What does pedaling kegs of cold brew coffee on a bicycle and running a century-old auto parts company have in common? For Lucas Philips (SESP ’19), the answer is entrepreneurship.
Often considered “Garage royalty” for being part of The Garage’s very first cohort of Residents in 2015, Philips returned to Northwestern on Wednesday as the Family Dinner speaker.
“I look back on my time at The Garage as one of the most fun chapters of my life,” Philips said to Residents.
Philips’ path has been anything but ordinary. As a freshman he launched BrewBike, the quirky student-run cold brew coffee business that quickly became a fixture at Northwestern. A few years later, at only 24-years-old, he acquired Newark Auto, a 120-year-old company that makes interiors for classic cars.
The son of a small business owner selling physical products, Philips recalled feeling pressure to build “the next Uber” when he arrived at college. But an alum’s story about owning barber shops in Chicago throughout undergrad helped Philips to reconsider.
“I would rather have a profitable small business that no one knows about where I just get to do my thing,” Philips told students. When he discovered a problem on campus – that students were waiting far too long for coffee at the Norris Starbucks – the idea for BrewBike was born.
Outfitted with kegs of cold brew on tap, BrewBike brought in hundreds of dollars in sales per day by the time Philips was a sophomore. While other Northwestern students were tailgating on game days, Philips was hauling kegs of cold brew to tailgates to make sales.
But with early growth came hard lessons, according to Philips. He and his team “put every penny into the bike” to start BrewBike, only to realize they had no money left for day-to-day operations: namely, to pay staff – or buy coffee.
“It felt like we were under a mountain of debt. It was very scary,” he admitted. “But we eventually grew out of that.”
BrewBike went on to win Second Place in VentureCat, expand to multiple college campuses, and raise millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The team expanded in a similar fashion, marking an important turning point for Philips, who by 2021 was ready for something new and pursued a different kind of entrepreneurship: acquiring an existing business.
Walking into Newark Auto’s factory for the first time, Philips was struck by its old-school systems, like a 1970s-era dot matrix printer still in use, which he saw as an opportunity for modernization.
“In The Garage, everybody is using AI and knows how to use it,” Philips said. “If you can take that superpower, which seems normal here, and apply it in its most basic sense to this other world where it doesn’t exist, it’s such a force multiplier. That’s what I do in my business every day.”
Since acquiring Newark Auto, Philips has expanded its catalog with new products, like interiors for vintage Porsches, and built out an e-commerce presence using Shopify. The timing couldn’t be better: the global classic car market is valued at over $40 billion today and projected to reach nearly $78 billion by 2032, according to Credence Research.
“I’ve taken what I’ve learned in The Garage and applied it to businesses that are not so tech-forward,” Philips said. “That’s also a really fruitful path.”
As he wrapped up his time with the Residents, Philips left students with the guiding principle that has carried him through both cold brew bikes and classic car parts alike: focus.
“The times I’ve made the most progress on my business is when I’m really focused on a narrow thing,” Philips said. “The motto that I repeat to myself over and over is: Less but better. Do fewer things, but do them as well as you possibly can.”
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