No Ceiling Season 3 Guest: Michelle Billionis

Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.

Michelle Billionis is my guest on the first episode of No Ceiling Season 3. She owns The Coffee Ethic. It’s a role she took on suddenly six years ago after the death of her husband, Tom. She says she’s been on a journey since then, to navigate trauma, raise her children and assume the responsibilities of the coffee shop. Michelle says she rediscovered herself in the process and found her own voice and strength in business. In this episode, we talk about grief and finding joy again, and how she’s grown her business by listening to her gut.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Christine Temple: The Coffee Ethic’s ethos is Cup, People, Earth. Can you tell me a little bit about what that meant to you when The Coffee Ethic was starting and how that mission has evolved?
Michelle Billionis: Cup, People, Earth was the initial tagline when we opened in 2007. When I rewrote the business plan in 2016-17, I found that it still held true, and I wanted to keep it. Cup is all about quality and trying to create the best experience for the customer. The people part is my absolute favorite part, and that has changed for me quite a bit. People for me equals community. If I could add another word, it would be love. Love for our community, love for people and being curious about people. But there’s so much more to the people aspect. If you think about coffee and you talk about where it comes from and you talk about the relationships with the families and farmers in other countries where we source our coffee, there’s a whole crazy cool relationship that forms. Earth, for me, is all about our responsibility as a business and as individuals to be responsible for taking care of the Earth. We started that initially in 2007. We were one of the few coffee shops, I believe, at least in the Midwest, that was trying hard to be responsible, sustainable. But then I’m discovering that sustainability can also mean your business practices and how you treat your employees.

Temple: Six years ago, your husband Tom suddenly passed away and you were left with this business, you were left with three young girls that now you’re the only parent to. Can you go back to that time in terms of what was that experience for you? How did you figure out what the priority was? Because you had so many things that you had to take care of.
Billionis: I know that a lot of people have gone through grief. That was my first major loss. I was basically a shell of myself. The decision was, do I keep the coffee shop and run the coffee shop, or do I continue in my current job and sell the coffee shop? That was what I had to decide as the parent and the owner because I was now the owner. I just said, “Girls, what do you think we should do? Can you imagine not having the coffee shop?” It was pretty quick for me to realize that I could not imagine, and neither could my girls, to not have the coffee shop. It became such a part of our lives, and we just love it. We love what it could do and the potential.

Related: No Ceiling from SBJ Podcasts