Tony Jolly transformed his passion for coffee into a thriving community space in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood with crucial support from U.S. Bank. Starting his career at Starbucks at age 19, Jolly gained expertise working with coffee in Ethiopia before establishing his own café. His partnership with U.S. Bank demonstrates how hospitality, community connection, and strategic financial relationships can create successful ventures.
Jolly translated his past experiences into a bright future as a specialty coffee entrepreneur, though it was a dark time that tested his resolve. He started with a shop called Hot and Cool Café. It took a disaster to plant the seeds of its transition to ORA Urban Café.
“Through the torrential rains of 2003, 2004, our ceiling collapsed, and quite frankly I was done,” Jolly said. “I was tired. We’ve given a lot, I mean 15 hours a day and every day trying to maintain this thing, and I almost thought about stepping away, believe it or not. But a friend stepped in and was like, ‘Tony. I see your ceiling. It’s a big wet hole there, and I can’t let you leave, so I have an idea for this.’ And I gave him the keys and walked away, and he came back with a stunning remodel, and it no longer looked like Hot and Cool. We decided to change the menu to be a little bit more ultra clean.”
“The food changed, the place changed, and I guess the name had to change,” he added. “So, it went from Hot and Cool Café to ORA Urban Café, and we opened, reopened, or relaunched in January 2024.”
The idea behind the shop was simple, yet profound: “Take my years of specialty coffee working in Ethiopia, understand this business model and bring it into Leimert Park in South L.A., into the Crenshaw district,” Jolly said. “This is a place to connect a community, a community space. And so that’s what our coffee shop became. And that’s what it is today.”
“Startups are hard for anybody,” Jolly said. “Normally, it takes friends and family and depending on what family and friends you have that will dictate your trajectory. But we were able to start and prove that we are capable. I got our first loan from U.S. Bank because they trusted our business models. There’s always been a banker there to kind of help us navigate, and always a product that the bank provides that fits our need at that time. And basically, they’ve come through ever since.”
Jolly has ambitious plans for the ORA Urban Café and is counting on his partners at U.S. Bank to help him achieve them.
“We’ve got lofty goals,” Jolly said. “Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t so ambitious. But we’re looking to duplicate our model, and with the help and guidance of a banker at U.S. Bank, we’re able to look at our financial statements and our product mix, to make sense of how to properly grow. If the business is capable of growing, these are the realistic conversations that we’re able to have. But we believe it does have the ability to grow, to duplicate itself, and we believe that U.S. Bank — since our first time banking, since that first loan — is excited about helping us with our growth.”
U.S. Bank also has taught Jolly some financial strategies that have strengthened his business. For example, Jolly had an idea for a program that helps previously incarcerated individuals with a social entrepreneurship opportunity to own coffee carts. He was able to present this to [Business Access Advisor] Delphine [Pruitt] and the U.S. Bank team to get advice on equipment financing, he said. “This banking relationship,” he said, “has been huge with our growth.”
