Texas, COVID, and Small-Town Virginia
Our story begins in Houston, Texas, circa 2020 - peak pandemic, two kids in diapers, global quarantine, and suddenly a lot more time to think about life. Josh was working in oil & gas, Morgan was a high school counselor, and between Zoom calls and toddler meltdowns, we started asking big questions. Like: What are we doing with our lives? What is our purpose? And… why not open a coffee shop in a town we’ve never been to before?
That town was Martinsville, Virginia. A family friend told us to check it out, and the moment we visited, we felt it - this small, scrappy town had something special. It didn’t need another franchise. It needed a gathering place with real people, real hospitality, and really good coffee. Within a few months, we sold most of what we owned, loaded the rest into a U-Haul, and moved across the country to build something from the ground up - literally. Our coffee shop, The Ground Floor, opened its doors in May 2021.
We thought we were just building a coffee shop. But after the crowds cleared and the doors were locked, something else started to grow - an obsession with what was happening before our coffee even reached our bar: the sourcing, the sustainability, the science behind the roast. Somewhere along the way a new passion began to take root - late at night, after the shop was closed, armed with a small coffee roaster and a whole lot of curiosity.
Late Nights & Casual Garage Fires
Building a coffee shop was never our full story - somewhere along the way, we realized we wanted to go deeper. Not just serve great coffee, but understand it.
We spent nights and weekends experimenting after our kids were asleep - tweaking profiles, roasting sample batches and tasting them until our palates were wrecked - but our skills got sharper. It wasn’t glamorous. It was garage-floor grit, failed roasts, and way too many “just one more batch” nights. But it worked. Slowly, we started dialing things in - learning what made great coffee great, and how to bring it out without burning down the garage (almost happened).
What started as curiosity turned into obsession… and then into something we could actually be proud of. The kind of coffee that made people stop mid-sip and say, “Wait - what is this?” That’s when we knew: this wasn’t just a late-night project anymore. It was the start of something bigger.
Drink Coffee. Live Forever.
After many long nights it eventually became an inside joke between my wife and I - “Alright, time for our third shift.” After our day jobs, after dinner, after kid and dish duty… that’s when the real work began. It wasn’t glamorous, but it felt like ours. Those late-night hours spent roasting, tasting, and tweaking, became sacred - the place where this whole thing quietly came to life.
We named our company Third Shift Coffee to honor the space between exhaustion and purpose, between what pays the bills and what fuels the soul. Our coffee is made for people who live in that space. People who stay up late, get up early, and keep going - not because it’s easy, but because what they’re building is worth it.
“Drink Coffee. Live Forever.” is our rally cry.
No - coffee won’t actually make you live forever. But what you do while you’re drinking it? That just might live forever. It’s about creating something eternal, something that outlives the moment - a business, a community, a life, a legacy. It’s about pouring into work that matters, whether the world’s watching or not.
