And drinking coffee.
The 46-year-old High Point woman — owner of the Queen Coffee Bean online coffee company — will be featured on the ABC program “Free Enterprise,” which tells the inspiring stories of former inmates who have started their own businesses after getting released from prison. The 30-minute show will air at 11 a.m. Saturday.
“It was so much fun, a dream come true,” Shivers says.
“You should never go to prison, but if you do, to come home and get followed around by a TV crew because you started your own business is definitely the way to come home. It’s less than a year later (since her release from prison), and I never had time to think about all the negative things associated with being in prison. This was super-fun.”
Shivers launched Queen Coffee Bean in late 2020. After her release last summer from prison — where she had served 10 1/2 months for conspiracy to commit tax fraud — she enrolled in a free eight-week course called “Inmates To Entrepreneurs,” which helped her get her new coffee business off the ground.
This year, when program founder Brian Hamilton decided to feature some of his success stories on the new show “Free Enterprise,” he chose Shivers for one of the episodes.
Her episode originally aired April 15, and Shivers and her family held a “watch party” for the broadcast.
“It was like an out-of-body experience, but not in a creepy way,” Shivers recalls. “You go through all these hard things, and then all of a sudden you’re watching yourself on TV. It’s pretty surreal.”
Saturday’s show will feature clips from the original episode, plus additional commentary from Shivers and Hamilton as they discuss the show.
Meanwhile, good things continue to happen for Shivers and Queen Coffee Bean (queencoffeebean.com) as the business grows. She’s no longer roasting coffee out of her home, for example, having purchased a commercial roaster and moved into a shared warehouse space to fill orders.
Now, she’s on the verge of outgrowing the warehouse space, too.
“Now I need a place for people to come sit and enjoy the coffee, just to hang out for a little bit,” Shivers says. “That’s the next step.”
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