Coffee Business — Achieving Entrepreneurial Success
The world’s worst kept secret: starting a business is a lot of work. Turning a profit from an idea is no easy feat. Many of the world’s best entrepreneurs spent years tinkering away at a prototype that could potentially turn into a viable business.
To get there, they clocked hours upon hours of hard work in hopes of keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. And while you may have never seen them sweat trying to put their next meal on the table, you can bet they’ve overcome quite a few hurdles in their early days as entrepreneurs before they set out to find product market fit.
So, if you’re looking to start your own business, you’re not alone in your struggle. In fact, you’ll likely have to overcome more than your fair share of hurdles before you find the right recipe for success. But, let’s take just one step back and ask: “What defines my business’s success?”
All too often we hear of the AirBnB’s of the world — the cream of the crop, the 1%, the wild success stories. We fool ourselves into thinking that raising investments, IPOs and acquisitions are the only recipe for success.
But the truth of the matter is, those success stories — while great — will never be achieved by the vast majority of entrepreneurs.
But there is hope yet. Many of the wild success stories we hear start as side projects. And I’m not talking about the side projects that we all have in our heads where we’ll one day make millions of dollars.
I’m talking about the side projects that actually turn into a business. The side projects that you work on in your off-hours. The side projects you thought about in the shower one morning, and then decided to go for it.
Those side projects are very real, and are what launched many of today’s billion dollar companies.
They literally lead through a small dark path to a light at the end of the tunnel that you never knew was there.
And that’s the thing — you don’t know how far you will go until you get started. And all too often, we let fear and doubt stand in our way. We fall on two extremes of a spectrum: either the idea is going to make millions or it is bound to fail.
But there’s a compelling middle ground. A middle ground of side projects that are real businesses. And the best part? They’re not about making millions of dollars. Instead, they make just enough to pay for coffee. They are what I’ve dubbed “Coffee Businesses”.
So what exactly is a Coffee Business?
A Coffee Business is an idea that can be started with very little capital, time and effort. But the idea is so simple that it can be honed into a product or service that solves a problem for customers.
A Coffee Business is something you can start while you’re working your day job. You’ll work on it in the evenings and weekends.
Coffee Businesses aren’t supposed to make millions of dollars. They’re supposed to pay for your coffee. That’s literally it. Instead of worrying about how you increase revenue so that you can quit your job, worry about how you can pay for coffee.
At its core, a Coffee Business is like many traditional entrepreneurial ventures when it comes to the early days. It’s a lot of hard work, and a lot of uncertainty. But the difference is that the Coffee Business isn’t necessarily trying to become the next big thing.
And that is what makes Coffee Businesses so powerful to those of us who pursue them.
We don’t have a goal to build a billion dollar company. We don’t even have a goal to quit our jobs. The goal is simple: pay for coffee.
Shifting your entrepreneurial paradigm to Coffee Business isn’t just about how you view your company. It’s also about how you view yourself as an entrepreneur and as a person.
It’s about changing the way you think about failure. So many of us are afraid to fail, because we don’t want to look bad in front of our friends and family. But a Coffee Business isn’t meant to be a source of pride or shame. It’s meant to be something that helps you pay for your coffee. By moving the goal posts of success closer to the starting line, we remove the pressure of having to hit a grand slam in order to keep living our lives. We understand that failures are incremental and that a series of failures will add up to real progress. It’s hard to learn if we’re afraid of failing every time we get up at bat, so with a Coffee Business, we’ve recalibrated our expectations to be much more realistic.
The next time you have a new idea, make the conscious decision to fall in the middle of the spectrum. Don’t fool yourself that you will be a millionaire and don’t think you’ll fail without even trying. Instead, approach your new business with the humble belief that you’ll bring in enough money to pay for your next cup of Joe.
