Exploring Life & Business with Cory Withrow of The King’s Craft Coffee/TKC Roasters

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cory Withrow.

Hi Cory, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today. 
The King’s Craft coffee company started in January of 2016, with our Poway location opening for business in Sept 2016. It started as a dream of having something in our community that would provide a place that not only served amazing coffee but also be a place of rest and relaxation with one another. We wanted to be fun but take our coffee very serious. We have been named the coffee shop of North County 3 times, I think, maybe more. 2020 was an interesting year for us because we didn’t shut down one day of that year. We didn’t have a plan “B”; we just knew we always wanted to be that “place ” where anyone could come and feel safe and breathe. In 2018 we opened our second location in Mission Valley, and it is still up and running today. In 2024, we are looking to open more locations and bring what we have started to as many communities in the county as we can 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting your own business and own brand from a dream is never a smooth road. We have struggled with everything from signage to power outages to Covid to financial stresses to employee scarcity. It is amazing because we are super thankful for the struggles and feel like we have learned something new about running your own business to the humanity of this great community that we get to serve. I think the key is taking everything one day at a time, with our focus always on our vision and goals for that particular year. We have a “we get to ” sort of mantra, not a “we have to” mindset. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us a bit more about your business.
In our business, we are responsible for all things coffee. We source all of our green coffee from all over the world using our amazing broker, Cape Horn Coffee. We try and make sure we are getting the highest quality coffee beans from all over the world, from Africa, Indonesia, South and Central America, and anywhere in between. We are also responsible for roasting the coffee and continuing to check the quality that we have in every cup. 

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you.
This is a good question, but I don’t really believe in luck. I believe in working one day at a time and winning the day, which leads to opportunity that presents itself as “Well they just got lucky”. We have been very fortunate to have relationships in our lives that have blossomed into strengthening our business and the decisions we make on a daily basis. 

Contact Info:

• Website: Thekingscraft.com
• Instagram: @kingscraftcoffee
• Facebook: The Kings Craft
• Yelp: The Kings Craft

Image Credits
Cassie Osterman