On our way to a Santa Cruz community event featuring a smorgasbord of local small businesses, I half-joked to a friend that I’m terrible about showing up for my local community.
He replied, “You have a space where hundreds of people gather every day to have fun, tell stories, and share laughs. The community is better because of your shops, it seems to me like you’re doing plenty.”
He was articulating something I already believed. That our work, when done with love and intention, is a form of community service.
Most of our social interactions day in and day out, revolve around businesses. Going out for coffee, a lunch date, grabbing a drink after work, not to mention work itself. This is why businesses are so powerful—they shape the world around us (sometimes for the worst).
So if you’re feeling the pressure to run a solid business and also do good on the side, a better strategy might be to get clear about what you do and don’t do, and integrate the change you hope to make into your day-to-day work.
I’ve been lucky enough to have meals at 3 Michelin Star restaurants and despite the cutting-edge preparation techniques, absurd wine lists, and bespoke table wear, none of them have made me feel the way my grandma's homemade tortillas did. Just a few ingredients rolled out with a wooden dowel borrowed from an old clothes rack, cooked in a modest home.
Although worlds apart in some ways, both experiences were created with love, both were gifts from people who care to people who appreciate those gifts, and both formed life-long memories.
Money is a convenient excuse to hide behind because no matter how much you have, what you wish you could do requires just a little bit more. But money doesn’t create experiences, people create experiences, and you're already a person, so you already have everything you need.
In preparation for a recent family trip, I deleted Instagram from my phone so I wouldn't be tempted to randomly open it up and scroll for no reason.
When I returned home, I struggled to find a compelling justification for re-downloading the app. Despite considering myself to be disciplined, I find myself mindlessly scrolling (“relaxing”) or sharing mindless memes (“connecting”) far more than I feel comfortable with.
I definitely see the case for businesses or a tight-knit family or social circle. The waters become murkier when we’re lost in the middle-ground: would-be influencers trading a significant amount of time and mental bandwidth in hopes that they’ll be the next one in a million. It’s not that different than spending all your money on lottery tickets. Sure, someone’s going to win, but it’s probably not going to be you.
I keep coming back to this question: Is the small amount of attention we’re getting worth the astronomical amount of time we’re spending on these platforms? I’m pretty sure most of us aren’t going to look back in 10, 20, or 30 years and say “I wish I would’ve spent more time on TikTok.”
Despite all that I re-downloaded the app and posted a few stories of my car today. How’s that for self-control?
Every Friday at 9 am we have our executive meeting. It’s a place where we discuss financials, check in on big projects, do some good old-fashioned venting, and every once in a while, shed a tear.
Every company-wide initiative we roll out gets shared with the executive team first. Sharing with this team helps us bench-test our ideas and through the conversation, we’re able to understand our own ideas better, all while getting feedback and insight that we might not have. While we can’t outsource our vision for the organization, having people put our ideas through the wringer is invaluable.
The meeting started its life as a Team Leader meeting—anyone who ran a department or store location, and at some point, it transitioned into the “Executive Meeting.” I don’t love the name—it sounds a bit corporate so I’ll often refer to it as our “upper leadership meeting.” Over the years it’s gone through multiple incarnations both in its format and in the people that attend. Basically, it’s a group of people whose opinions we trust that have earned their spot with the passion they have for sharing our mission and values, the way they carry themselves at work, and who have a track record of turning ideas into reality.
I have a complicated relationship with this meeting. Some days it feels like the highlight of my week, and on others, it feels like we’re wasting our time. Sometimes we come prepared, sometimes we wing it. Sometimes we try a new format and stick to it for a month only to slip back into chaos. Sometimes I talk too much. Sometimes I don’t say enough. Even though my two business partners and I have clearly defined roles, we’re all passionate about every aspect of the organization and it’s not uncommon for us to have different opinions on the best way forward.
While my natural inclination is to have everything completely buttoned up, sitting through a disorganized meeting every once in a while feels way better than feeling disconnected because we have no communication with our team. Despite all its imperfections, the spirit of the meeting is true.
The biggest rewards of my life haven’t come from constantly chasing what’s new and exciting, they’ve come from being deeply invested in one thing. The first time I got an all-expenses paid work trip was in 2007 when I flew to Milan for the Host show. This was about five years after I’d gotten my first coffee job and about two years after I’d competed in my first Barista competition.
Being in Milan with my colleagues was a reward for my hard work, but the even bigger reward was being confident and well-versed in my craft.
