Bo.co owner Lily Clark added a food truck this summer to help with mobility for farmers markets and catering. (Photo by Tate Fagan)

Inside every 16-ounce cup of boba tea sold at the Bo.co food truck or farmers market stand, roughly 20 bubbles of deliciousness – the tapioca pearls that give the drink its signature look and taste – bounce around in the cup.

That’s basically one tapioca pearl for every idea that Lily Clark, an entrepreneur at heart and owner of Bo.co, comes up with on a weekly basis. Some of her ideas are quickly executable, such as dreaming up different drink flavors or add-ons – products and/or services – to improve the consumer experience at Bo.co’s locations.

“Anything that I want to test, I can,” said Clark, who finished her MBA at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2022. “It’s helped me with my scientist side. I don’t like to call myself a chef, because I don’t think I’m a chef, but I definitely am a scientist. I like to test hypotheses. I like to play around and combine different things. It’s a creative outlet for me. Anytime I want to draw a design, I can do that for the business. It allows me to build skills.”

Her mobile boba tea business, which she runs with her sister, Luci, sets up at five regular locations and also does catering events.

Bo.co is at the Soulard Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, at the Kirkwood Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, at The Boulevard Farmers Market in Richmond Heights on Sunday mornings, at the Tower Grove Farmers Market on Tuesday afternoons and at Living Room Coffee in Maplewood on Wednesdays.

Some of Clark’s other ideas, though? Those are on a much grander scale.

“I have essentially two companies,” she said. “One is the boba tea and one is more of a broader-scale, long-term company working on urban planning and development, building St. Louis’s first car-less self-sustaining community.”

That company, Grow-Op, is proof that Clark is not afraid to dream big, an innate personality trait that was nurtured and amplified while she was completing her MBA.

“UMSL definitely expanded my way of thinking,” she said. “The MBA program had parts that I was not initially very interested in, like business law, but ended up being so interesting. Taking a finance class, I didn’t realize there were so many little tricks that top business owners use to help grow wealth and have different revenue streams outside of the one product that they might be selling. There were so many times I thought, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of this that way.’”

Clark started her MBA during the COVID-19 pandemic – after she earned her BA in music from Berklee College of Music in the spring of 2020, studying songwriting and music production – and finished in May 2022, meaning her UMSL classes were split between online and in person.

“I did have Dr. Perry Drake’s class in person, and I was so glad that was in person,” she said. “He’s so animated, and it’s really fun to watch him teach. He allows everyone to collaborate and talk with one another, so that was a really great experience, too.”

That type of collaboration, a hallmark of the UMSL educational experience, helped Clark learn to grow comfortable enough to ask questions and seek out advice.

“I’m not one of those people that would just go out and be confident enough to ask someone who is 20 years into the business how they got started,” Clark said. “But UMSL bringing those entrepreneurs to the classroom or onto Zoom conferences felt a lot lower risk than having to get rejected by them in person or just not get a response back when you reach out. Having connections to people who have done great things beyond anything you could probably imagine is really cool.”

The origins of her boba tea company were already in place when she was at UMSL – inspired by a trip she took with her sister to Taiwan in 2018 – though most of her focus was on creating and selling boba-inspired candles, bath products and related items. She was able to take what was taught in her UMSL classes, things like using Facebook ads, understanding social media and learning SEO best practices, and immediately apply those concepts to her growing company.

In 2021, Clark won $2,000 in one of UMSL’s Entrepreneur Quest pitch competitions. That money went directly toward supplies and rent for a farmers market booth. She also went through the Square One program at Cortex Innovation Community, finishing that in 2022, too.

It didn’t take long for Bo.co to gain a dedicated following. The sisters have been featured in articles by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Feast Magazine, among others. Clark is growing the business carefully. The food truck, for example, was a summer addition made when the right opportunity came along, an expansion that helps with mobility for catering events.

Clark is always evaluating potential moves, anything from opening her own café or restaurant to partnering with different entities or getting into grocery stores.

“That’s something that I learned from UMSL, things like the sunk-cost fallacy and opportunity cost, and that really helps play into whether or not I’m going to do something,” she said. “It has to be the right opportunity for the time. In the winter I can go a lot harder with some of these bigger projects than I can in the summer, when I have my hands full with the truck and five different farmers markets and different events going on.”

Grow-Op, founded with the goal of creating a self-sustaining, environmentally-friendly modern community in St. Louis, is at the top of her list of bigger projects.

“When I was doing the boba and researching and looking at how much waste is created by small businesses and even more by large corporations, I was thinking, what would be the best way to address that?” she said. “To change consumer behaviors was not going to be accomplishable unless we were to change infrastructure and completely flip that and make multiple-use building spaces that are residentially and commercially zoned, and to basically create communities that are closer together, that all rely on one another.”

Clark is passionate about this project, which is still relatively early in the research and planning stage. She’s talked with local and state government representatives. She’s reached out to innovators and entrepreneurs – especially while in the Cortex program – from a wide variety of industries, learning their business models and the essentials of how they started their businesses.

She’s applying those lessons to Bo.co now while thinking ahead, too.

“I’m trying to say yes to these opportunities to gain the skills and to figure out how to build the community,” she said. “Once I get a good enough idea of what it’s going to look like, then I’m going to take it back to some of the state representatives and see what connections they have.”

The communal aspect is key to Clark’s urban planning vision, with people working together to build a walkable neighborhood – multifamily housing, office spaces, shopping, etc. – where everything is environmentally friendly but still meets the needs of modern-day living. At this early stage, that could mean mostly starting from scratch or customizing and connecting existing neighborhoods to meet the vision. That’s one of her primary areas of research.

“We’re trying out some things and testing assumptions with how to retrofit existing communities,” she said. “One of the things that I’m working on is figuring out how to implement bodegas or small convenience stores on existing suburban streets, so people don’t need to make that extra trip to Walmart, Target or grocery stores.”

One of the biggest challenges has been conveying her vision.

“When I first started, I didn’t have the language right,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was going to be, so a lot of people couldn’t understand or grasp what I was trying to do with it. But now, since we’ve tweaked what it is going to be, and I can explain it a little bit more in depth, everyone’s on board with it as soon as they hear about it, and asking ‘What can I do to help you with this?’”

Clark is excited about the possibilities, with Grow-Op and Bo.co, too.

“I’m going to let the boba company take me wherever it goes,” she said. “I don’t necessarily have a 10-year plan for it, like I’m going to sell it or I’m going to grow it to be 10 restaurants in 10 years. I’m just kind of allowing it to be what it is, and that helps me get my foot in the door.”