One of the many ventures that I have started is a coffee-roasting business as part of Healthy River Ventures, run by my son Kurt. The Specialty Coffee Association of America puts on a massive conference annually and, this year, it happened to be in Atlanta, right up the road from where our roasting shop, The Beanery, is located. So Kurt and I and Andrew Gunn, our primary coffee roaster, made the trip to learn and explore about the coffee business.
In addition to the huge exhibitor hall that featured every possible aspect of growing, distributing, roasting, packaging, and serving coffee, there were coffee roasting and barista championships, workshops and lectures. I attended several lectures, including one on buying green coffee beans. The two presenters were from Olam, a wholesale distributor of green coffee from around the world, and they shared a great presentation about the process of evaluating and buying green coffee beans. What struck me the most was when they highlighted the most
important quality needed to make a great coffee buyer: How well they handle a situation when things don’t go as planned. They were describing the very traits that I write about in Grounded! It turns out that things frequently don’t go as planned when you are buying green coffee beans (the more I examine different industries, the more I find that every industry is rife with examples of when things go wrong!). What’s most important, more than knowledge of the growing and drying process, more than understanding the types of fungus that can affect green coffee, is the ability to keep one’s head and exhibit calm focus when a disaster, however large or small, strikes.
Regardless of your industry, the ability to appropriately handle a tough or contentious situation with calm focus may make the difference in mitigating the negative effects of a disaster.