Nicholas is the Founder and CEO of Bluestone Lane, a premium Australian cafe and lifestyle brand that has over 50 locations across 8 markets, that aims to be the local spot for your daily coffee escape. Nicholas’ way-finding journey has spanned across three professional careers: the Australian Football League (AFL), banking for UBS and ANZ, and now full-time in hospitality with Bluestone Lane.

His morning routine

My morning routine has changed dramatically since having kids (I have two young children: a three year old and one year old). I prioritize quality time with them and exercising in order to get my day started well. The majority of our team and stores are based on the East Coast, they're up and at-it when it’s 5am/6am here and 8am/9am there. It's tough to juggle the most pressing things workwise, having young children, and getting in a small amount of alone time for fitness, and mental framing.

I’m fortunate to have an incredible partner that enables it all to happen, but it's still a work in progress. My wife and I collaborate so that we both can make time to exercise, whether it be to jump on the Peloton, go for a walk, do yoga or what have you. This morning as an example, the kids woke up at 6:15am. I spent time with them, read some books, got them changed, had breakfast, unpacked the dishwasher, fed the dog, that sort of stuff, while my wife got on the Peloton. Then, we exchanged. 

Prior to having kids, my wife and I lived in NY for about nine years. Every morning we would go to a fitness class, get a coffee and go to work. It was a pretty simple morning routine.

What life design means to him

Life design for me really resonates with:

What are your overarching priorities? 

What do you value the most as a person? 

What is your legacy going to be? 

I’ve had three professional chapters already, and I just turned 39. From my 6 years as a professional athlete in the AFL, to my banking career which was for 11 years, and then the last four years full-time with Bluestone Lane.

It’s been an extraordinary journey and throughout this, I have continued to remain focused on the continuity and depth of relationships with people I care most about: my immediate family and friends. And then, ensuring that I’ve continued to allocate time to give myself the best chance of a long, healthy and fulfilling life to support my family particularly my children, which certainly is about health and fitness.

Life design is also about being inquisitive, a relentless focus on learning, and having an open mind everyday, while trying to understand more about the world and how you can contribute to your smaller community (which can then have a bigger impact on the world).

On his eating habits

We’ve basically been plant based for the last 2.5 years. My wife is very into health and wellness. She’s a biomedical scientist, studied nutrition post-grad, and was an international fashion model and the face of a lot of fitness and beauty brands, such as Athleta. So, she's got a terrific understanding of the wellness and healthy-lifestyle movement, and has been an architect of the Bluestone Lane menu and our brand.

We’ve always been health conscious and focused on maintaining a sustainable diet. Not that we can’t have moments of indulgence––I love having a beer with my mates and occasion treats like that. I think there’s ways you can do it that are sensible and balanced. If I do have steak, I'll have it once a month. For me it’s often not about completely eliminating, it's just about materially reducing the amount of our consumption.

The Harvard Medical School published a study called the Plate and the Planet. It’s about a “Planetary diet” that would not only dramatically improve the life expectancy of our society, but also that helps with climate change. I think this diet should be the roadmap for everybody.

On information and inspiration

People's appetite for information is voracious, because people are looking for answers. They're looking for hope, they're looking for signals to give them confidence that life’s going to go back to the way it was. There’s so much you can learn from both podcasts and newsletters by well-rounded and experienced individuals. I listen to a number of podcasts, and I read a lot of articles by a few trusted news outlets or posts on LinkedIn. The level of trust and authenticity is what I value the most about it.

I seek inspiration and motivation from fellow founders, by learning about their journey and how they continue with such passion to invest in their companies, their teams and customers. There are a few people that have inspired me tremendously through my Bluestone Lane journey, although I don’t know them personally. Howard Schultz is one of them without a doubt. The brand he built and the change Starbucks facilitated in consumer behavior was extraordinary. I’ve been enamored with Richard Branson for a very long time. I remember reading Losing My Virginity maybe 15 years ago, and it was such an incredible book. From a business and startup perspective, I love listening to Reid Hoffman’s podcast, Masters of Scale. 

Curating life design

We live very close to the ocean, so we have the chance to go to the beach often. One thing that I want to get back into is surfing, and trying to make time for it in the morning, because I think it's terrific. It's good for fitness, and it's constructive for mental health because I can't take my phone in the ocean.

Curating authentic relationships

It's easy to get caught up in the troughs, and let negative news or events impact your vitality, mood, and optimism. I have found it essential to find positive energizers in your community, family, or friends that can keep you going and updated. Without those “believers and fans”, I’m certain I couldn’t have achieved what I have in my professional career to date. I feel very fortunate to have them. 

This is something I’m looking to provide to other entrepreneurs and individuals in the future as an investor and advisor, particularly given a positive energizer can be the difference between success and failure––it’s that sensitive. Mental health is one of the largest and fastest growing societal health challenges, and I’m determined to be part of the solution to help others.

I really needed the support when Bluestone Lane effectively collapsed as a byproduct of COVID. Revenue fell 90% in two weeks. It wasn’t through any fault of our own, it wasn't like we were operating poorly or we didn't want to open our stores. We were forced to close as there were no customers anymore. Dealing with that and trying to stay upbeat, I learned that you need to be conscious so that you can contribute positivity and keep yourself motivated and optimistic. It’s important to be careful not to absorb information and energy that will suppress you and add more weight to any challenges.

His stepping stone into the hospitality industry

While working in banking, it was quite apparent to me how different the coffee culture was and how much I missed that twice daily escape. I missed the daily ritual of going down with my colleagues and socializing over a great cup of coffee. I missed walking into a place where the barista knows my name when placing an order. Somewhere that I am a true local, not a customer. I thought there's a terrific opportunity with a younger demographic, that's interested in premium experiences, products and services.

