Creating Café Barcomi's in Berlin

With American ingenuity and grit, onetime dancer Cynthia Barcomi, through trial and error, founded a thriving food business overseas

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Barcomi adjusted her products for a German palate.

She says she was "seen as exotic, this American in Germany making handmade baked goods."

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Entrepreneur: Cynthia Barcomi, 46

Background: Just one month after graduating from Columbia University in 1985, Cynthia Barcomi decided on a whim to move to Berlin to become a professional dancer. It was a difficult transition for the Seattle native, who had earned a degree in theater/dance studies and philosophy but could barely speak German. Determined, Barcomi learned the language, eventually joined a dance company (where she was a principal dancer for eight years), and got married. After giving birth to her second child, Barcomi decided it was time to change course again. This time she wanted to start her own business. She came up with the decidedly un-German idea of opening a café serving American-style baked goods and roasting her own coffee beans.

The Company: Barcomi started off small, selling her baked goods to Berlin's largest department store, Kaufhaus des Westens, better known as KaDeWe. A year later, in 1994, with $15,000 in savings and a bank loan of $100,000, Barcomi, by then fluent in German, opened Café Barcomi's on Berlin's Bergmannstrasse, serving brownies, New York cheesecake, muffins, bagels, and roasted coffee. In 1997, she opened a second, larger outlet (this one with a restaurant) in the Mitte district in the former East Berlin. Now celebrated in the German media as "Berlin's Coffee Queen" and "Miss American Pie," Barcomi is set to publish her third baking book, is filming a pilot TV program about baking, and is in discussions about opening a café in the city's new airport.

Revenue: $2.07 million in 2008

Her Story: I had a concept, and I knew what I wanted to do. But I had no idea where coffee was cultivated or how to roast it. Still, I learned growing up that I could do anything if I put my mind to it. I started by going to Berlin's main library and checked out books about coffee and how to roast beans. Back then, there was no Internet or Google (GOOG). There was a specific kind of roasting machine that I wanted. To find it, I had to go to Berlin's Commerce Dept. library. That was the only the place where you could get access to the Yellow Pages for every city in the country. Next, I needed a loan.

I learned pretty quickly that there were a lot of cultural bridges that I needed to cross. I was instructed to calculate how much it would cost to start my business and explain my plan and ask for a credit line. It seemed simple enough. I went to the first bank; they turned me down flat. Then another and another. I went to about 12 banks and was rejected by them all. I represented a triple whammy: I was a foreigner, a woman, and I wanted to start a food business. While I didn't doubt my concept, I did wonder whether I would get a bank to help me.

Perhaps naively, I refused to give up. The kind of American-style entrepreneurial spirit that I had grown up with doesn't really exist here. Repeatedly, I was given the prevailing wisdom in Germany: If my idea were a good one, it would already exist—and since it doesn't, then we don't need it. I was told there are no new good ideas. I said: "I'm sorry, I beg to differ. With that attitude we'd all be riding around in horse carriages because nobody would have invented the car."

To Go Far, Exude Confidence

I doubled my resolve and came up with a new line of attack. I started taking my cookies with me to my bank meetings, and I put my theater background to good use, approaching meetings like a scene study class. The other people were often mistrustful and skeptical. I told them of course I knew how to roast coffee. Nobody checked, and the trick was to act as if I could do it. I came across full of confidence. I made sure to speak only German, and I refused to let my husband attend these meetings. I was a woman, and I was going to convince them I could do it. Sometimes I think had I not been a Girl Scout and studied theater, I would never have been able to get through the process.

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