So, You Want to be an Entrepreneur? Keep Learning.  

That’s what successful serial entrepreneur Aaron Contreras says as he returns to Auburn’s Harbert College of Business to finish his degree. 

Aaron Contreras, Managing Partner of Volcanica Coffee, a Suwanee, Georgia-based specialty coffee company he co-founded, is back at Auburn working to complete his degree after leaving the Harbert College of Business to successfully pursue multiple start-up opportunities almost ten years ago. 

Some may ask why the leader of a fast-growing, self-funded company that has been profitable from Day One would take time away from running it to finish his degree. With his company poised to break the $10 million a year run rate threshold in a highly competitive market dominated by huge players, what knowledge or skillset could he hope to gain that he doesn’t already possess?

“That’s a great question,” says Contrares, who is not only back in classes this fall, but is also taking advantage of the experience, expertise and resources available at Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator – an organization that didn’t exist when he left Auburn. 

“First of all,” says Contreras, “I’m not taking time off from running Volcanica. I’m enrolled in the online Bachelor of Science in Business Administration program at Harbert, which is a completer program designed for working professionals and others who left the university at some point but have a desire to come back and complete their degree without leaving their positions or responsibilities in the business world. That’s one of the beauties of the program.” 

“As for what I hope to learn, it’s pretty straightforward. I’m confident in what I do know, but I’m also aware of what I still need to learn. I have hands-on experience with what it takes to succeed during the first few months and years of a start-up, particularly when it comes to leveraging digital marketing to jumpstart and grow an initial customer base and drive revenue and profitability early on. But when it comes to taking a promising market leader to the next level, I felt that mission required a set of skills I simply didn’t have – yet.

The NVA sat down with Aaron in his office at Volcanica’s facilities in North Georgia to get an up close and personal look at the family-owned business he worked at as a child and now heads. 

NVA: Let’s begin with how Volcanica was started – the company’s origin story. 

Contreras: Back in 2004, my father, Maurice – who was born in Costa Rica – had a dream to bring great Costa Rican coffee to the United States. Our family’s connection to Costa Rica goes back to the early 1900s, when my great grandparents and great, great uncles living there would organize the coffee harvests, taking the kids out of school to help with the picking.  

I remember how one vacation we took to Costa Rica when I was very young turned into a hunt to find a small, independent coffee farm Maurice could start working with to import roasted coffee beans back to our home in the United States. 

He would stock them in a little freezer in the garage. When he’d get an order online, I would package them up and place the stickers on each of the bags, helping him prep the orders to ship. They were all whole beans at first, but later we bought a grinder, and I would grind up the beans for some of the orders.  

This experience had a great impact on me. Maurice was an established senior corporate executive back then, making six figures at the time. This coffee business wasn’t his primary job, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a relatively small endeavor – what you’d call a “side gig” these days. But it was profitable and allowed us to be able to afford things like nice vacations. 

NVA: Fast forward to when you left Auburn in pursuit of your own entrepreneurial desires – talk to us about that decision back in 2015 and how it worked out.  

Contreras: My entrepreneurial journey actually started during my senior year of high school. I was doing business competitions with DECA, formerly the Distributive Education Clubs of America, and I accidentally signed up for what I thought was a marketing contest, but in fact, it was an accounting competition. I didn’t know that until late the day before.  

So, I dug in, and overnight I learned how to compile depreciation schedules on assets, read income statements, calculate cash flow – just the basics, really. I ended up getting first place. I quickly realized from that experience that I had a mind for business and started thinking about how I was going to make real money while in college – I didn’t want to be a poor college student working for minimum wage. 

I was really big into mobile apps at the time – 2014, 2015 – and there was a company back then called Cinemagram that had raised about $70 million alongside of Instagram, competing with them. Cinemagram was struggling to deliver despite the funds they raised and was not able to compete with Instagram, but there was still a lot of money in the bank there at the time. I got in with this company through helping them out – unbeknownst to them at first.  

I simply went out and bought their domains and secured their Twitter and Instagram accounts for a new product they were working on. I then approached the company, and I said, “Hey, you guys don’t know me, but my name’s Aaron and I just bought all your domains and secured all your social media handles. I see that your company’s growing and I want to transfer ownership of them over to you.” They were surprised and asked, “How much do you want for them?” They were ready to cut me a check right then and there for thousands of dollars 

I told them, “I don’t want money, I just want a job. I’ll give them to you for free if you hire me. Make me your social media manager, make me your content creator, whatever.” And they said, “Okay, great.” As a freshman entering Auburn University, they put me on Product and Marketing Development for a new app that they were building called Yeti Campus Stories, which ended up becoming the number one app on Auburn’s campus in 2015. I helped Yeti Campus Stories achieve thousands of daily active users and added over 10,000 users per day from my dorm in the Hill, Dunn Hall which doesn’t even exist now with the new developments on campus. 

