When NIU Business junior Olivia Lynd heard about an IGNITE! opportunity in her Marketing 350 course, she was intrigued. “We had a folder on our Blackboard course page about internship opportunities in sales,” she said. “I didn’t know much about IGNITE!, but I was familiar with BrewPoint from visiting Elmhurst in the past. Seeing the internship was about sales, I decided to apply because it could further my education.” Lynd, a marketing major from Cincinnati, Ohio, joined BrewPoint as a sales and customer relations intern in April 2022.

IGNITE! is an internship program at the College of Business that allows students to work paid internships with local businesses and nonprofit organizations. The student works for the business organization, and the college subsidizes the student’s wages.

Much like Lynd, BrewPoint founder and CEO Melissa Villanueva came across her life-changing opportunity online. In June 2014, desiring a new challenge, she started searching Craigslist for an espresso machine with which she intended to start her own coffee shop. In an unexpected turn of events, she instead found an entire coffee shop for sale and jumped at the opportunity.

BrewPoint Coffee was founded that month, and since then Villanueva has expanded the business into four locations in Elmhurst and Oak Park. “From working at Starbucks in high school, I really felt like coffee shops were a great way to build community. You have people coming in every single day, it’s accessible in terms of everyday cost and coffee is something people get excited about,” Villanueva said. “My then-boyfriend, (now-husband) and I went to go visit the shop for sale, and our hearts just sang. We knew it was perfect for us.”

In addition to operating BrewPoint cafés, the company also offers event-hosting space and a “coffee education program” which Villanueva uses to teach aspiring roasters how to run their own coffee shop. She has taken the sum of her experiences to write her own book on the topic, aptly titled “Starting & Running a Coffee Shop.”

A desire to incorporate education into her business factors into everything Villanueva does, and that extends to the tasks she sets out for Lynd. “I think the biggest component of the IGNITE! Program is the complemented pay, which is just huge. Normally, when I’m responsible for paying an intern, I’m focused on what is best for the business, but with the College of Business paying the student through IGNITE!, I can focus on making sure the student is learning new skills that will help with their career,” she said. “Even if what the intern puts out in terms of work product isn’t something we wind up using for BrewPoint, it’s OK because it gives me an opportunity to show the student something new, that maybe they haven’t learned before.”

Whether it’s learning new skills or furthering BrewPoint’s goals, Lynd has proven to be a great asset for Villanueva. “I’ve been very fortunate with Olivia, because she picks up on things so quickly that we’ve been able to expand some of her responsibilities beyond our initial plan, which was a greater focus on sales,” Villanueva added. “Knowing just how great her capabilities are, we’re able to look at the bigger business picture outside of sales. When I worked in sales, I never had the opportunity to really study that bigger picture. With the broader spectrum of things we’re looking at, when sales issues come up, we can see which other areas are contributing to those issues. We’ve looked at website design, and Olivia has helped us organize some of our events.”

The opportunity with BrewPoint has positively impacted Lynd, as well. “Having this IGNITE! internship has given me the opportunity to learn outside the classroom, which is fascinating because this is real-world, real business. In class, you learn steps and processes on how things are done, but in my internship, I can go out into the real world and see how and when those steps apply,” she explains. “It’s meant a lot to me to work with Melissa because BrewPoint really sticks to its values, where not all companies do. It’s really cool to work for a company that is real, down-to-earth and cares about its community.”