COLUMBUS, Ohio, U.S. – Greg Ubert, founder and president of Columbus coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea, has been named a finalist for the Columbus Chamber’s 2018 Small Business Leader Award.
For more than 30 years, the annual award has honored a small business owner or executive whose business exemplifies success through increased sales, number of employees and contributions to the community.
The 2018 winner will be announced at the Chamber’s Annual Meeting breakfast on Feb. 8.
“After 26 years as an entrepreneur and decades of helping other small business owners succeed, I am thrilled to be considered for this award,” Ubert said.
In 1991, Ubert founded Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea with little more than enthusiasm and a determination to succeed.
After the recent Harvard graduate discovered he couldn’t fall in love with computer software, he left a promising career in Chicago to pursue twin passions for coffee and entrepreneurship.
Ubert moved back to Columbus and started a coffee roasting business with a tiny coffee roaster in a one-room office. With little business experience – and none in the coffee industry – he learned coffee roasting from the grounds up, without any formal training.
From the start, his vision focused on providing the best-tasting coffee and coffee-house products to customers while creating a supply chain of mutual benefit with growers and suppliers.
After he saw that some coffee house customers were struggling, he studied their operations and developed a service platform called “Seven Steps to Success.” The program offered a unique proposition: Crimson Cup would teach entrepreneurs how to open coffee houses and help them stay in business.
In 2003, he published Seven Steps for Success: A Common-Sense Guide to Succeed in Specialty Coffee. This book and Crimson Cup’s coffee shop franchise alternative program have put more than 350 independent coffee businesses in 29 states, Guam and Bangladesh on the road to success.
Today, Crimson Cup is a leading coffee roaster, recognized by specialty coffee’s flagship publication Roast magazine as the 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Its coffees regularly win taste tests, high rankings from independent coffee reviewers, and trophies in competitions including the Good Food Awards, Golden Bean North America and America’s Best Espresso.
