Apologies, Excuses, and The Quality Line
Apologies and excuses are for amateurs. If we want to be seen as professionals it makes more sense to scrap the excuses and instead draw a well-defined quality line. Once something meets or exceeds the quality line it’s good to go. No apologies, no excuses.
If you consistently find yourself embarrassed by the work you’re putting into the world, raise the quality line. If you’re consistently unable to ship because nothing meets your quality line, you can either lower the quality line or get better.
While it’s tempting to claim “nothing less than perfection,” reality doesn’t support this.
At any given time we (and most other specialty coffee shops) have a spread of baristas on bar with anywhere from three months to three years of experience. To be cleared to work on bar, each barista needs to meet a certain standard, but the more experienced barista is on a whole different level. A cappuccino from the less experienced barista is delicious. A cappuccino from the more experienced barista is a transformative experience. If we set the quality line in relation to the three-year baristas skillset, that’s fine, we just have to create an infrastructure that ensures we’ll always have a full team of baristas with no less than three years of experience and be willing to say “I’m sorry, we’re not serving cappuccinos today” when we don’t. This approach doesn't serve our guests or our organization.
It’s perfectly fine to have a lofty vision and a realistic quality line—you can’t charge for garbage, but what’s something you can deliver that identifies you as a player in the game you’ve chosen to play, that you’d be proud of?
Set your quality line accordingly and deliver. No apologies. No excuses.