the business of their business. Sometimes, you’d rather not be there, and you would rather be dead, just because you’re so goddamn tired. My autonomy within the business entity doesn’t make my feet stop hurting. But, but, but! The alternative would be worse, and seeing people who are obviously actively going out of their way to support the café is heartwarming.

Collective businesses are not for babies. You have to be able to hang in meetings, and on email threads, though both our meetings and our email threads are far less full of feelings than they once were. We are way less crunchy than some collectives, too. We do vote, rather than making all decisions by consensus, though our votes do tend to get talked through to the point they are unanimous. We also have two managers, who make a slightly higher hourly wage than non-managers do. They are also owners, and they get the same vote in the meetings the rest of us do, but they make daily decisions for the shop. They do some back of house work like making the schedule, but also work on the shop floor, depending on what kind of coverage is needed in a given week.

Sometimes I think: If I had held on to my savings, I wouldn’t need to get a second job. But let’s be real: If I had those dollars liquid, they would be long gone, and the business I helped create with that money is a magical unicorn paradise. It is also a grubby, physical job where you have to be on your feet all day and smile when you don’t feel like it. I am making $9 an hour there, which is below the living wage for my city ($11.24, according to three seconds of Googling and an online calculator,) but not awful for the work when you include the tip jar (the takings of which the manager on duty divides each day according to how many hours each person worked that day, including prep shifts, cleaning, etc.) I wish, as I so often do, that I were making more money. It helps immeasurably, though, to know that nobody else is getting rich either.

Perhaps you’ve heard: The U.S. is moving towards a service economy and workers in jobs that have traditionally been on the crappy side are trying to unionize and strike against unfair, dangerous, or demeaning working conditions. Starting a collective business is not an option for most workers, and collective businesses do not and cannot replace legislated and enforced reforms to a broken labor system. It is utterly wack that I had to pay however much money to work my $9-per-hour side job, and yet, I am wildly lucky to have it.

Our café is not a political entity, though last session one of our managers testified before state legislators in support of a bill to raise the minimum wage. The bill died. $7.25 is what my work might be worth elsewhere. It might be cool if you didn’t have to start the business yourself to get the OK job. It might also be cool if offering an OK wage and basic benefits were not this grand magnanimous gesture, and we were not in a position where we had to more or less match prices of shops where they weren’t trying to be heroes about all that stuff.

A Domino’s spokesman recently said that working at his company was a second job for a lot of people, in order to justify why Domino’s employees didn’t need benefits or a living wage, as if A) There’s a clear first job/second job hierarchy for everybody, whereas for our first job, we’re bankers and surgeons, and for our second jobs, we’re delivering pizzas in order to gather material for our novels, and B) Our second jobs are just little bonus frivolities, that we take for “extra cash!” Whatever. Our second jobs are jobs. Are third and fourth jobs are, too, and on out into infinity. I’m proud to have helped create a good second job for myself, and sorry that it’s at all noteworthy.

Cara Dudzic cuts hair and slings coffee.

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