Growing, Growing, Gone

Any given week in our first year of business might see me roasting, packing and shipping web orders, posting on Instagram, making videos, cupping, taking calls from wholesale partners, and working bar.

With a small crew, one location, and the roastery on-site, It was very easy to connect with the heartbeat of the business. Teamwork came naturally. Ownership interacted with the frontline every day and vice versa. 

As we have grown, positions have become more specialized. Marketing Team Leader, Partner Program Director, Green Coffee Coordinator, Retail Team Leader, Roastery Team Leader, Controller, etc. 

It’s more difficult to connect with the heartbeat of the organization. Teamwork is trickier. If you lead a department, how do you know what to handle on your own vs. when you need the organization to provide an “outside” resource? 

Barista Training

I’ve had the great fortune to work at three well-respected coffee companies during large growth periods, and inevitably at some point, for some reason (to scale more quickly or alleviate pressure from hard-working cafe managers), on-the-floor training is replaced or at least heavily supplemented with off-the-floor training. A training department is formed, someone gets a fancy “Barista Trainer” job title (yes, I’ve been that guy multiple times), people leave the cafe to attend classes in a lab, and on the whole, drink and service quality goes down.

We see this playing out in real time with the third-wave coffee behemoths, businesses that in some ways invented the genre and have seen incredible growth. Despite how well-resourced they are both financially and with human talent, they are no longer the places you’ll find the best experiences or most knowledgeable, engaged staff, at the cafe level. 

Scale

We need some level of specialization. I can’t do all those things I described in the opening paragraph at scale—roasting thousands of pounds of coffee is much different than roasting hundreds. 

The common thread I see among the businesses I admire is that the knowledge and the core of the culture live very close to the work. Leading seventy-plus employees across multiple cafes and departments sounds like a pain in the ass, but leading a team of twelve at one location feels doable. The question that's been nagging me lately is: How can we reap the benefits of being a larger company while still acting like a smaller one? I haven’t seen anyone in our industry pull it off. 

Someone I deeply respect who runs a coffee company about twice the size of ours recently asked me how many locations we have. 

“Four plus the roastery,” I said.
“You’re in the sweet spot, don’t add any more,” she replied. 

Part of me believes we can do things that have never been done before. Part of me believes she’s right.