For the guest, the baseline expectation is perfection. And why should it not be? No one ever walks into a cafe or restaurant thinking I hope they at least get 70% of my order right. No. The expectation is that you’ll deliver on your promise and be attentive to the details and quirks of their order.

Of course, we all screw up from time to time, and how we respond to mistakes is incredibly important. Mistakes create a huge opportunity to leave a lasting positive impression with our guests—even more so than if we had gotten everything perfect from the get-go.

Here’s a frustrating scenario I see playing out over and over again at coffee shops:

A guest has an issue with their order. Let’s say their latte was supposed to be with oat milk instead of whole milk, decaf instead of regular, for here instead of to-go—maybe there were supposed to be two lattes instead of one. Whatever.

They address the problem with the barista, and the barista pulls one of the following:

• They immediately leave their station, walk over to the reg op, and spend minutes trying to figure out where the chain of communication went wrong.

• They dive into the POS or KDS to see if what the guest says they ordered actually matches what they were rung up for. “It says here you didn’t actually order oat milk.”

• They pepper the guest with 20 questions, or even worse, start being combative with the guest.

They’re doing everything possible except fixing the order!

Here’s all you need to do when there’s something wrong with a guest's order: Apologize, and fix it expeditiously, without drama.

In that moment, it doesn’t matter which team member made the mistake, or whether or not the guest actually ordered what they said they ordered. Just make it right.

All you need to say is: “I’m so sorry, I’ll make an oat milk latte for you right now. You can take this whole milk latte to a friend if you want, no charge, of course.”

Simple.

The Bigger Picture

Let's say they didn’t actually order oat milk. If we’re combative, placing blame, or do something ridiculous like sending them to the register to pay an additional fee for alternative milk or an extra shot, everyone loses.

The guest loses out on a great experience, the cafe loses out on a potential repeat guest who might turn into a raving fan, and the Barista loses because instead of being a hero and making someone's day, they're just the ineffectual body behind the counter.

Do we want to make our guests feel embarrassed, angry, or regretful for choosing to spend their time and money with us? No.

Do we want to be right at the expense of losing a guest or someone having a terrible experience at our store? No.

Mistakes are an inevitable part of service—we don’t want to make them, but recovering well creates an experience that sticks in the guest's mind. So even though we've fallen short of our initial promise, we've built trust, shown we care, and demonstrated we have the guests' best interests in mind.

They will come back.
They will remember you.
They will tell their friends about you.
You will be a legend.

Just make it right.

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A Slight Departure
Here's a video my friend Paolo made with me. It's a nostalgic love letter to a car, an era, and a journey. It's automotive-heavy, but has elements of coffee and the journey of building a business and career that you might find interesting.

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Being a barista is one of the only trades where some amount of excuse-making seems normal.

How many times has this happened to us? Our espresso is served to us with a sheepish hesitation and a line like:

• “It was giving me a hard time on the dial-in.”

• “It’s a couple days past its prime—last week it was so good!”

• “They’ve been tweaking the roast, and I don’t quite have a handle on it yet.”

Imagine going to a restaurant and being served with the same energy.

• “The steak’s been giving us a little trouble this week.”

• "It’s a new dish, the kitchen’s still learning how to prepare it perfectly.”

• “The farm we get our vegetables from is having a rough year, so the flavors are a little less vibrant than usual.”

There’s no way you’d come back. You likely wouldn’t even pay for your meal.

The kicker is, even if the food was decent, you would still perceive it as subpar because you’ve already been told something isn’t right with it.

Of course, feelings of is this good enough? are hardly unique to serving espresso. In most of my creative endeavors, the closer I get to finishing a project, the faster the doubt floods in.

• “Will everyone see the imperfections I see?”

• “Is it even worth sharing?”

• “Will people think I’m stupid?”

These questions, while natural, don’t serve the art I’m creating or the people I’m hoping to serve.

Making excuses in an attempt to justify lower quality doesn’t garner you sympathy and understanding—it makes your work less valuable. Confidence (not to be confused with arrogance) and carrying yourself like a professional increase the value of your work.

If you’re second-guessing yourself, the only question worth asking is Did I do my best? which is worlds apart from Is this perfect? Whether it’s building a business, publishing a book, or making coffee: proudly serve it. No drama. No excuses.