I started to formulate this idea and didn't really act on it for a couple of years. Finally in mid 2013, while I was still working in banking, we launched our first coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan. It was in a subterranean basement, with no street visibility or signage. This was our stepping stone into the hospitality industry. I went full time with Bluestone Lane in 2016, when we scaled to 12 stores. Since then, we’ve grown our business to over 50 stores across eight different markets. 

The vision for Bluestone Lane was very different at the start. I didn't even really think that I would be necessarily going full time and ever work in hospitality. I thought that it would be a side thing. It was really created out of self necessity, as I felt to be my best in NYC I needed my Melbourne ritual of getting daily coffee at my local cafe. 

Most challenging aspect of scaling

We’re in the people business as we don’t have a product that is uniform (that is part of our future though via CPG Coffee), which you can just distribute and sell.

We are very focused on providing a service that's reliant on people. Challenges of scaling this kind of a business centralize around ensuring uniformity, consistency and robustness of expectations and standards. Recruiting and training to ensure that everyone on your team is executing your proposition consistently is the largest and most common challenge within the hospitality and retail industry. 

As you get larger and gain access to more experienced talent, you bring people in that have done it before and know what high-performance looks like. They can transfer their experience and confidence in effort to scale and build out your business into different regions.

We've been through a number of iterations to find the right balance of seasoned experience versus youthful enthusiasm. It is still a top priority for us to have a team with people who’ve grown up with the business and who were promoted from within; however, at different inflection points you have to inject talent who have broader experience and can really act as coaches. 

Going from boot-strapped to VC-backed

We grew our store footprint to about 25 stores before we sourced institutional ventured capital financing. I think it's very fortunate that I've come from the banking & finance industry, so I was able to present and articulate what the company is about, our purpose, how we create value, how we can be an attractive investment proposition, and how we can crystallize a return on that investment. 

We completed seven rounds of funding, five rounds of financing augmented with two bridge rounds. There were a couple things that stood out to us about RSE Ventures when we were looking for the right institutional investors. 

1. Entrepreneur Ethos: RSE Ventures primarily invest in Founder-led companies, so they have unique insight into what building a business with a very entrepreneurial mindset is like. Both Co-Founders of RSE are serial entrepreneurs and are high achievers, so it was apparent from our early dialogue that they would be very supportive of my vision and the journey of building a brand and all nuances and emotions that go into it. 

2. Trust: We found a tremendous amount of comfort in the fact that a number of brands they’ve invested in, were companies we admired. The way they operated, the authentic relationships with their customers, and also their positioning. RSE Ventures has experience in supporting companies that operate in the same industry as us, which is important because there are certain nuances across different sectors. You want to make sure you're not taking an investment from someone who has no idea about the business cycle, challenges, and opportunities. You need investors who are pretty involved in your space.

3. Patience: We focused on making sure we have a partner that is patient and invested in us, rather than in it to mechanize, control, and optimize from day one for an economic return. It was important for us to find investors that will let the entrepreneurial spirit live on, and that invest in relationships to build brand awareness through patience and support, and that’s what they certainly have been. 

On doing your due diligence

There are a lot of investors out there, so you definitely need to dig into what their real motivation is. Some are purely financial investors, that are looking at return on capital, and that is the only thing that they really care about. They’ll position themselves or try to influence your business so that they get the outcome they want. Where some other investors are more interested in building something that can be everlasting or a lot larger. That time commitment and threshold varies dramatically. I spoke to a number of founders and CEOs of the portfolio companies of RSE to ask them:

1. Is RSE a good partner?

2. Are they truthful to what they're representing to me? Is it authentic? 

3. Are they empathetic?

4. Are they calm?

5. Do they support the business through good and bad times?

6. Give me some examples where you've had really tough moments.

Changing the food and beverage incentive landscape

It’s a real shame and an indictment on humanity, that the most successful restaurant, coffee, or hospitality brands primarily sell processed food. High in sugar, high in fat, and other ingredients that lead to elevated risk of diseases and illnesses. 

Businesses that sell processed frozen foods with very limited nutritional content are the most successful as it relates to size, market capitalization, and even operating profit margin, because by eliminating naturally perishable ingredients you can have better margins. This incentive landscape really frustrates me enormously, and it’s something that I’d love to see change. 

In addition to the negative health consequences of these processed foods on the human lifespan, the big fast food players are key contributors to climate change. The beef, livestock, processed foods, shipping frozen products around the country are all significant emitters of carbon. 

A few words to athletes

Whatever you're doing right now in your athletic career is only going to be one chapter in your book. Life beyond being an athlete is really exciting because this opens to the second chapter, where you get to use your skills developed and honed as an athlete to innovate and push the limits outside of the sports setting. 

All the skills you’ve built by being in a high-performance elite team environment and all the selfless work put in to become a better player, is going to be so valuable when you face a challenge throughout your next career. All of the training and sinew will come to the forefront again. What you’ve learned isn’t just applicable on the field, track, court, or in the pool. This was a guiding principle of mine, which helped me transfer my skills when I transitioned into banking, and then being able to apply that skillset to become a great leader while founding a premium brand and building a team in an industry I had no experience in––hospitality.

I’m thankful for my parents and brother for keeping me focused on the larger things outside of life than just being a sports star. If you compartmentalize it, when your sports chapter comes to an end, you still have excitement and utility about something else. I see a lot of athletes that tie everything to that one period, and believe as though nothing else will be as good as that lifestyle and they’re pretty close minded. They haven't invested in and thought about their future.

To those that have, I think that they move on from their sports chapter and they channel their energy and all those skills in another way, and still get tons of enjoyment from it. It may not be as purely blissful as playing at your best, but it still brings plenty of utility and excitement.