Trips come and go, but hard-earned skills serve us for a lifetime. Without putting in the work day after day, year after year, it’s unlikely you’ll get the extraordinary opportunities. If for some reason you do get the extraordinary opportunities without putting in the work, you’re actually missing out.
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.
There’s a Jungian idea that other people can tell you more about yourself than you can. By being emotionally removed they can assess from a more objective perspective—they see how you act, what you spend your time on, and what you avoid.
The same thing could be said about our guests. If we don't make an effort to see from their perspective or call on them for feedback, we really have no idea how well we’re doing. Maybe we have a line out the door, money consistently hitting the bottom line, and relatively low turnover. But if we don’t know Why this is happening, can we sustain it? And while it might look like we’re crushing it, how much better could we be?
Of course, not all feedback is created equal. We want feedback from people who get it, not anonymous trolls or one-time hitter quitters. We want feedback from our guests, not just randos.
There is a sweet spot. No feedback and we’re not as good as we could be. Feedback from the wrong people and we risk becoming confused or chasing shiny new objects instead of focusing on higher-level goals.
Listening to people tell you how you’ve fallen short of their expectations can be uncomfortable. But the opportunity to learn and grow in good faith stings less than the pain that ultimately comes from blindly leaning into your own self-deception.
At some point, a business unexamined and unchallenged falls apart.
Values in a business function just like personal values.
Each of us has a code. When we honor that code, we feel most like ourselves. There’s an inner peace that comes from living in a way that’s aligned with our values, even when doing so is challenging.
When we make decisions that go against our values, whether out of convenience, peer pressure, or sheer laziness, we feel kind of icky inside. But a bump in the road doesn't have to send us down a completely different path.
Bump. Correct. Learn. Repeat.
Judgment
Like people, we can’t judge businesses on their ideals, we can only judge what they do. Values not put into action don't count for much.
But we shouldn’t judge businesses by their worst moments—we all miss the target sometimes. Most things are not all or nothing. To strive for a goal and fall short is much better than not striving at all. If we put in the work day after day, year after year, at some point, our imperfect reality will eclipse yesterday's perfect dreams.
Few things are as rewarding as being a helper. Here's a short list of things you can do to improve the workplace experience for the people around you:
Share what you’ve learned.
Set goals with your teammates.
Be someone’s accountabilibuddy.
Take the time to listen and connect.
Share your wins with your team (default to "we" not "me").
Recognize people for their contribution (no generic “You’re crushing it!” shoutouts. Be thoughtful and specific).
Recommend someone for a promotion (but only if they truly deserve it).
Offer to help with something that's not your responsibility (but only if you can follow through).
Push the people around you to be as great as you know they can be.
Cheat sheet: If you want to be a better coworker and aren’t sure where to start, do the things you wish your coworkers would do for you.
There are no secrets to success, not anymore. If you want information, you have it. If you want to figure something out, you can.
Want to tell better stories? There are workshops available to you 24/7. Trying to dial in your P&L? There are thousands of YouTube videos pointing you in the right direction. There’s no shortage of people willing to share their hard-earned skills with you. A lot of times for free! We can learn from the best anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing.
Access to knowledge is not what’s keeping your business from being where it wants to be.
Skills are the easy part.
The hard part is feeling like you’re alone.
The hard part is continually giving but never having your own cup filled.
The hard part is pushing forward when everything feels like it's about to fall apart.
The fear that comes with taking the next step knowing it might not work.
The weight of going to bed with every night feeling like it’s all on you. Your head hits the pillow—instant anxiety. Everything you could've and should’ve done comes to visit you like the ghost of Christmas past.
What’s really hard, is knowing that you’re making a difference.
The people we look up to don’t help either. How can we feel like we’re winning when our Instagram has 1,000 followers and the girl we’re learning from has 2 million? Floating in a sea of what looks like people crushing it, it’s easy to feel small.
Sometimes looking at someone else's story can help us understand ours.
We have a friend, Benjamin Paz. Benjamin grew up in Honduras. His dad ran the coffee mill in El Cedral, a small community on Santa Barbara mountain. Coffee farmers from around the region would harvest their coffee and bring it to the mill to have it processed. For coffee we call commodity or C market, you kind of just get paid what you get paid. Drop the coffee off at the mill, the mill pays you, the mill sells the coffee to an importer and the cycle continues, harvest after harvest, year after year.