Re-pulling Espresso: A Practical Aside For Working Baristas

Before you go down the espresso re-pulling rabbit hole, you need to ask yourself an honest question: “Am I confident I can make a significant quality increase in a timely manner?” (The answer is probably no, or you wouldn’t be where you are in the first place)

If the answer is indeed no, serve the espresso with a confident smile, lock eyes with the guest, and tell them to enjoy. Rip the band-aid off and keep dialing in as you go.

If you’re in the ballpark and feeling confident, you can shuffle things around a little bit. Throw the not-quite-perfect shot in a mocha, make a quick grind adjustment, and bump the espresso back one spot in line. But you only get one shot at a repull—once the guest sees you struggling or notices it’s taking way longer than normal, you’re right back where you started—no matter how good the shot you serve is, the perception of low quality has already tainted the experience.

I see baristas burning 5 minutes, re-pulling a shot 4 times while sweating bullets, all to make a shot that’s marginally better than the first one they pulled.

So back to my original point: unless you’re certain you can part the heavens and create a life-changing espresso experience, just serve what you've got with a smile. If you’re new and struggling, I get it. Being a green Barista in a busy cafe can feel heavy. But someone trusted you enough to put you on bar, so you might as well trust yourself.

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“People need to respect the amount of work that goes into this coffee.”
“People need to respect coffee as much as they do wine.”
“People need to understand how special and rare this coffee is.”
“People need to understand how difficult my job is.”

No. They don’t.

These entitled views (some of which I’ve been guilty of having in the past) put the responsibility on our guests to do the hard work, when in reality it’s our job to guide them through the journey and give them a reason to care. The way to do this isn’t by telling them how great we are, or how much they should care about what we do—it’s to build an emotional connection with them.

It’s a trope at this point, but it’s true: People care more about the way you make them feel than anything else. So if we truly want our guests to respect the coffee and our craft, our primary focus should be on creating amazing experiences for them—making them feel welcome, engaged, and valued.

While craft is important, in the context of a business, its function is to pave a pathway to eliciting emotions and making memories. People may be interested in it or enchanted by it, but craft alone can only go so far. The deepest appreciation for our craft will only come after we’ve built a genuine emotional connection with the people we hope to serve.

Our guests don't exist as a means for us to pursue our craft—rather, our craft provides a conduit for delighting our guests.

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No syrups. No espresso to go. No blenders. No food aside from the obligatory pastry offerings. Some people took it even further: No batch brewer. No condiment bars and no cream or sugar. The early Third-Wave coffee movement was as much defined by what it wasn’t as what it was. 

This reductionist approach became one of the quintessential traits of the specialty coffee movement in the early aughts. Anything that wasn’t coffee was simply taking away from the coffee. 

Today, there are more places to get a cappuccino with properly textured milk and coffee traceable to the producer than we ever thought possible, and surprisingly, most of them look more like Second-Wave cafes than Golden Era Third-Wave espresso bars. Full food menus, sweet fizzy signature beverages, one popular roaster where I live has a dedicated matcha menu complete with a matcha One & One. As I’m writing this, we’ve got a brand new slushy machine sitting in the lab waiting for testing—it’s one of the fancy ones you’d see at a cocktail bar serving a frozen Paloma, but it’s a slushy machine nonetheless. Hardly a purist's paradise. 

Our guests appreciate the quality that came from the Third-Wave movement, but for most of us, the current market demands more options than the traditional espresso bar menu. So, to delight our guests and maintain relevance, we learn to dance with the culture. Sometimes we lead, sometimes we follow. Following sounds negative, but as long as it’s properly balanced with leading, and in a way that doesn’t compromise our mission and values, it serves a function.

Almost paradoxically, if we never lead, we’re generic and will probably never see success. If we never follow, we risk getting left behind. 

I’m a purist at heart, with all my heart. Nine times out of ten, a well-made Manhattan will be better than the seasonal house cocktail. Straight espresso offers a more dynamic, intricate, and intense flavor journey than a citrus-infused espresso tonic specialty beverage. Many of the things on our menu are not for me, and that’s ok. Matcha lemonade being on our menu doesn't automatically make our espresso taste worse.

I'm not advocating for an anything-goes approach to building your business—the most compelling organizations start with a strong point of view, and some things are non-negotiable. But at this stage of my life, I’m more excited about the opportunity to delight guests than I am obsessed with everything being done my way.

