We met Lucas Philips or, as many of his friends call him, “Brewcas” in the Garage, where it all started.
The name “Brewcas” came from BrewBike, a startup that Lucas co-founded when he was a freshman two years ago. BrewBike is the very first student-run coffee business on campus. With a coffee bike that circles around in warmer days and a coffee shop inside Annenberg Hall, BrewBike has become an essential part of the Northwestern community. It has been providing students with their daily dose of caffeine fix for over a year. We sat down with Lucas, the man behind BrewBike, to talk about the journey of his business from the very beginning and the inner growth of him as a student entrepreneur.
Lucas started his pursuit of entrepreneurship when he first came to Northwestern. “When I got to college, I just wanted to start a business,” he said. He started by finding a problem and later realized that the problem was always there in his daily life: it is just too hard to get a good cup of coffee on campus. As a caffeine addict (like many of us), he would walk to Coffee Lab from his dorm room in the freezing cold to get his daily caffeine fix. How to get a good cup of coffee on campus became the problem Lucas was trying to solve.
With a passion for coffee and little experience in entrepreneurship, Lucas took the ideas to his peers and mentors. He came up with the bike idea after talking to his former partner: Heritage Bicycles in Chicago. Lucas said he always had a vision of the design and the aesthetics of the shop. It is something that flows to him naturally. The things that he had to learn is management, people, and many many “how to(s)” that will come as he manages the business. “How to have tough conversations?” “How to read people?” “How to frame things for different people?” Just to name a few. Those how to(s) become the most valuable learning experiences of him as a student entrepreneur.
It has been two years since Lucas first founded BrewBike. We asked him how are things different from two years ago. “The core of BrewBike is still the same,” he said. The goal has always been providing affordable, convenient coffee for students. He is the one who has grown with the business for the past two years. The daily challenges pushed him to learn to leverage team members’ experiences to solve problems. There are countless “how to(s)” that come with running a business. Each single problem motivates Lucas to keep learning. He said it is a challenging and crazy ride but he is enjoying the journey.
Now an established business on campus, Lucas is pleased with the size of BrewBike as it is today. There is potential to expand to other campuses, but overall, Lucas is more interested in making BrewBike sustainable here in Evanston.
After spending the last few years concentrating on expansion, Lucas is now focused on settling into that growth and further establishing BrewBike. While BrewBike is still very much a young scrappy startup, Lucas is now putting time into further establishing it as a brand for students with multiple offerings. This could allow BrewBike to collaborate with new organizations in the future. As a student entrepreneur who started the business from this very campus, Northwestern will always be close to Lucas’s heart. He said that he wanted to help Northwestern students and that has been the same from the beginning. That is what he is passionate about and that will forever be in the identity of BrewBike.
Before Lucas had to run to his next call, we asked him about the tips he would give to future student entrepreneurs. “This is the time to do it,” he said. He emphasized the importance of not being afraid of failures. As a college student, there is far less to lose than a working adult. “The worst case scenario is your startup fails and you go back to your dorm room and continue being a college student,” Lucas said. It is his adventurous spirit and fearlessness of failures that landed him on the long road of entrepreneurship. These two spirits will keep fueling him as he continues on with BrewBike or any other new ideas he has for the future.
Some tips Lucas gave to future student entrepreneurs.
