For Entrepreneurial Alum, the Hard Path is the Best Path
By: Jeff Joiner | April 12, 2023
Few things have been easy for Chris Stana BA’12, and that’s just the way he likes it. From daily 5 a.m. calisthenics during military school to growing a business as a full-time student at The University of Texas at Dallas, Stana has always thrived on being challenged.
“I really love the struggle and the hard work,” Stana said. “That’s why I love being an entrepreneur.”
Stana is the creator of a mobile coffee service called Hot Shots Catering – a service that is so much more than a coffee cart. He has created a European coffee experience that serves clients at corporate events, conventions, weddings and other functions. A political science major at UT Dallas, Stana recognized an untapped niche market for a mobile gourmet coffee service, and once the entrepreneurial bug bit him, he hasn’t stopped since.
Stana was born in Pennsylvania and he lived there until his family moved to Frisco, Texas, when he was 10 years old. After his freshman year at Frisco High School, Stana saw an ad for a summer camp at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, featuring a teenager climbing an obstacle course rope. Stana said the idea of being challenged to get physically fit in a military setting appealed to him.
“I’d always been this kid who strived harder when things in front of me were more difficult,” Stana said. “I think around that time, I was 13, 14. I knew that if I had rigor and structure, I’d be someone who excelled.”
Stana said he loved his experience at the summer camp so much that he decided, with his parent’s support, to transfer to the Marine Military Academy for the remainder of high school. Stana said he immediately fit in at the physically rigorous school, organized like a U.S. Marine Corps battalion with the addition of high school classes. He not only excelled at the school, he thrived.
Stana rose steadily through the cadet ranks from a guidon, the cadet who carries his platoon’s flag, his first year to a platoon sergeant with the rank of staff sergeant in his second year to the rank of captain and then major and company commander by his senior year. But though he loved life as a Marine military cadet, he didn’t see a military career in his future.
“I thought about a career in the Marines, but I couldn’t see my future being in the military,” he said. “I knew I wanted to start a business someday, and I took everything I learned in military school and applied it to the outside world.”
After graduating in 2005 and returning home to Frisco, Stana again challenged himself by working a variety of full- and part-time jobs to put himself through college. He worked as a personal trainer in a local gym, sorted packages for UPS and worked as a rug flipper, a carpet store employee who turns over piles of rugs for customers to see.
After taking many of his core classes at Collin County Community College, Stana transferred to UT Dallas to major in political science. He had developed a fascination with politics during his community college classes and thought about going to law school, but he had for a long time wanted to own a business. But what type? He loved food and beverages, so he considered a coffee shop. Then a chance experience at an event planted a different seed.
While in college, Stana helped his father, David Stana, who owned an event photography business. A gig with his dad working at the Plano Balloon Festival opened his eyes to a business need he realized he could fill, and his entrepreneur side kicked in. Stana observed the festival included all kinds of food vendors, but no coffee services. He was sure people attending an event like that would buy coffee just like they bought food.
“When I started Hot Shots, coffee catering wasn’t anything on the map,” Stana said. “But I felt there was a market for a mobile, European-style coffee service. I started this while going to UTD and living at home with my parents. It was a slow start, and I was learning as I went along because I didn’t know anything about business at the time.”
Stana recognized what Starbucks had done to the world of coffee by introducing not just caramel macchiatos and other Frappuccinos to a growing world of young coffee drinkers, but the brand gave them the Starbucks experience with personal service that no restaurant could match. Stana could see that a new generation had discovered coffee was no longer just a breakfast drink — it was hip. Stana’s take on the business model was to make it mobile, something virtually unheard of and that fit his style of taking the challenging route.
“Coffee was never made to be mobile. It requires a large machine that needs to be plumbed into a water line and requires power,” Stana said. “Before I started the Hot Shots gourmet experience, people hauled huge machines around and hooked them to car batteries or they had to invest in a coffee truck.
“What we’ve been doing for 16 years is progressing the system, so now we can set up on your bar or a table,” he said. “We set up our system in less than an hour, and trained baristas can serve several hundred drinks an hour.”
Stana has set up in corporate offices, convention centers, in a barn and even on a boat. Along with coffee and espresso, Hot Shots offers lattes, cappuccinos, gelato, Italian sodas, hot chocolate, pastries and something Stana calls a doughnut wall. A wildly popular new offering is the printed latte, which comes from a machine that prints logos and other images in espresso on lattes. And his products are served by baristas dressed in white serving jackets and ties in the European tradition.
“I love old movies, and I love the servers in Casablanca who waited on people in white jackets. I wanted that to be part of my gourmet coffee experience,” he said.
The business model has become so successful that Stana is now working on franchising the concept.
For Stana, choosing challenging paths, from attending military school to paying his way through college himself, created opportunities and opened doors that made his entrepreneurial journey a success.
“The military school experience and how I’ve learned to run my business come from my desire to just do the right thing and to do it my way,” Stana said. “My clients would say I have integrity and am a hardworker. I always put my clients first and strive to offer the ultimate gourmet mobile coffee experience.”