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I was sitting at the bar slowly working my way through my meal when the front-of-house manager checked in on me. He thanked me for joining them for dinner, then asked one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked in a hospitality setting: 

“Is there anything we could be doing better for you?”

I was immediately reminded of my second favorite Coaching Habit question: “What’s the real challenge here for you?”

Both questions invite contemplation and the addition of “you” makes both questions personal. 

I found myself caught up in thought for a moment actively engaging with the question in a way I rarely do with questions like “How is everything?” or “Are you having a good time?” While well-intentioned, these questions are less thoughtful and feel more like a common courtesy than a genuine question. 

As it turns out I was perfectly content, but I truly believed that if I wasn’t, the manager would have eagerly taken action to improve my experience. 

I repeated the question to myself several times to burn it into my brain, then went back to my meal feeling better than I did before (which was already stellar).

This is the power of intentionality in your guest experience. In the same way the carefully crafted questions in The Coaching Habit lead to discoveries that lesser questions would not, the perfect question in a hospitality setting can make your guests feel cared for in a way that more generic questions never could. 

P.S. If you're wondering what my favorite Coaching Habit Question is, it’s by far the Foundation Question: “What do you want?”

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Coffee prices are at an all-time high. Here's a conversation I had with my business partner Charles Jack to discuss the spiking Coffee C Market. We talk about why coffee prices are so high, how coffee buying works, what the C Market is, and how we can buy coffee more sustainably.

Charles is a founder, co-owner, and CFO at Cat & Cloud Coffee. He is a former Wall Street investment analyst and portfolio manager and has also worked in the green coffee sector for TechnoServe in Ethiopia and South Sudan.

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I wasn’t late but I was in a reasonable hurry. On an LA excursion to meet up with friends for a drive, I made the very necessary coffee stop. I popped into a well-known specialty coffee spot—aside from a couple sitting at a two-top who already had their beverages the store was empty. Prefect. 

After being left hanging at the register for an oddly long time I placed my order: cappuccino, espresso, Pellegrino, Fifteen dollars. Our drink wait time benchmark at Cat & Cloud is 1-3 minutes so I figured I’d be out of there in five minutes max. 

Five minutes came and went and still no drinks. The barista was slowly making beverages but nothing came my way. Then I saw it: a ticket holder with a row of tickets at least ten deep. Mobile orders. I was in an incredibly busy cafe disguised as an empty cafe. 

I had to bail. I ran (literally) down the street into a Starbucks around the corner, ordered a short coffee, then clumsily jogged to the hotel spilling coffee on my hand the whole way, and made it just in time to jump in the car with my friend and make our meetup time. 

I understand the attraction of mobile ordering. My main beef with it is it deprioritizes the people who are physically in your store. If someone cares enough to walk down the street and through our doors, they should get priority.

Over time, businesses attract a customer base who values what they value. While speed of service and quality can coexist, a space that prioritizes creating experiences and building connections is different than a space that prioritizes convenience. With every decision we make as a business, it’s worth asking: 

Who do we want to be?
Who do we want to serve?

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Last week a guest brought in their personal mug to get coffee. After handing it off, our team member fumbled and dropped the mug which shattered into pieces. 

Without missing a beat, our team member apologized and grabbed one of our custom mugs (which we sell for $32) from the merch shelf, filled it with coffee and said “Here’s your new mug!” 

This is an example of what we call Power To Please. If anything goes awry, our team members are empowered to fix it with a solution they deem appropriate. No need to ask a manager or owner—just make it right.

We’re not worried about people giving away too much. Most people have a solid intuition on what’s appropriate. A simple gut check is to ask yourself: “If I were the guest, what would make me feel taken care of?”

From a mathematical perspective $32 is nothing compared to the lifetime value of a guest. Despite making “business sense” , empowering people to delight our guests isn’t about engaging in a transactional relationship, it’s about creating a remarkable experience. We want people to feel taken care of whether they're a regular or a one-time visitor. 

SOPs and checklists provide operational consistency but there’s no way to script an “if this, then that” matrix for every single thing that might happen in a dynamic retail environment. To provide the ultimate experience, we need to have a script while also creating space to improv.

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Every vision we act upon puts us on a path from Here to There.

But on the way from Here to There, our desires evolve. No matter how far we go, what we thought would make us fulfilled feels just as far away as when we started.

