Firecrackers
Entrepreneurial talent lights up Akron-Canton
Nardos Street, Founder, Bereka Coffee Fueling Community Through Coffee
Coffee has always meant joy and community to Nardos Street, founder of Akron’s Bereka Coff ee. Now it means business too. A native of Ethiopia, Street said coff ee is central to her homeland’s culture.
“Ever since I was a little girl, I roasted coff ee and performed coff ee ceremonies, so it’s what I knew,” she said. “It’s energizing to share my culture with others.”
For the first three years, growth was diffi cult and inconsistent, with business slowly picking up by word of mouth. A social worker at The Blick Center during the day, Street performed coff ee ceremonies and catered events in the evening and on weekends.
Leadership at the Bounce Innovation Hub fi rst became familiar with Street and Bereka Coff ee through her participation in Food Truck Wednesdays and events she catered at Bounce. They told Street about the MORTAR at Bounce program, a 15-week accelerator for minority- and woman-owned businesses. She’s now a graduate.
“I met an amazing group of people through MORTAR and loved every minute of it,” she said. “I feel very blessed that Bounce reached out to me.”
While she also sells authentic Ethiopian food and tea, it’s the coff ee and the important role it plays in bringing people together that was the catalyst for starting her business.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and events were suddenly cancelled, Street had a plan.
“We pivoted to e-commerce to sell our coff ee and teas, and started doing online demos,” she said.
In the past year as in-person events resumed, Street participated in pop-ups at the NoHi commercial kitchen incubator located in the North Hill neighborhood of Akron, which is helping the business grow.
Being part of the community at Bounce has enabled Street to connect with infl uencers, share resources and support other business owners.
As Street looks ahead to the future of Bereka Coff ee, she is currently exploring the Akron area for a brick and mortar café, where she would serve coffee, tea and authentic Ethiopian food.
“It has been an amazing experience to feel love from the community; it’s the fuel to keep moving, “ she said. “This is more than a business. It is a calling to celebrate the beauty of cultural diversity.”
Evan Haug, Chief Executive Officer, LEAF
Evan Haug of Stow was an intern at an electrical company specializing in solar power when the lightbulb went off.
His job there was to design the order—or string —of a solar power array before installation, and he found the engineering process tedious. If he could fi nd a way to automate the manual processes of the design, he’d save engineers time, trouble and money.
So Haug went to work developing an AI-powered AutoCAD plug-in and began to form a company. Logically Engineering Automation Features Ltd., LEAF for short, eventually caught the attention of Bounce Innovation Hub in Akron where it received support needed to evolve into a full-fl edged business.
Bounce connected LEAF with several Northeast Ohio resources. For instance, Thompson Hine LLP handled the company’s legal fi lings, and HJK Digital built its website and other marketing tools. Marcum LLP advised LEAF on accounting.
“All these great resources and people around us pushed us to move forward as quickly as possible, and that’s been valuable to have a little push behind us,” said Haug.
The plug-in works like this: When solar panels are put on a roof, they are strung together. Only a certain number of panels can go together in a certain order to make it an electrically safe project. It’s an engineer’s task to have the whole project designed with each panel wired sequentially. Typically, too much time is spent drawing lines in AutoCAD manually, Haug said.
“Basically, our platform allows engineers to bring their expertise and calculations to the app,” said Haug. “The app will take this information and create the stringing design for the solar panel layout. If changes occur throughout the project, engineers can make adjustments.”
LEAF was one of 10 companies chosen as fi nalists in the American-Made Solar Prize awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Each fi nalist was awarded $100,000 in cash and $75,000 in technical support vouchers.
LEAF said his mentors at Bounce and elsewhere pushed him along, but he advised entrepreneurs they should realize some steps take time.
“We’ve made some thorough decisions and talked things over with advisers,” said Haug, who now devotes all his time to LEAF. “That has set us on the right path to move forward more quickly in the future.”
