I love working directly with company founders, especially when they’re still involved and passionate about day-to-day operations. Yeah, yeah—you’re supposed to scale and decentralize decisions and delegate everything to team members and make yourself obsolete so you never have to show up—but what’s the fun in a 4 hour workweek? I like working with founders who aren’t looking for a quick exit. People who view their business in and of itself as a creative endeavor—who enjoy running and gunning and solving problems and never slowing down long enough to even realize how far they’ve come.

Tinker Coffee is one of these businesses. Founders Steve Hall and Jeff Johnson, along with every single person in the company, move in lockstep. There’s an upbeat, optimistic enthusiasm that drips from their team. It’s 100% entrepreneurial spirit and it’s a lot of fun to see in action.

We’ve been working with Tinker on a brand evolution over the last year, starting with fleshing out their brand identity, revamping packaging, merch and a website overhaul. Rather than our typical long form project writeup, we wanted to invite them over to discuss, not just where they’ve been, but where Tinker is headed and how they intend to shape coffee culture in Indiana

CODO: Kicking off, please introduce yourself—what’s your background, and what lead you to open Tinker Coffee?

Jeff (Tinker): My name is Jeff Johnson. I am a husband, a father to two wonderful small children and I am one of the co-founders of Tinker Coffee.

I grew up in northern Indiana, graduated from Purdue and migrated south to Indianapolis with my now wife, Chanda Johnson. My first job after graduating was with IBM as a business consultant. It was 100% travel and since I’ve lived in Indiana my entire life, I saw it as a great opportunity to see different cultures around the world. I will forever be thankful for the great people I was fortunate enough to work with for 10 years at IBM. I can’t emphasize enough how my team members at IBM positively impacted me.

My entire adult life I have been interested in coffee. In college I convinced my fraternity to invest in an espresso machine. It was a hot topic as others had different ideas to spend the funds. Needless to say the espresso machine was broken the first night it arrived.

My interest in coffee grew while traveling for IBM. I remember when the idea of starting a coffee roastery popped in my head. I was staying at the Waterbury, Connecticut Marriott where I lived for nearly five years and in this hotel room one night I was frantically gathering information to figure out what was needed to start a coffee roasting business. I was way off.

Fast forward to 2014, Steve and I are brothers-in-law, both living in Indianapolis and hanging out with the family regularly. We started talking about coffee and he took to it. Our conversation and interest in specialty coffee grew and the plan to start a coffee roaster began to develop. At that point in our lives we were both ready to follow a passion and take a chance. Once we decided to go all in, the pieces came together. Steve found a roaster, I found a building and in November of 2014 Tinker Coffee was official.