As Benjamin got older and became more involved in the business, he noticed an opportunity. He saw that some people in his region were producing coffee that was well above par—too good to be sold at C market prices. He also saw that people producing average coffee could improve their quality and raise their income if someone helped them understand what buyers on the other end of the supply chain were looking for.
Benjamin runs the mill now and while they still move plenty of commodity-grade coffee, he’s found a calling working with the farmers in his region, helping them improve their quality and connecting them with buyers on the other side of the supply chain.
He’s not particularly popular in the large scheme of things—unless you work this super niche slice of the specialty coffee community, you have no idea that he exists, but in his community, he’s a living legend because of what he continually does for the people around him. Show up in service, and make things better.
It’s not all fun and games, he still has to run the business. But his contribution matters deeply, and the ripple effect extends far beyond his community. Because of the work he does, we get to experience these unique and amazing coffees, thousands of miles away. But even more than that, we’re inspired by his generosity and his vision!
Benjamin’s story helps us understand our opportunity.
We’re not in business to be the biggest in the world. We’re not in business to be the richest in the world. As I’m sure many of you have discovered: there are easier ways to make money than running an independent business.
We’re here to connect.
To create experiences.
To teach.
To inspire.
Each interaction we have is an opportunity to bring a bit of joy into someone's day. Joy that they can take with them, and pass on to the people they interact with. You can’t use up joy, the more you share it, the more it grows—it’s renewable energy. The joy you create with one short interaction can provide fuel for multiple people’s entire day.
This is a gift. A gift that can be received by anyone who interacts with your business.
Ever had a terrible experience at a retail store that left you thinking: “Fuck it. It’s not worth it I’m just going to get everything from Amazon.” You’re in a position to make sure no one ever has an experience like that at your store.
Ever had a terrible job where no one cared about you or saw the potential in you? You’re in a position to make sure that doesn’t happen at your organization.
Ever taken the lazy route of complaining about young people’s work ethic instead of having the courage to challenge them to live up to their full potential? You get where I’m going here.
Just like Benjamin, we can choose to show up in service and change the world for the people around us. This is no small thing.
Maybe we get famous. Probably not.
Maybe we get rich. Probably not.
But we definitely make a difference. We have the power to help people feel more like themselves.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership.” - John Maxwell
It’s an almost perfect leadership quote. Leadership sets the tone. As does the leader, so do the employees.
Sure, you’ll find diamonds in the rough. People who are crushing it despite working for a leader who’s a complete mess. But it’s only a matter of time before they realize that despite having some success in a broken system, that a diamond among diamonds shines brighter than a diamond in the rough.
It’s commonplace for leaders to embrace their position when things are going well “My team is killing it, I’m a great leader!” and distance themselves from their position when things are going poorly “My team isn’t pulling it together, what the hell is wrong with them?!”
You can’t have it both ways. If you take credit when things are good, you have to take responsibility when things are bad.
Everything rises and falls on leadership.
Perfect is a brick wall you run into no matter how talented you are.
Better is a staircase you climb step by step.
Perfect is something none of us can be.
Better is something anyone can be.
This week I conducted a string of interviews to fill an internal position, and one of our employees repeatedly spoke words like motivation, growth, challenge, etc. He was dead set on continually learning and growing.
“Where do you think your desire to get better comes from?” I asked him.
He told me his mom continually challenged him—that they would play games and she would almost always beat him, and that made him hungry to get better but also made him unafraid of failure. Then he dropped a gem on me and said:
“I learned to love losing because it helped me win.”
When I feel anxious about holding one of my teammates accountable, I can often trace the feeling back to the fear of not wanting them to hold me accountable. There could be any number of reasons for this: fear of failure, knowing I haven't been putting forth my best effort, or simply not wanting to do what needs to be done.
Sometimes I trick myself into thinking that It’d be nice to just float under the radar—someone lets me slide, I let them slide, no hard conversations. The easy life.
But if we step back and look at the long game, coasting through work is much less rewarding, and not necessarily easier than embracing being held to a high standard. And as hard as communicating with candor can be, it’s nothing compared to the resentment that breeds when we avoid difficult conversations.
Accountability is a two-way door. If we step up and hold others accountable, we’re opening the door for them to hold us accountable, and that’s a good thing.
The Acton Academy is a series of one-room schoolhouses founded on the belief that every child is a genius who has a special gift that can change the world.
