Customers don't tip for coffee.
I was managing the busiest restaurant operation at the busiest ski resort in America with an 8 lane checkout cafeteria, a patio BBQ, and a coffee stand. The coffee stand took 3 staff to run and they never generated tips, neither did anyone else. The coffee stand had a liquor license but had spent years of selling only coffee. It was overlooked.
It wasn't a more or less desirable role to work at, but I hyped my staff to start to believe it was. We couldn't stop being a coffee stand, but we could become more. We looked around the warehouses for signs, posters, chalkboards and built an ambiance. I set a new signature drinks menu with a hot toddy and Irish coffee. I took pictures and printed them. We wrote the drink names everywhere. Over merchandised. We sold a few, it wasn't an instant hit, but all the alcoholic drinks paid with a tip. This is when staff started appreciating me.
I encouraged more revenue. Expanded the menu and sales rose. I evaluated records, cut the losers, added more signs, more variations, did research. Our attention to detail rose. I encouraged them to add to the menu, sell what they love. I'd say "the customers are the same as us".
Their tips increased in line with alcohol sales. They started to approach me when we broke records before I even saw the daily numbers. "sold 14 more than we did yesterday". I'd regularly walk into new drinks on the menu. "Been planning this one, give it a try, you are going to love it". Staff started doubling their daily wages in tips, then tripling, then they started earning a week's wage every day. Customers don't tip for coffee, but they will tip for alcohol, even if you mix it with coffee.
One guy who had always sent part of his paycheck home locked my eyes, sincere to his core. "My parents say thank you, and I do too.. my brothers need this. Thank you for coffee bar." I responded, "You did all the work. Plus the customers don't like me as much as they like you."
It became a privileged role. The envious horde of cafeteria staff watched a tight knit team form between the 7 who successfully rotated in at Coffee Bar. They took over their own schedule, covering for each other without fail. They helped me maintain inventory. They started a competition to become the best at making coffee art, they practiced folding the cream into the top layer of coffee, and making intricate patterns. The better the customer's reaction when they saw the art, the more rep they earned over their friends. They practiced specifically on this goal, looked for attention to their skills. They tried to teach me, we laughed when I couldn't pour as good as them. It was hard to replicate, they had mastered pouring a cup of coffee. The results were clear. I had leveraged my tools to incentivize a team to grow and produce results better than I could do myself.
Customers started tipping for coffee.
Looking for hard problems, long days, and an enthusiastic team creating value.
I grew up with 5 siblings in the oak canopy of New Hampshire suburbs.
At 18 Utah offered the Rocky Mountains. I started cleaning hotel rooms at Snowbird resort, sold vacuums door to door, rented a basement. I hitchhiked up the canyon 7 days a week, it was the record snowfall year, always waist high.
At 21 Charleston South Carolina offered friends, beach, and a restaurant industry. I was promoted to General Manager within 2 years. Managed 18 employees, $1.6M revenue, increased profit 10% year-over-year. I bought a car.
At 23 Breckenridge Colorado offered a restaurant at top of a ski mountain, the game at scale. 40 employees, $6M revenue, highest contribution margin in the restaurant's history. I earned the highest employee approval rating of all the resort's General Managers.
At 25 I travelled in search of the miraculous. Backpacks, hostels, and street food collided me into entrepreneurs who built things on a laptop. I saw, then I became the coffee shop engineer.
At 27 I had learned Python, Django, CSS, Javascript, and React before it had functional components. Launched my first ecommerce product, a customizable teddy bear. Found a manufacturer overseas, bought equipment and inventory. We even sold a few.
At 28 I quit driving Uber when I was hired as an engineer. Trellis pushed me to get better. They had me learn Vue, Shopify's liquid brackets, and the day-to-day of a tech startup, ecommerce at scale. I shipped features in sprawling legacy codebases and learned to deliver in undocumented code.
At 30 freelancing let me design and architect challenging code. I did well at some and not at others. I liked the creativity, I hated refactoring. I learned to write code I love to refactor.
At 31 I bought a farmhouse in Vermont on a quiet dirt road beneath the stars above a view.
At 32 I turned a 500 gal smoker into a roadside bbq doing $20k/month. Built my own POS system and website. (Currently building an automated system of temp sensors, actuators, and log hoppers so Claude can cook for me).
At 34 I self-taught Aiken smart contracts and UTXO architecture to ship a first-of-its-kind DeFi mechanism to mainnet.
At 35 I rebuilt an unstable multichain wallet into a modular architecture with state machine auth, ready to scale across chains, working with an international team.
I adapt and incrementally achieve goals. I think creatively, seek friendship, embody my mission, make things look cool, and have fun. Give me good problems, an environment to fail forward and watch me become relentless.