Bob Googe is the owner of Jittery Joe’s Coffee, which has nine locations in Athens and 17 nationwide.

Q: You got into the coffee business by happenstance after volunteering at your daughter’s elementary school. After you officially entered the business, what was the hardest learning curve?

So learning the coffee was a lot of fun because I always liked coffee. I think the hard part was learning how to run the systems side of a business. I enjoy people, and I like building businesses, and I like hiring people and training people and greeting customers and all that kind of stuff. But if you’re actually going to actually run a real business, it’s not just sort of a hobby or a one-shop business, you have to have systems to support it. So the hardest part was doing that, and I’m not very good at it, but my wife (Deborah Googe) is excellent at it.

Q: How did she learn to do that?

She met with our accountant, and she was like, “What do I need to know? What software do I need to learn? What do I need to do to get you the information in the manner that you need so that our financial statements make sense?” So she just sort of built her internal systems over time, and she discovered what we needed.

Q: Do you credit specific attributes about the way you handled these learning curves as the key to your success?

Yeah, I mean, when I first bought the first store, I didn’t know the difference between a cappuccino and a latte. My ego is involved in how well does it work? If your ego is in doing it right, then you have a chance to grow, you have a chance to learn, you have a chance to get better, and you can interact delightfully with people. But if you’re defensive, the customer gets upset. You get upset, things go out wrong. I mean, it’s just a mess. The real secret is to walk and go, “Guys, yes I’m your boss. Guys, I don’t know anything. Teach me. Pretend like I’m an idiot because I am,” and just go from there. I think that was a huge launching pad for me.

Q: You’ve now been in this business for around 22 years. Have you seen any changes in the Athens food and drink industry?

The vast majority of retail food or drink in Athens when we first started was local. I would say the majority of the food in Athens now is chain. There wasn’t a Cava, you know there wasn’t Gusto. There’s a bunch of Starbucks, there’s Dunkin’, there’s Krispy Kreme, there’s Panera, none of that was here and so now we are competing against giant multinational businesses there.

Q: How do you adapt to those changes?

What we try to do is something we’ve always done is just sort of double down on it as we want to be the Athens community shop, right? We don’t have the advertising and the media presence of the big people, so we had to sort of get into people’s hearts on a more local level. We have four stores on campus. That means that students are a significant portion of our customer base and a significant portion of our employee base. So when a student asked me if I can come talk to a class or sit for an interview we put it in our schedule because we owe it to y’all.

Comments are edited for length and clarity.

Caroline Danzi is a public relations and communications major covering business and consumer news.