When I started Compass Coffee in 2014, I wasn’t just building a business—I was running from something. Let me explain.
Like so many, I was on the “corporate America conveyor belt.” In college, I interned at an investment bank and a real estate investment trust. These were soul-sucking office jobs where I sat in a sea of gray cubicles, dressed in a suit and tie, tapping away at a keyboard from early in the morning until late at night. Picture an endless Excel spreadsheet, a stiff chair, and a daily existential crisis.
Sure, I learned some useful skills, like mastering Excel without touching the mouse (thrilling, I know). But I couldn’t shake the thought: Is this my life for the next 30-40 years? No thank you.
One day, after work, I wandered into a Barnes & Noble (yes, when people still browsed for books at Barnes and Nobles). A book about the Marine Corps caught my eye. I started reading about their Officer Candidate School—a program that lets you train for 10 weeks during the summer, with no long-term commitment. It was like a lightbulb went off. I decided then and there that I’d rather risk my life in Iraq than spend another minute in the soul-draining monotony of corporate America.
So I joined the Marines. I wanted something real, tangible, and meaningful. I wanted to serve my country, push myself, and prove what I was made of. No paperwork, no cubicles, no bullshit.
Fast-forward to today. Compass Coffee has grown beyond anything I could have imagined. It’s successful, thriving, and expanding. But success comes with a catch: I’ve found myself getting pulled further and further away from the things that got me into coffee in the first place. I’m no longer spending my days behind the bar or roasting coffee. Instead, I’m drowning in paperwork, lease negotiations, and legal contracts.
Running a business means doing a lot of things that are absolutely critical, but not exactly fun. Negotiating leases, for example, is one of the most consequential parts of my job as a CEO of a retail business. A bad lease can cripple your business, while a good lease can set you up for long-term success. But the process? Oh, the process.
The Official Lease Review Starter Pack
Negotiating a lease feels like stepping into an old black-and-white film—a world where everything moves at a glacial pace, and the tools of the trade feel like they belong to another era. Picture a room filled with stacks of paperwork, fussy typewriters clicking away, and people in stuffy suits debating the placement of commas in legal clauses. That’s exactly how the process feels today: slow, overly formal, and hopelessly outdated. What should be a modern, streamlined experience instead feels like you’ve been transported back in time, trapped in a never-ending reel of inefficiency. It’s frustrating, expensive, and entirely unnecessary for a growing business like Compass Coffee.
It’s infuriating, inefficient, and the opposite of what I enjoy. I’m not a great student, never have been. I hate the structure of classroom learning, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend hours poring over dense legal documents. But as a CEO, I have to do these things. They’re critical to growing Compass Coffee and being a responsible leader. The challenge is doing them without wasting time, money, or my sanity.
Enter Spellbook, my guardian angel of lease negotiations. It’s a game-changing AI tool that reviews and suggests language for contracts. Think of it as a lawyer’s brain, but faster, cheaper, and refreshingly uncomplicated.
Flashback to November 2022: I’ll never forget the day ChatGPT-3 came out. Sure, it could tell semi-clever fart jokes and spin some entertaining stories about my mom’s toy poodle, Atticus, but it wasn’t anywhere close to being useful for something serious—like legal work. Fast forward a year, and ChatGPT-4 dropped. It was smarter, more refined, and definitely more capable, but still not quite hitting the mark for what I needed. Then, last week, I finally got off the waitlist for Spellbook—and instantly, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Under the supervision of my lawyer, I can now use Spellbook to fully review a lease and compare it against my lease template, ensuring that every provision important to Compass is accounted for.
Spellbook simply just makes this whole process smarter. It’s like having a tireless legal assistant that gets better every time you use it. The more contracts we run through Spellbook, the smarter it becomes. Over time, it builds consistency across our agreements, so we’re not reinventing the wheel every time we negotiate.
And those tiny details that lawyers love to argue about? Missing clauses? Spellbook catches them. It’s like having a high-powered legal radar, making sure nothing slips through the cracks—without me spending hours combing through pages of dense legal jargon.
The best part? Spellbook has slashed our legal fees by 80%. Fewer meetings, less arguing, and a whole lot less money spent on lawyers billing by the hour. It’s faster, cheaper, and just makes sense. Plus, this streamlined process means we can finalize leases and open new cafes much faster than ever before. The money we save on lawyers can be reinvested into things that actually matter—opening new cafes, training our team, and creating better experiences for our customers.
Most importantly, using AI tools like Spellbook gives me back my time. I get to focus on the parts of Compass Coffee that I love: helping people grow, developing new opportunities, and making our customers’ days better.
At its core, this is about more than just saving money (though that’s obviously a huge bonus). It’s about using technology to bridge the gap between the things you have to do and the things you want to do. For me, I lean into AI tools like Spellbook to handle the areas where I’m weak—like reading and negotiating contracts—so I can spend my energy on what I’m good at and passionate about.
Running a business will always come with some mundane tasks. That’s just the reality of leadership. But by embracing technology, we can work smarter, move faster, and invest in what really matters.
