Entrepreneur percolates local success

BEHIND EVERY MAN: David Levesque’s company, Brewed Awakenings CoffeeHouse, was founded in 1996 and has since grown to about $4.5 million in sales. By his own admission, he may not be where he is without the input of two strong female voices – his mother, Kay, and his wife and Brewed Awakenings co-owner, Natalie. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
BEHIND EVERY MAN: David Levesque’s company, Brewed Awakenings CoffeeHouse, was founded in 1996 and has since grown to about $4.5 million in sales. By his own admission, he may not be where he is without the input of two strong female voices – his mother, Kay, and his wife and Brewed Awakenings co-owner, Natalie. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

David Levesque has a lot for which to thank the women in his life, and he’s not shy about giving credit where credit is due.
After all, if he hadn’t followed the advice of his mother, Kay, or his wife, Natalie, he might not today be half of the team, with Natalie, that owns four Brewed Awakenings CoffeeHouse locations that serve up to 1,000 customers each daily.
“I have to give credit to my mother. She said, ‘Why don’t we sell coffee,’ and I said ‘It will be a lot of work’,” Levesque said. “She said we could do it.”
And they did. Natalie’s helpful suggestion, which convinced a reluctant Levesque to add a sandwich menu to his shop’s offerings, would come later and many years after the Rhode Island native first entered the state’s entrepreneurial scene.
In the mid-1980s Levesque was a young adult without any formal education, having not finished high school, running the vending department at Johnson & Wales University.
There was a lot of freedom in his position with hiring and ordering, which Levesque said gave him a sense of being his own boss without the worry of how he would actually make money.
“One day I just decided to put out a vending machine of my own. I did that for several years with trial and error and that ended up leading into the office coffee business,” Levesque said.
He was busy stocking local businesses and offices with their weekly coffee supplies when the opportunity to purchase a gift basket presented itself and soon he was the owner of Bella Baskets on Atwood Avenue in Johnston.
That’s when his mother, who was working with him at the basket shop, put her 2 cents in about serving coffee to customers.
“I put out one machine, and soon we had a coffee shop inside the gift-basket shop,” Levesque said. “It seemed to be a steadier source of income, where baskets were extremely seasonal.”
Five years later he expanded to a second location in downtown Providence, opening just before Sept. 11.
Limited parking and, admittedly on his part, a lack of planning, ultimately equaled failure there.
“Business was all over the place, and I lacked the experience on how to build a shop. I took what I was doing in Johnston and mimicked it, but we had no engine behind it,” Levesque said. “It was ignorance and a lack of experience. It was a difficult close, and it cost us a lot of money.” To help compensate, Levesque opened up another shop in South Kingstown in 2003 and, following Natalie’s advice, began offering sandwiches and other items to build a food menu.
By the time he was able to pay off everything he owed on the Providence lease his other two shops were a raging success.
“I never wanted to do sandwiches. I swore up and down I’d never be a lunch place,” he said. “When I met my wife, she said, ‘We have to do egg sandwiches.’ Now, excluding coffee, it’s our best-selling item.”
Brewed Awakenings opened a second Johnston location in 2009 and now has plans to expand the original Atwood Avenue store by 50 percent by taking over adjoining space.
The Cranston store was opened last fall on property Levesque bought that previously was a “distressed old gas station.”
The shop’s menu has expanded well beyond that one egg sandwich to include several other breakfast and lunch sandwiches and wraps as well as salads, pastries and desserts.
Levesque said every food item is prepared to order. There are no pre-made egg patties sitting in a freezer at Brewed Awakenings.
Levesque said doing business in Rhode Island hasn’t been what he would call easy in terms of navigating zoning permits, taxes, fees, and what he called a tendency of a lack of communication between permitting departments.
But his hard work, and that of his family and his employees, some of whom have been with him since the very beginning, has been rewarded, he said.
His goal is to keep growing the company, finding the right store locations, designing each location uniquely, and to continue to successfully compete with larger coffee-shop chains.
“I care so much. I shake hands. I talk to people. And I listen to people,” Levesque said. “That comes from me, from my wife, from my managers and employees. We really care about the customers. That’s what’s made us successful.” •COMPANY PROFILE
Brewed Awakenings CoffeeHouse
Owners: David and Natalie Levesque
Type of Business: Coffee shop and restaurant
Location: 1395 Atwood Ave., Johnston; 1577 Atwood Ave., Johnston; 60 South County Commons Way, South Kingstown; 1200 Pontiac Ave., Cranston
Employees: 38 full time, 102 total
Year Established: 1996
Annual Sales: About $4.5 million

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