In 2006 I was in Portland for a Barista competition and saw Kyle, the Stumptown barista trainer standing outside their Belmont cafe which was right next door to the Annex, their public-facing cupping room and coffee tasting bar. He was leaning against the building smoking a cigarette with one foot propped up on the wall. He looked like the James Dean of Specialty Coffee.

I asked him what he was doing, and he said he’d just finished a staff training and in a half hour he was going back in to lead a wholesale training. At that moment I knew that if I could have a job like that, I’d be happy for the rest of my life. Almost 20 years later, still working in the same industry, my dreams look different.

As I get older I'm becoming more convinced that There doesn’t exist. Our life is comprised of perpetual Here’s. We’re not on a static path, we’re on an ever-evolving treadmill. And yes, short-term sacrifice for long-term gain is part of the program, but if our never-ending Here isn’t bringing us any joy it’s worth considering we might be on the wrong treadmill.

Rewards come in many forms: monetary, autonomy, notoriety, etc. If we’re self-aware enough to put ourselves on the right treadmill, doing the work day in and day out becomes a reward in and of itself.

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Yesterday I asked our Marketing Coordinator why she enjoys her work, and she responded with three clear, concise reasons. 

1. My work is Creative. I’m often doing something I’ve never done before. 

2. My work is in the Service of other people. I get to connect with and make other people's lives better. 

3. I enjoy creating Strategy. Figuring out what our guests expect and how to meet those expectations is engaging. 

She beautifully articulated three pillars of a job worth having. I’d make a personal edit and say Curiosity fits her explanation better than Strategy.

Creativity. Service. Curiosity.

It’s notable that none of these things are specific to her job. No matter what our work is, we can choose to engage with these ideas—the job we have isn’t as important as the story we tell ourselves about that job. 

I thanked her for writing this week's blog for me and here we are.

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“Scale and ubiquity creates complexity. Complexity demands efficiency. But we are in a business where that touch point between the customer and the barista has to be protected and has to be elevated…Starbucks demands nurturance. It’s a company that has to be nurtured like a young child. That is an anomaly, inconsistent with scale.”

This is pulled from a great interview with Howard Schultz (find it here). This push/pull theme is the golden thread woven throughout the interview. On one end you have an inspiring vision of workplace culture, craftsmanship, and guest experience. On the other, you have scale at all costs.  

Every micro-story shares traits with the macro-story. Case study: the Frappuccino

1. Starbucks acquires the business that created and held the trademark for the Frappuccino 

2. Schultz dislikes it: “I didn’t like the name. I didn’t like the beverage. I didn’t think it was appropriate for Starbucks.”

3. Schultz bottles the Frappuccino for the mass market in a joint venture with Pepsi

Listening to Howard is inspiring. There are sections of his dialogue that would fit right into a Cat & Cloud meeting. His vision is not so different from ours, but the reality of Starbucks and Cat & Cloud are completely different. 

This interview reminds me that every step along our journey we have choices to make, each with an opportunity cost. Who do we want to be? Who do we want to serve? What are the markers of success for us? The tension between what Starbucks is and Howard Schultz’s vision is almost painful to listen to. It seems that a more peaceful way to live might be to:

1. Be honest with ourselves about what we truly value

2. Build our brand promise around those values

3. Enjoy our success tension-free

Note: I can't recommend this episode enough. Great stories, interesting cultural perspective, and an incredible behind-the-scenes look at how one of America's (then the world's) most ubiquitous brands was built.Acquired Podcast. Starbucks, With Howard Schultz

The most common compliment I receive about Cat & Cloud is some version of “Your staff is the best!” It’s funny that even the guests who have been coming in for years saying the best thing about Cat & Cloud is the people, hardly notice those “best people” are consistently changing.

It’s easy to get sucked into believing that there are a finite number of amazing people, but our experience tells us otherwise. We used to see all turnover as a negative, and too much too fast is. But the reality of a business like ours is twofold:

1. We have many people on staff who are entering the workforce for the first time. They resonate with our culture, crave learning, and do great work, but they also have their own passions and life plans. If people can come, contribute, and leave with a bag of skills that helps them thrive and get where they want to go, that's a win.

2. Even if everyone wanted to make Cat & Cloud their forever home, we can’t possibly grow fast enough to perpetually provide long-term career opportunities for everyone on staff. We also don’t see this as a negative. In most entry-level jobs you're choosing your work based more on culture, workplace experience, and learning opportunities than long-term earning potential. (I would've taken Cat & Cloud over my first job at McDonalds if it were an option.)