The company faced some challenges with content and eventually shut down, but I walked away with a solid payout. So, there I was at Auburn, not quite rolling in steady income but definitely not starting from scratch either. 

NVA: That’s when you decided to move to New York City, right? 

Contreras: Yes. You have to remember that entrepreneurship wasn’t a focus at Auburn at the time – there was no New Venture Accelerator or coursework focused on starting and growing a new business back then.  

So, I up and moved to New York City and started a company called HypeWave Technologies, an application that focused on highlighting musicians and giving them a platform to be heard, similar to SoundCloud. That company failed to gain traction and would eventually become dissolved after raising a ton of money.  

I was out of a job, but I was still working for my dad’s company doing a bit of email marketing on the side, working remotely out of my apartment in New York, just to build up a little income to pay my bills while helping my dad out.  

But here I was living on Wall Street, my rent is $6,000 a month at WeLive, and now I’m not doing all that much other than working out at Equinox right across from the New York Stock Exchange every day alongside all these top Wall Street traders, Goldman Sachs executives, big hedge fund managers, Blackrock, Deutsche Bank, etc. I would help spot them, re-rack their weights, and they’d be asking me “Hey, what’s your name? What do you do? Where do you work?” 

I was meeting a lot of investors, but none of them seemed interested in talking about how to grow a company, what a well-run operation looks like. It was all about raising money, not running a business – which was what I was interested in learning about.  

NVA: So that’s why you decided to come back to Auburn?  

Contreras: That’s right. Interestingly, all this talk about raising money at the levels these folks were doing every day changed my perspective about how big a small business could become if it had access to the resources needed to grow exponentially beyond initial start-up success.       

Around that time, I was closely following Willie Morris, an Auburn alum living in New York who graduated in 2007 and went on to launch FaithBox with Gary Vaynerchuck. His entrepreneurial journey from Auburn to building a successful company really resonated with me. I kept finding myself looking back at Auburn and the entrepreneurs who came before me. It reinforced this idea that Auburn isn’t just a place you graduate from – it’s a community that continues to inspire long after you leave. Morris’ story showed me that scaling up wasn’t just about working hard; it was about building something bigger, with the right vision and support. 

I also was reading a book by Seth Godin called Tribes, in which he talks about building a tribe of a thousand people, that if you have a thousand people – customers – you can grow that business into something much bigger. That statement about the thousand customer threshold was super powerful. Volcanica had a little over a thousand customers at the time, although they weren’t ordering consistently, which I thought I could change. 

So, I returned to Auburn to help Maurice take Volcanica to the next level. And it worked – we went from doing $1.2 million in 2018 to a much larger multiple this year. We’re cash flow positive and – more importantly – we’ve been consistently profitable every year of our existence. All this from a self-funded initial investment of $500,000. 

NVA: With all this experience, what would you tell your fellow classmates at Auburn about starting their own businesses? 

Contreras: First thing, stay in school. You don’t have to do what I did ten years ago. You have literally everything you need right here at Auburn, thanks to the New Venture Accelerator and the expanding entrepreneurial curriculum at the Harbert College of Business.  

If I had access to the extraordinary expertise and guidance I am currently receiving from NVA Director Lou Bifano, Entrepreneurs-in Residence Scott McGlon, Ward Swift, Greg Cessna, Barry Thomasson and others – not to mention all the business support services the NVA offers students – I definitely would have stayed in school myself. 

But there’s much more to it than that. Through the NVA, I have recently been introduced to Greg Winchester, Industry Alumni and Relations Head at Harbert and namesake of the Winchester Institute for Real Estate Development at Auburn, who has offered to help guide me as we embark on our expansion. We are planning to build our own specialty warehouse to support our growth, and the Institute’s phenomenal breadth of experience and expertise in commercial real estate development looks to be a big help in that critical initiative. 

Equally exciting is the connection the NVA has made for us with Glenn Richey, Eminent Scholar in Harbert’s Department of Supply Chain Management. It turns out Glenn has considerable experience helping U.S. companies set up operations in Costa Rica and throughout Central America and West Africa – locations that serve as primary sources for our coffee beans, and I look forward to all the benefits his hands-on, in-country expertise will bring.  

I’ve always heard the saying: “If you love Auburn, Auburn will love you back,” and I can wholeheartedly say that I am certainly “feeling the love” today at the Harbert College of Business. 

War Eagle! 

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To learn more about the Harbert College of Business Online Programs click HERE.

For more information on the New Venture Accelerator contact Lou Bifano, Director, at loubifano@auburn.edu or visit their website HERE.