I recently listed to James Freeman on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) podcast. James is the founder and CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee. This talk is full of incredible insights, some handpicked highlights are below.
- Obsess over the quality of your product and “repeat to perfect.”
Before starting Blue Bottle, James was a professional clarinet player with a coffee roasting hobby. As a musician, James used to sit alone for hours on end practicing the clarinet. His goal was to play a little better at the end of the day than he did at the start. Through this process, he developed the discipline of “repeating to perfect,” which became a guiding principle at Blue Bottle. The goal was serving customers delicious coffee and James stripped away every distraction that got in the way. He only had 6 drinks on the menu, with no sizes and no flavors. There were no couches or plastic-wrapped muffins like most other coffee shops had. Every day, James focused solely on making delicious coffee and repeating the process to perfect his craft.
The farmers markets James attended reinforced the notion that quality of product was most important. None of the farmers had marketing budgets or PR firms. If your product was good, people bought it. And they came back next week to buy again. It was that simple. James made sure that things like logos and branding were secondary concerns at Blue Bottle.
- Recognize that the customer experience is part of your product.
James recognized early on that Blue Bottle’s product was coffee + experience. Delicious coffee could be amplified with a positive customer experience or ruined with a negative one. From his prior career as a musician, James honed the ability to “imagine the sensory outcomes” of his audience and he used this same skill to master all the details at Blue Bottle. He analyzed everything from the atmosphere of the café to the sound of the speakers. He even edited the menu knowing that seeing a word you can’t pronounce sparks a small sense of anxiety.
James talks of a formative experience he had at a Japanese café. After he ordered his coffee, the barista spent a minute scanning a hundred of different cups before selecting one. “Just pick one, dude,” James initially thought to himself. He then realized that, in that particular moment, the barista was searching for the perfect cup to enhance James’ experience. The barista was imagining sensory outcomes and acting accordingly. No detail is too small if it can contribute to a positive customer experience.
- Constraints lead to creativity.
When James started Blue Bottle, he lacked both business experience and money. These constraints forced him to be creative though. They allowed him to be unique.
James had never received formalized business training and admits that, at the time, he didn’t even know “P&L” stood for “profit and loss.” Unlike business savvy founders, James didn’t focus on market research or efficient processes. He believes that if he had, Blue Bottle would have been just like all the other traditional coffee shops. Market research would have told him that customers liked options, while James decided to only serve 6 items with no sizes or flavors. He also embraced inefficiencies that led to higher quality coffee. James would grind and brew each coffee to order, despite the long wait times, because that’s when the coffee tasted best.
“In the first 10 years of Blue Bottle,” says James, “we were really built around my own incompetence, my failings, of me being unwilling and unable to make certain compromises, the quirks of my taste, and having a deeply personal control over everything, and not being too devoted to efficiencies. All these eccentricities and missteps became our founding path.”
James’ lack of money was also a constraint that had a positive effect. Blue Bottle’s first location was a small kiosk in a sketchy, dead-end alleyway. With more money available, James would have felt pressured to open a more traditional café in a better location. James believes that the uniqueness of Blue Bottle’s kiosk helped customers be open minded and accepting of a unique experience. The experience at Blue Bottle wouldn’t be like one at other coffee shops, and the location made this clear right away.
- Never sacrifice quality for growth.
Blue Bottle recently made the decision to stop selling their coffee to wholesalers, walking away from 20% of their revenue. As James notes, “There are perils to trusting someone else to care about your product and with wholesale I was feeling more and more out of control of the experience people were having while drinking our coffee.” Blue Bottle couldn’t ensure that each cup was being brewed to taste as good as possible. They couldn’t ensure that every location had full sugar canisters and clean countertops. These might seem like small details, but if you stop caring for just a little bit, you stop caring about something else just a little bit, and these all add up to a negative customer experience.
This decision is rooted in James’ conviction that the quality of his product is most important. It might not seem like a good idea to choose to walk away from business. But it solidifies Blue Bottle’s promise to the customer that they will be served a delicious cup of coffee. It’s true to each word of their mission statement: “Deliciousness. Hospitality. Sustainability.”
Other business-bites from James:
-Avoid distractions and simplify.
-Let your customers relax, don’t beat them over the head with your message or brand.
-Be in service to your product, in service to your guest.
-Don’t just maintain your standards, improve them.
-Moments accrete to form experiences, deliver as many positive moments as possible.
-Sometimes illuminations comes when all seems lost.
To hear James in full, download the podcast or watch the video below. By the way, this ETL podcast is a phenomenal free resource and definitely worth visiting regularly.