The school’s educational style is rooted in the Socratic method, and the schools are run mostly by students. They use a system of points, badges, and 360 reviews to evaluate effort, attainment, and character. When I apply their system (slightly modified) to the workplace, a review system could look something like this:
Effort: Did you put your heart into it?
Attainment: Are you meeting the standard?
Culture & Character: Are you living the values and being an example for others?
You could evaluate these yes/no, or rate them on a scale with specific examples to support your decision. If you chose a 1-10 scale for each metric, you might say that any metric below 80% needs improvement and that the average of all three scores must be 80% or higher. If improvement is necessary, you’d determine an acceptable timeframe—perhaps two months in a row below average indicates you might need to have a more serious conversation, three months in a row below average and you might encourage someone to find their happiness elsewhere. Of course, you could also develop a system for rewarding positive contributions.
New Employees
With new employees, or employees learning new skills, attainment will always fall below effort. Until people become masters of their craft, it makes sense to track effort and progress. The Acton Academy has a framework for evaluating that too. (Again, I’m modifying this a bit)
New Employee/New Skill: Did you put your heart into it? (effort)
Two-Week Check-In: Is this time better than last time? (improvement)
One-Month Review: Are you meeting the standard? (meeting standards)
2+ Months: Compare your work to a master—are you as good as the best? (continual improvement and mastery)
Standards & Specificity
With any performance review system, specificity matters. A well-defined standard is a must. Those standards should mirror your values and cultural goals. For example, at Cat & Cloud, the standard for a barista might include strict barista skills (espresso prep, milk texture, latte art, etc.), general coffee knowledge, and guest experience. It doesn’t matter how good you are at making cappuccinos if you’re sucking the energy out of the room and the cafe is a mess.
I’m still digesting this, but here are three takeaways that apply directly to building healthy cultures and maintaining high standards at your business:
Mindset and attitude matter.
Effort and impact are not the same.
Not all nice/fun/rad people are cultural fits.
If you drink Specialty Coffee on a regular basis you’ve no doubt noticed the price increase of your daily indulgence. Inflation, cost of goods, the ebb and flow of the coffee market, and tip creep all have a part to play.
What used to be a $3.00 cappuccino with a $1.00 tip has morphed into a $5.00 cappuccino with 15%, 20%, and 25% tip options. (In California a popular Specialty Coffee chain has cappuccinos priced as follows: Santa Cruz: $4.50, San Francisco: $5.00, Los Angeles: $5.25. Prices will fluctuate depending on geography, and these prices were neither the cheapest nor the most expensive I found.) If we take the median of $5 plus 8% sales tax plus a 25% tip we’re landing around $6.75.
This is no joke for a daily habit. There’s also no shortage of basic breakfast options at any given cafe in the $12-$17 dollar range. Throw in a modifier or two (oat milk, add an extra egg, etc.) and you’ll face a tab close to $30 for your coffee plus a snack.
I added some items to a cart as an experiment. 6oz cappuccino ($5), add oat milk (.50), avocado toast ($13), add poached egg ($2), tax ($1.28), 20% tip ($4.10), total = $25.88.
A Note On Tipping
I have issues with tipping culture in general but setting that aside, if you have the gall to flip around a tip screen with a button that says 25% on it, you better be blowing my mind.
While I’m a business owner, I worked as a Barista for over ten years, and like them or not, I understand the role tips play in the lives of service workers. I also understand that you as a barista, didn’t choose the numbers that pop up as tip options, those are chosen by leadership. So perhaps the same note to business owners is prudent here. Business owners: If you have the gall to program a tip screen with a button that says 25% on it, you better be training your team to blow my mind.
A Screaming Deal
As annoying as price creep is, Specialty Coffee may still be underpriced considering the amount of effort and intentionality that goes into growing, harvesting, processing, sorting, shipping, roasting, and finally preparing it. Anyone who’s ever visited a coffee farm would be shocked at how much work goes into creating a product that’s so easy to take for granted.
What’s more, the best coffees in the world are a bargain. What would you expect to pay for a great bottle of wine, a top-tier cigar, or a rare whiskey? Coffee offers a flavor experience that’s more complex and nuanced than any of those at a fraction of the cost. But a great raw product isn’t enough.
While wine and whiskey come to us ready to drink, coffee, especially espresso, requires skillful preparation. I see many baristas going through the motions of making espresso but with little attention to detail and an absence of passion that’s hard to quantify—it’s almost an energy or aura that you can’t see but feel. (You know when you’re watching a true professional work.)
