I can hold an average weight business card in the furrow of my brow. Kinda proud of that. However in my career my natural resting face has inspired a lot of “interesting” assumptions. Now, to some degree, there is a limit to what I can do, but in my work I want to make sure that what I want to …
Roasting and brewing creates opportunity for mentorship and relationships that last longer than the sensory experience of the cup. Seriously pursuing technical excellence is a part of securing this opportunity and today’s guest has been on a journey to bring both to the table. On this Rate of Rise we are talking with Purefi Coffee Roasters, Chris Johnson! Chris is …
It is easy to become stuck in the ways that you first learned to do things. Especially if those ways have brought some degree of success. We take comfort in the familiar to the degree that even if it is not working, we will protect the known dysfunction rather than embracing something new better, but not known. Not to mention …
I love cupping coffee. It is a great way to assess a coffee and learn how to identify defects, attributes, and nuances that allow you to make decisions about buying coffee and how to maintain consistency in roasting. But the issue we have in a lot of coffee is that cupping, a practice designed for the above scenarios, has been …
The favorite past time of many an owner is to gripe about their younger Gen Z staff. Before them it was millennials. Before them it was Gen X, before them…well, you get the idea. For as long as coffee shops have hired employees, leaders have found it challenging to lead and manage a younger work force and the reason given …
“Don’t get left behind!” It feels like every post trying to sell you on a product relies on fear in order to make the sale. The idea of marketing to “pain points” as they say in the biz, is not entirely wrong since we do in-fact want to provide solutions for real needs. But where things go a step too …
Ranking the best coffee shops in the world is a task that sounds like a neat idea! That is until you realize the sheer impossibility of such a task not to mention the cognitive dissonance required to pretend like the results of such a ranking are in any way definitive or substantive. The world of coffee shops thrives on professional …
Focusing on numbers above guest experience may actually prevent you from achieving the numbers you need to sustain your business long term. Yet still people insist on creating environments in the shop that turn customers into marks to be worked for the sake to extracting as much out of them each interaction as possible so we can see average tickets …
Today we are surrounded by content and it is expected of every customer facing brand to strive to create a brand persona and content to reinforce your values and attract others who share those things. The bi-product of this dearth of content is the underlying sense of anxiety, disconnect, and lack of grounding as it seems the more we produce …
When you build a trust through serving people with sincerity and passion, those same people support and uplift you. In the business of the coffee shop, those kinds of relationships are the life giving force that carries owners through the ups and downs of ownership. Today we get to talk to two of our industry’s sweetest people whose cafe is …
