A Conversation with Greg Ward of Bridge City Coffee

When you walk into Bridge City, you’re greeted by the hum of a bright blue espresso machine, vibrant orange chairs communing around unfussy tables, the lively conversations of friends and colleagues over hot lattes and iced coffees, and the smiles of young, friendly baristas behind the coffee bar.

The space’s design remains refreshingly simple, save for some discerningly chosen art and trailing green plants. On the back wall, it’s hard to miss the thick black letters spelling out Bridge City’s mission: “Building value and hope in people through coffee.”

Greg Ward’s journey into impact-based for-profit work was a gradual one. His father is a carpenter, and growing up, Greg found himself working for his dad. In his teenage years, he took a job waiting tables, and another working at a pizza restaurant. “That didn’t last long,” Greg laughs. A post-collegiate move to Denver led Greg to a business owned and operated by a church that was designed to engage the culture around it through a concert venue. “I learned a lot about impact and business there, working my way up from bartender to executive director.”

“One day, I was in line at a Jersey Mike’s with my wife. We saw this good employee. She was fairly young. We engaged with her first, and she was really great. And then her coworkers were just terrible to her. She was so great, and they were awful. They were just dragging her down. And that’s when I told my wife, ‘Someday -- maybe thirty years from then, I thought -- I want to open up a restaurant where we will treat people like human beings and try to show them the worth they deserve.’

Everyone has to work, and it’s where we spend a third of our lives, based on a 40-hour work week and sleeping seven hours a day. Barring trauma or some other [terrible] experience, what do we all complain about most? Work. I knew there had to be a better way.

I wanted to redeem the service industry and the experience of the workplace."

In 2017, Greg and his wife moved from Denver to Greenville. After months of dreaming and planning, Greg and his business partner opened up Bridge City that December. But it didn’t come without setbacks.

“Eighty thousand dollars of investment money fell through right when we opened, which of course made things very difficult. Then a few months later, my business partner had to move back to Kansas City to take care of family. Of course, he did half the operations, so I was trying to figure out how to do that without him. In May, we had our second daughter, and then we opened the drive-thru. As a new business, much more money was going out than coming in, which you kind of expect. And then Covid hit.”

“At that point, we had to make a decision. We were $60,000 in credit card debt. Our mission has always been building value in people through coffee-- that really is the whole purpose. It’s not just on the wall, or something we just say. That is the reason we exist. Coffee is the vehicle for a bigger end goal. So at that point, I was thinking, ‘Should we start cutting corners to save money and stay afloat??’ I was personally in debt as well from all of this. But we chose to stick to the mission. And if it went up in a ball of flames because we stuck to the mission, that’s what we would do.”

In March of 2020, Greg initiated a public fundraiser for his staff, where he was able to raise six thousand dollars to continue to pay his employees. PPP also rolled out around then. ”We were able to give a chunk of that to my employee’s PTO because they were incredible during the pandemic. The rest of the money was used to start the Bridge Fund Collective. We did everything we could to keep everyone, and in the end, we didn’t let a single person go. That’s how we kept it going during Covid.

Two and half years in, Bridge City is out of debt, and doing exactly what they set out to do: building value and hope in people through coffee. Employees are learning important life skills through their work, some participating in fund matching incentives to empower them to save money to buy a car or a laptop for school. Others are receiving budget coaching.

“My goal for all of [the employees at Bridge City] is for them to discover their worth as individuals. The formula I’ve come up with is Value or Worth + Purpose = Hope. It’s not revolutionary in the initial concept. But if you don’t understand your worth and value apart from performance or status, then you won’t believe you’re worth having a better future -- so you won’t hope. And if you don’t begin to move through and understand your purpose, which I define as the collection of our ambitions, it’s the same result. But when you understand both of those things, you begin to hope. That’s the number one goal here. And we have achieved that.”

To learn more about Bridge City, and their newest initiative, The Bridge Fund, head to https://bridgecity.coffee/bridge-fund.