Again, my goal is not to take jabs at baristas. Employees are a reflection of leadership—they will put their energy into what leadership values, whether leadership states those values explicitly or not. But employees are also their own individuals, and despite being part of a less-than-stellar culture, we each have the opportunity to take ownership and hold ourselves to the highest standard possible. That’s a whole different article in and of itself. Back to the cafe!
Hospitality
The cafe is no longer the only place to get great espresso beverages. With the plethora of equipment and information available, the dedicated home enthusiast can make cappuccinos just as good, if not better than what they’d get at a cafe, and they can make it exactly how they like it, every time.
Amazing coffee is a must but by itself, it’s not enough. Our real opportunity is to create memorable experiences. Experiences that are so amazing that people can’t help but tell their friends. Experiences that fill people up with positive energy that they pass on to the people they interact with. These experiences are a gift and aren’t trivial. Our daily interactions at the coffee shop have more impact on our lives than the once-a-year vacation we take with our family—to undervalue them is a mistake. These experiences, good or bad, shape our lives.
Hospitality is a craft in and of itself. To treat people as guests, not customers, to see yourself more like an actor in a Broadway play than a register operator in a cafe. We have tremendous influence on the emotional state of our guests. I’m not talking about simply being nice. I’m talking about truly seeing people, meeting each individual where they’re at, and leaving people feeling fully taken care of. To be of service is a privilege, and if we carry that mindset into whatever we do, there’s no limit to the impact we can have or what the market will support.
Regardless of where we sit on the price spectrum, we should be aiming to take pride in our work and delight our guests, but when the sum total of the experience doesn’t match what we’re charging, we’re stealing. Great coffee being the bargain that it is, I’d happily pay $7 for a perfect cappuccino with the service experience to match. But $7 for an OK cappuccino with mediocre service—no thanks.
Leadership is more about building relationships than having authority.
Feedback from a trusted peer has more influence than an order from an untrusted boss.
The best breakdown I’ve seen of this philosophy is in John Maxwell's 5 Levels of Leadership. I’d recommend reading the book in its entirety but here’s the gist:
The 5 Levels of Leadership
1. Position - People follow because they have to.
2. Permission - People follow because they want to.
3. Production - People follow because of what you have done for the organization.
4. People Development - People follow because of what you have done for them personally.
5. Pinnacle - People follow because of who you are and what you represent.
Looking at these levels it’s easy to see how authority in the traditional sense only gets you so far, why the boss might not be the most influential person in the organization, and why being of service and having a strong sense of values is essential for anyone who hopes to have influence whether it be peer-to-peer, top-down, or bottom-up.
It’s easy to shy away from peer-to-peer feedback because we don’t want to feel out of line or like we’re “telling someone what to do”. But when done through the lens of service, feedback is an act of generosity that builds trust, while benefiting the individual and the organization.
You don’t have to be the boss to lead.
Asking the right questions is invaluable, but at some point, the professional needs to have answers.
Here’s a rule I use with my team: You can ask me anything you want, but to get my ideas, you first have to give me yours.
This encourages people to take the initiative to solve problems themselves, builds the muscle of sharing their ideas, and prevents them from using a never-ending barrage of questions as a place to hide.
It’s like the buy-in for a poker game. Bringing your ideas to the table means you have skin in the game.
Initially, your ideas might be off-center. This is to be expected and provides an opportunity for discussion and cultural alignment. Over time your ideas will become more on point, you will feel more empowered, and everyone from guest to owner will enjoy the benefits.
Once you understand enough, it’s time to take action. Your default mode can evolve from “Is this OK?” or “What do you think?” to “Here’s what I intend to do” and finally to “Here’s what I did.”
A Cool Boss
lets you slide
finishes your work for you
uses gossip as a means to connect
shirks responsibility
strives to be popular
A Good Boss
challenges you and holds you accountable to your highest level of work
never does anything for you that you could do yourself
holds the cultural line, even in the face of criticism or pressure
embraces responsibility
strives to be of service
Turns out a cool boss isn't that cool.
Much of the work you do when you’re young is less about expressing who you are, and more about discovering who you are.
Don’t worry about leaving your mark on a project.
Don’t approach your work from a place of selfishness or ego.
Don’t make it about you.
Focus on making a positive contribution to the team.
Do your best.
Work with intention.
Show up again and again in the service of others, and through these acts of service your gifts will begin to reveal themselves.
We all have gifts to share, but we can’t effectively share them unless we put in the time and effort to discover and develop them.
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