Strong leadership is a necessity, but the cult of personality is a trap. The cult of culture is freedom.

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Professionals

Do their best work even when they’re not having their best day because people are counting on them

Take ownership of their actions—they make mistakes but not excuses

Seek to serve others rather than seeking fame for themselves

Understand that their reputation follows them wherever they go

Know that imperfect actions are better than perfect ideas

Act with integrity on and off the clock

Don’t gossip

Take responsibility for their growth

Never stop learning

Build their organizations and team up, not tear them down

Over-deliver every time

Share what they've learned and pay it forward

Crush the job they have even when it’s not the job they want


If you can check off these boxes you’ll be an asset wherever you are and build a reputation with limitless potential. Apply these with consistency and in time, any job you want is yours.

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Even the best actors will only churn out a mediocre movie without a solid director.

The director holds the vision and works to bring out the best in the actors. Actors sign on because they believe in the project and want to be a part of it (they’ve likely turned down other roles to accept this one). 

You won’t see Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer, but his fingerprints are all over it. Ideally, you’re so immersed in the story that you don’t even think about the director—you’re thinking about how the movie makes you feel. 

If the movie flops, we blame the director. If the movie does well, the actors get most of the shine.

I can’t think of a better analogy for running our company. 

You likely won’t find the owners on the floor, but our ideas are everywhere. Our work is holding and communicating the vision, getting the right people on the team, and creating an environment where they can do their best work. 

Employees aren’t here because they have to be but because they want to be (working might be a necessity, but every Cat & Cloud team member could easily get any number of other jobs). 

If the business fails, it’s on us. But our guests rarely think about us. They know our team members (the stars) and keep showing up because they love how going to Cat & Cloud makes them feel. 

This is the essence of leadership. It’s not about physically being front and center. It’s about imbuing ideas with meaning and facilitating bringing them to life by creating an environment that empowers the contributions of others—all in service of your guests, customers, or clients.

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“Clean the toilet because it’s part of your job.”

“The lasting impression people take away from any experience is the sum total of everything they see, hear, smell, touch, and feel, both consciously and subconsciously. Any slice of the experience should reflect our mission of creating memorable moments for our guests. Making sure the restroom is dialed is part of this.”

When we understand and resonate with the meaning behind our tasks, even the sh*ttiest ones feel more bearable.

You’re cleaning the toilet either way. Which toilet would you rather clean? 

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One of our secret weapons at Cat & Cloud is tapping into the creativity and inspiration of our team members. From seasonal beverages and new menu items to green coffee buying decisions, some of our most popular creations have come from the minds of our team. 

But just an idea isn't enough. Ideas are easy. Bringing them to life is the hard part. Have an idea for a new menu item? Sweet. You’re on the hook for finding vendors, costing out ingredients, and making sure they fit within our margin and pricing structure. You take the lead on dialing in the workflow—how does this integrate into an already humming kitchen? Everything has to make sense both culturally and monetarily. 

We've set this standard and people repeatedly rise to the occasion. When you pave the way with your mission and values and pair the right level of autonomy with the right level of responsibility, you’ll be amazed at what your team is capable of.

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As an independent company, we spend what we make and keep a watchful eye on our P&L and cash position. Wants are plenty—on any given day, we could find no less than 20 things we’d like to update in each department. Add all those up and we’d run up a tab we couldn't possibly pay. This seems to be the case no matter how much we grow, our appetite is always bigger than our stomach.

Instead of allocating a paltry amount of money to each department for CapEx, we have a quarterly allocation of a larger lump sum shared company-wide. If the retail department uses $10K for something, that's $10K that the marketing, roastery, or partner program departments don’t have access to.

This shared budget approach means every large CapEx allocation involves a discussion with our leadership team to decide where the money will go. The ongoing dialogue about the health and needs of each department drives interdepartmental cooperation, fosters ownership, and connects each department's actions to the bigger picture better than a siloed culture of “I have to protect my money and spend my full budget or I won't get it next year.” 

Our departments aren't in competition with each other. We’re not playing a zero-sum game. The goal of any expenditure is to drive our mission forward. If the money gets allocated to the highest-level organizational need, everyone wins.

