The Best Day at Work Is the Day the Boss Stays Home: A Conversation with Will and Courtney Kassner of Crew + Co

When Will and Courtney Kassner founded Crew + Co in 2015, the plan was an online storefront. Custom leather Bibles, family devotional products, a faith-based business they could run from home. For ten years, that’s exactly what they did.

Then Will started dreaming about a coffee shop.

“Through lots of prayer, my heart got won over,” Courtney Kassner said. “To completely transform the space that we have into a coffee shop and a place where people can come shop our products as well.”

The building they eventually opened in had originally been purchased as office space, mostly because it was right across the street from the post office. Convenient for shipping. Low traffic. Quiet. Then the dream started growing. Coming up on one year since opening their doors to coffee shop customers, the Kassners are now running a nine-person operation out of Byhelia, Mississippi, just 30 minutes outside of Memphis, managing two very different business rhythms under one roof: the online Bible business and the brick-and-mortar shop. Some of their team members do both. “We have Bible makers slash baristas,” Will laughed. “Multi-talented.”

What Nobody Tells You About Going Brick and Mortar

The Kassners spent a full year building out the coffee shop themselves before they ever opened the doors. Their thinking at the time was that if they pushed hard enough through the build, things would calm down once they were open.

“We kind of tricked ourselves,” Will said. “We thought we were going to push, push, push for a year, and then once everything’s open it’ll chill out because we’ve done all the prep work.”

It did not chill out.

He described the gap between the vision and the reality: “You have this really strong vision for what you want on the community aspect, what you’re trying to build with the people in this area. But the vision for the time I’m spending at the grocery store — that didn’t come to fruition until it was like, here we go.”

For Courtney Kassner, the surprise was more personal. As an introvert, she wasn’t prepared for what a full day of customer interaction would cost her. “I was not prepared for how exhausted I would feel, not even just from work, but just from interacting with people all day.” Will, on the other end of the spectrum, would have been happy to talk to everyone who walked in and then come back at night to actually get his work done — which, for a while, he was doing.

They’re still solving the equation. “The equation is written. We have yet to solve it,” Courtney Kassner said. “We’re just out here.”

The Question That Changed Things

The biggest operational challenge the Kassners are working through right now is one that most established business owners eventually hit: how do you build a team capable of running the business without you in every single detail?

They took their first real test of this about a month before we recorded. They went out of the country, the first time they’d traveled with the coffee shop open. Will had been listening to the Entrepreneurs Blueprint to prepare. “I learned that our employees can handle it. We just haven’t given them the chance yet.”

The shift in thinking came from a question they started asking: “Describe to me the best day of work you’ve ever had.”

The answer was consistent. The best day of work was the day the boss wasn’t there.

“We both looked at each other like, we’re the bad guy,” Will said. “We’ve got to remove ourselves a little bit — for our own sanity, but also for your employees to really have ownership and motivation and a desire to plug in. It’s the ability to see themselves in the role of leadership versus always being in the role of my boss is here to tell me what to do.”

Will made a concrete change: he moved his computer home. Getting out of the shop meant he could actually focus, and it gave the team the room to own the space. “I’m sure it’s good for everybody left in the warehouse as well.”

Courtney Cook (the host) noted what the question itself revealed about the Kassners’ leadership: “That shows your heart and your care for your employees, to ask them, tell me about your favorite day of work ever. And they felt comfortable enough to say, well, when you weren’t here.”

Building Something That Can’t Be Strategized

The coffee shop’s growth is doing something unusual: it’s largely happening without a formal strategy driving it.

“A lot of the growth is not coming directly from us,” Will said. “It’s coming because of others who have recommended their experience at this place.” He described the culture they’re trying to create: a place where customers feel genuinely seen, heard, and valued. Where the team’s job isn’t just to make good coffee but to connect with people’s actual lives. Will was wearing a sweatshirt from a family that comes in regularly whose dad drives a race car. “Truly connecting with what people are doing in their story — that’s what’s bigger for us.”

They call it “farming community.” And on Saturday mornings especially, it shows.

“Saturday mornings at Crew and Co feel like a truly special place,” Will said. “There’s something going on on Saturdays.”

When asked how they protect that culture as the team takes on more ownership, both of them paused. “I don’t know,” Will said, and then laid out what they believe: that the culture survives because it’s genuinely shared. The employees aren’t just executing it — they believe in it too. “I do believe that everybody that works here buys into that. But it flows a lot better when it feels like it comes from within your own self.”

When God Moves, You Go

The Kassners’ approach to strategy is not what a traditional business advisor would hand you in a deck. They said so themselves, half-joking that they might be on the wrong podcast.

They aren’t wrong to flag it, because their faith is not a values statement on a wall. It is the actual operating system. Will told a story from his seminary days — a friend who reminded him that in the Old Testament, when the pillar of cloud moved and the fire moved at night, God’s people moved with it. “When God moves, you have to go. When God stays, you stay.” He said it has been the theme of their entire business career.

That conviction has been tested. Their best sales year ever was 2020. COVID drove a surge they hadn’t anticipated. For a moment, it felt like easy mode. Then 2021 arrived and the numbers dropped significantly. What they’re left with, years later, is the building they bought during that growth spurt — the building that became the coffee shop.

“I would have to tell myself the comparison is not worth it,” Will said. “I do feel like God let us have that growth in our business during that year just so that we could get to this point now.”

Courtney Kassner put it plainly: they have no choice but to keep going, because every time they’ve looked at the numbers and questioned whether it made sense, something else happened to confirm they were supposed to be there. A customer would walk in and say something that stopped them cold. The income and the expenses don’t always line up. But the sense of calling does.

“In a lot of ways, this feels like our church plant,” Will said. “We just don’t have service on Sundays and I can’t sing good. But the true value of making connections where people can share stories and understand that God is real in their life — you can’t put a dollar sign on that.”

Working Together and Staying Married

Will and Courtney Kassner have been working together full-time for six or seven years. They’re honest that they don’t always do it well.

The things that help: setting a boundary on work talk at the end of the day, being intentional with the time they have with their kids, and taking a real trip together every year. (This year: Scotland.) They also play pickleball.

The harder thing to solve is what Will named without an answer: the family often gets what’s left over after the business has taken everything else. “I feel aware of it,” he said. “And I guess that’s a place to start.”

On the question of authority and humility in a working marriage, Will made an observation worth sitting with: “Your spouse actually knows who you are through and through. There’s not a false dichotomy of authority. It’s just truth. And so you have to be humble enough to admit when you’re not right.”

Courtney Kassner’s response: “Depends on the day maybe.”

Find Crew + Co

Will and Courtney Kassner are building something genuinely special in a small town in Mississippi, and they’re doing it one Bible, one cup of coffee, and one faithful step at a time.

You can find them at crewandco.com and on Instagram at @crewandco.