When I started a café consultancy company with my partners, my vision was to make a name in the industry that I was interested in. I didn’t quite understand the essence of building a business or creating unique value for people. Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to business world. I never thought it would be…
I had 3 partners when we set up a café consultancy company in in 2015. After a celebration lunch, I felt sick. I was drowned in emptiness and anxiety – what have I done with my life? I remembered walking up a hill and gazing down at the city, feeling the warmth of sunshine and…
When I joined a start-up coffee chain in 2013, I entered a new world that was fundamentally different from the corporate environment I came from. Despite casual dress code, my on-boarding experience started with travelling around town with my boss to retail outlets, warehouse and roasting plant, meeting licensees and suppliers. From day one, I…
‘I’m going home, home.’ This is a line in ‘La La Land’ when Emma Stone felt humiliated after a poor received play and decided to retreat back to her parents’ home. I felt it. That was my life too. Back home, I told family and friends that I sold off my business and decided to…
I happily signed up for a speaking gig a couple months ago with Mindvalley, thinking it could be fun to share about coffee. Who cares that I had no experience in public speaking, I had two months to prepare for it. This was what I thought when I said yes to the organiser. 60 days…
One and a half months into being a (over-rated) ‘startup founder’, a friend asked me this question knowing that my team was making coffee in an event until 4 am in the morning. It was a weekend. He started to project our total revenue, profit margin, earning per hour and all the hard figures, leading…
Coffee is a happiness business. It’s a legalised drug that stimulate good mood (at least for me). Things get a little complicated in the era of third wave coffee, when we coffee people are obsessed with single origin, COE micro lot, and original flavour of coffee. Coffee is supposed to be acidic! Fruity! With blueberry…
A lot of people who enjoy coffee aspire to become a café owner one day to serve the coffee they love. Passion can definitely fuel your drive to run a café, but running a sustainable café business is a different ball game altogether. Joshua from espressolab and Daphne from Assembly Coffee are generous enough to…
Sometimes I think I am happy to stay in coffee industry forever. Coffee makes things okay even on the shittiest days; and people that surround me makes me feel homey all the time. The process of grinding and tamping coffee beans, watching the flow of double ristretto, steaming milk and giving my best shot in…
I love coffee. So much so that I abandoned my well-paid corporate job and took a dive into a F&B start up company, feeling certain that this is the best decision that I’ve ever made in my life. Looking back at the past 12 months being a full time coffee lover, it is time to…
‘Hmm, I don’t know how to drink coffee.’ When I animatedly tell people about the story of coffee, this is the response that I get most of the time. Everyone knows how to drink coffee, for sure (it’s a beverage!). That gets me started to think about people’s concern in declaring their right and wrong,…
Thank to Starbucks, sipping a tall latte has translated into style, coolness and status no matter where you are. For most of us who grow up drinking coffee off packets, standing in front of a never ending coffee menu board seems like a daunting scenario. It just seems so not-cool to ask the barista what is…