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In a brick-and-mortar setting, the size of your business limits the number of people you interact with, but it doesn’t limit the depth or value of those interactions. Every interaction is with an individual, and it's unlikely that any given individual cares whether your annual revenue is $1 million or $30 million, or whether you have one location or ten.

Thoughtful service from a caring professional is (unfortunately) so rare that if you consistently delight your guests, partners, and employees, you’ll undoubtedly carve out a special place in people’s hearts and essentially become irreplaceable. I could live without Starbucks and Round Table Pizza. But if my favorite local coffee shop or pizza joint closed I’d be bummed.

It’s problematic to believe that the size of your business dictates its significance. Most of us will never be anything close to famous. Does that mean our lives don’t matter? Of course not. The same is true for our businesses and projects. Making a huge difference for a small number of people is a worthwhile pursuit.

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The trope of the snotty barista is dead. The same goes for the uppity bartender or chef. Even the famed soup-nazi from Seinfeld is out of business.

When we separate our craft from the people we hope to serve, we trick ourselves into believing our craft can stand alone. But even the most responsibly sourced, perfectly prepared coffee in the world can’t save us from not saying hello when people walk through the door, missing small order details, forgetting our regulars names, or having no sense of urgency. I've been fortunate enough to dine at several 3 Michelin Star restaurants, and even at those, where the ingredients and preparation techniques are world-class, the service and human interaction leave the biggest impression. 

In our stores, we use a triage system of Guest, Coffee, Caffe to keep this idea front and center. First and foremost, we take care of our guests, coffee comes second, and cafe issues come third. (We can all relate to how annoying it is to be standing in line somewhere and see no one at the register while an employee is cleaning the windows.) To hit our mark, we need all three components working together—we can't say we're taking care of our guests if we're serving subpar coffee in a dirty cafe. But starting with the Guest is a constant reminder of what's most important.

We can all learn to roast delicious coffee or build the perfect Manhattan. Skills that used to be closely guarded trade secrets are now in the public domain, and as it turns out, all of them are easier than emotionally connecting with hundreds of guests a day. 

The trend of pretentious craftsmanship is over. Our guests don't exist as a means for us to pursue our craft, rather, our craft provides a conduit for delighting our guests.

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If you’ve ever received remarkable service, the person who gave it to you likely spent more time focused on your needs than theirs. They made the experience all about you, and because of that, you have a deep appreciation for them. 

This is the seemingly paradoxical relationship with being of service: it’s not about you, yet your role deeply matters. 

One of the exercises we do at new hire orientation is to have new team members share stories of memorable experiences. They could take place at a coffee shop, restaurant, doctor's office, or on a vacation with friends. Anything goes. People share experiences of all kinds, and the common thread woven through these stories is someone making a choice to put another person at the center of the universe.

We share these stories to tap into how these experiences make us feel and understand that every day, we have the opportunity to create those same feelings in every guest we serve. When we recognize the joy in receiving, the joy in giving becomes apparent. 

The range of experiences in these stories also reinforces one of our core beliefs: Creating a positive impact has nothing to do with what you do and everything to do with how you do it. We’ve all had regrettable, forgettable, and incredible experiences with people from every imaginable occupation. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a huge corporation or it’s your first day working the register at a local coffee shop. The experiences you create for the people around you shape your life and theirs.

Find the humanity, find the magic.

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I recently popped down to my neighborhood bike shop with my daughter to pick her up a Strider. I walked into an empty shop and the employee behind the counter had his head buried in his phone. He looked up at me as I walked in then went back to typing on his phone. We walked around the shop for a long minute before he put his phone down and said “Can I help you?”

I could have ordered the same bike on Amazon, it would have arrived the next day with free shipping and I would have had more color options to choose from. But memories are precious and I wanted the experience of going into a physical bike shop with my daughter and watching her eyes light up as she trots around, plays with the pedals of the display bikes, and ultimately gets the stoke of taking something home with her. 

As an independent business owner supported by the community around me, I deeply want to support other businesses in my community. But the reason local businesses are special is not simply because they’re local, but because of the connection and care they have the opportunity to provide. What the bike shop failed to realize is that their real business opportunity is to create an experience, because the products they sell are simply commodities (there are hundreds of places I can buy a Strider). 

If we strip away the magic of the human experience we shouldn’t be surprised when people opt out of supporting local businesses and simply click to buy on Amazon. But if we take the opportunity in front of us seriously and focus on creating connection and delighting our guests and partners, we become irreplaceable.

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