We Started a Hotel Company the Day America Shut Down

Three partners. Seven hotel deals. One meeting at a corporate headquarters that would shut down before we got home. And the pivot that turned it all into 15 Scooter's Coffee locations in under 3 years.

In late 2019, my partners and I launched BraveHart Development.

The plan was simple: build hotels across the Midwest. And the team we assembled was built for exactly that.

My partner Troy Hart is a third-generation hotelier whose family had been in the industry for decades. He had the relationships, the track record, and the deep institutional knowledge of how hotel deals actually get done.

My partner Brandon Vonnahme brought the financial rigor. Master's in Finance. Former bank examiner. Former senior loan officer and COO of a regional bank. Brandon understands capital structure, investor relations, and risk management at a level most operators never touch.

I brought 20+ years of operational experience: P&L ownership, supply chain, team building, and the ability to take a plan and make it real on the ground.

Three partners. Three completely different skill sets. Zero overlap. That's not an accident, it's the whole point.

And for a few months, it worked.

Within weeks of forming BraveHart, we had 7 hotel projects in the pipeline. We were working with Ryan Rivett, the founder and CEO of MyPlace Hotels, an extended-stay brand with 59 locations at the time, on developing several Midwest properties. And we had just secured a meeting with one of the largest hotel chains in the world.

Not a cold call. Not a pitch deck over email. A real meeting. In Maryland. At their corporate headquarters.

They were prepared to offer BraveHart a significant line of credit to build out a prototype we had developed, across the entire Midwest. This was the kind of deal that changes everything.

The Dinner

The night before the meeting, we had dinner with their executive team. The conversation was exciting: collaborative, interactive, the kind of dinner where you're sketching ideas on napkins and everyone's leaning in.

Then the phones started going off.

Not ours. Theirs. One by one, the executives started glancing down, stepping away, whispering. The energy at the table shifted. You could feel something was wrong before anyone said it out loud.

Finally, they told us.

Their corporate office was shutting down. Effective immediately. The country was starting to lock down. COVID had arrived, not as a headline anymore, but as a reality that was about to dismantle everything.

But here's the thing, they didn't cancel the meeting. They figured out how to keep it alive. The next morning, they opened one conference room for us. We had to stay secluded in one area of the building and leave immediately after.

The Meeting Nobody Thought Would Happen

We showed up. We ran the meeting. And it went great.

The executives were enthusiastic. The deal made sense. The numbers worked. Everyone shook hands and said the words you want to hear: "We're excited about this."

On the drive home, we were still planning. Still dreaming. We knew COVID could be a disruption, but we thought it would be a blip on the radar. A few weeks of noise, then back to business.

We didn't realize the world was about to stop.

The Collapse

As the weeks turned into months, the blip became a black hole. Hotels didn't just slow down, they became toxic. Occupancy cratered. Chains froze development. Investors pulled back.

One by one, our 7 projects evaporated. And the deal with the major chain, the one that went so well in Maryland, died quietly. No dramatic phone call. No official rejection. Just silence, and then the slow realization that it was never coming back.

We had started a hotel development company in arguably the worst environment for hotels in modern history.

The Reckoning

Brandon and I hit a wall. We genuinely contemplated going back, getting jobs, working for someone else. We were lost. The thing we had built BraveHart to do simply didn't exist anymore.

Troy was in a different position. He still had his existing hotels under management, and he was facing a crisis of his own. Smaller operators, those managing 10 hotels or fewer, were going bankrupt or being forced to sell for pennies on the dollar. It was carnage.

But Troy survived. And his investors survived with him.

The reason was simple: Troy had always been conservative with investor funds. Where other operators paid out every available dollar in dividends, Troy kept enough cash on hand to weather exactly this kind of storm. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't exciting. It was smart. And when the world fell apart, it was the difference between survival and liquidation.

The Pivot

Troy lives in Omaha, where Scooter's Coffee was founded and where their corporate office sits. He knew the brand. He had actually picked up the rights to develop a single Scooter's franchise in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the same town where MyPlace Hotels' corporate office is located. It was a connection born from the hotel world.

When COVID shut everything down, Troy called us.

"Hey. I own the rights to develop a Scooter's in Aberdeen. If you guys like the brand and want to be a part of it, we could pivot. Put a fund together and open Scooter's locations the same way we planned to build hotels."

Brandon and I looked at each other. We looked at the hotel market, dead. We looked at the coffee market, drive-thru, essential business, pandemic-proof.

Wisconsin was the next closest Midwest market with enough open territory to build something meaningful. Iowa was essentially sold out. So we carved out a geographically smart territory in Wisconsin and went to work.

15 Locations in Under 3 Years

The rest is history. BraveHart pivoted from hotels to coffee, and we built 15 Scooter's Coffee locations in under 3 years. We won Developer of the Year. Twice. We broke company records. Twice.

We went from a dead hotel deal in a shuttered Maryland conference room to one of the fastest-growing franchise developers in the Scooter's system.

None of it was planned. All of it was earned.

The Real Lesson

People love to talk about timing. "Right place, right time." But our timing was catastrophic. We launched into a pandemic. Our industry evaporated. Our biggest deal died at a dinner table when the phones started buzzing.

What saved us wasn't timing. It was the team.

Troy's conservative financial discipline, honed across three generations of hotel management, kept his investors whole when others lost everything. While operators around him were liquidating at fire-sale prices, Troy had kept enough cash on the balance sheet to survive the unsurvivable.

Brandon's financial acumen meant we weren't guessing when it came time to pivot. When we restructured from hotel development to franchise operations, we had a former bank COO modeling the capital requirements, stress-testing assumptions, and building investor presentations that actually held up under scrutiny. That's not something you Google.

And operationally, we knew how to take a plan off a spreadsheet and put it on the ground, fast.

Three skill sets. Three backgrounds. One shared instinct: look at a dead industry and say, "Okay. What's next?"

That's not a business school case study. That's just what the right team does when the world falls apart.

You don't get to pick the timing. You get to pick the people you build with and the speed at which you adapt.

We picked well.