John Luke Roberston is the founder and roaster at Kings Lane Coffee in West Monroe, LA. You may be familiar with the TV show Duck Dynasty that follows the lives of John Luke’s family and their duck call business, Duck Commander. As John Luke grew and…
Can you have too much of a good thing? When it comes to managers and bosses in the coffee shop the answer is a resounding and exasperated YES! Why do we do needlessly multiply leaders in the shop like Oprah giving our free cars and as a result…
Coffee competitions have grown to be a dominant force for how professionals and consumers alike view the role of a barista, the industry, and coffee itself. Mindsets, businesses, and the supply chain itself has been shaped by the influence of…
Caring for people and their experience, both as employees and as customers, is at the heart of a successful coffee shop. In order to consistently pursue that, an operator needs to have a strong grounding of personal values that directs their decisions and helps them weather the storms of entrepreneurship. Today we are talking with someone whose mission to facilitate …
If I could pick one way to absolutely decimate your culture and drive your employee’s morale into the dirt, while also making your customer’s squirm, it would be passive-aggressive reactionary nitpicking masquerading as leadership. I get it, you have…
In our quest for success in the coffee shop business we embrace the busy and frenetic pace that is assumed as necessary to bring us fulfillment. As we work we can often lose touch with the thing that drove our passion in the beginning. While scaling and ambition have many benefits, there always remains the need to connect with deep …
In order to have engaged baristas, owners and managers must first be willing to engage. Unfortunately we have a habit of stifling questions and feedback from the group of people who live closest to the systems we create and treat questions as either…
When we think of the craft of coffee we tend to think only in terms of the bean and beverage itself. The whole value chain of coffee has benefited greatly from continued emphasis on transparency and today we have the ability to track down almost every detail and variable of a coffee to accurately determine what went into the resulting …
As a roaster your career can go through many different unique phases, all of which will tech you different things about the craft, the business, leadership, and even entrepreneurship. Not least among the things you learn is how to use both resources and constraints as opportunities to serve others and grow as a roaster. These are the kinds of experiences …
The most important thing in coffee…is people. More to the point, managers and owners prioritizing hiring and caring for the right people, and baristas embracing taking responsibility for their own careers and how they show up in the shop vs blaming…
