Samuel Gurel, of the Sustainable Coffee Institute, introduces SCI and the motivation behind creating a podcast about the steps toward a successful coffee shop.
SCI Introduction
Samuel Gurel: [00:00:00] Hi, my name is Samuel Gurel. Welcome to the SCI coffee business podcast.
This podcast has been a long time in the making. We've dreamed this for years as probably most podcasters have. Here on this first podcast, we really wanted to answer the question who is SCI? Why are you doing a podcast? And what has SCI been up to lately?
So, SCI stands for Sustainable Coffee Institute. It was formed back three years ago by a group of people that felt that the industry needed an institute that was focused on what was going on at the farm level, specifically, trying to create guidelines on: what does sustainability mean? At that time there were some customer surveys that said that people thought the sustainability was one of the most important issues that mattered to people. However, when asked what they meant by "sustainability," customers didn't seem to have a very clear answer. The general public didn't seem to know what they meant by sustainability and quite frankly, the coffee industry didn't know what they meant by sustainability. A lot of people in the industry, a lot of big companies, have formed their own certifying bodies that certify that their coffee sustainable, but they're not certified by a third-party.
So SCI set out to define, "what does it mean for a coffee to be sustainable?" What are the different attributes that are measurable and objective? That can measure how sustainable a coffee is. Because if you want to say a coffee, sustainable, you want to improve its sustainability, you have to have a baseline to be able to measure how sustainable it is.
So if you want to make a coffee more sustainable, you have to start with a baseline of measurement of how sustainable the coffee already is and what areas it needs to improve in specifically. So that's how SCI started. It wanted to be very focused on farming so it developed education for the farmers in processing, in farming methods and how to do a good nursery.
One of the motivations for us for this was actually a farmer friend of ours in Guatemala. Their story was so compelling. They had been farming coffee for five generations. They were extremely successful. Their coffee with some of the best coffee that anyone could want. Their farm was the measure of sustainability. You'd walk through the farm and there would be native trees growing with orchids. And the farm was one of the best managed farms anywhere and the coffee was absolutely amazing. Often you'd have cup scoring 90. However, a couple years ago, the farm went bankrupt and actually they were forced to sell most of their land.
And it was a huge blow to the family and it wasn't because they didn't know how to farm it wasn't because they didn't know how to process coffee. It was simply because they didn't have the basic business principles applied to their business. And so SCI recognized this gap and realized that there had to be education available specifically on how to apply.
Business best practices to the coffee industry. So we started teaching these best practices, and we've seen phenomenal results. We've seen specifically that farm turned itself around, but we also noticed that the other end of the supply chain where cafes can actually also sometimes struggle from lack of using best business practices and really that's my personal story. So I'm here today to tell you my personal story.
SCI came to me and asked me to help them develop the SCI coffee shop management curriculum. And I was excited to do that, but I want to share today with you why I was excited to do that back in 2012, I found myself running a growing coffee franchise in China. It was a great time to be in the coffee business in China. No matter what you did it worked. We were super cool. We were cool just because we were foreigners. We were growing fast and I had never felt so cool and so successful in my entire life. Everything was great.
And about that time, a very important person in my life named Chris Turner came into my life. And he began to teach me some fundamentals of business that I had somehow missed of how to build a great company culture, how to distill your vision, mission, values, and to run a values-based business based on that. And at the time I was already doing pretty well, I didn't really think I needed his help much, but then came 2013, which was the year that everything changed for me.
In 2013, our company had several hundred thousand dollars embezzled from it. The company almost failed. We had to close coffee schools and coffee shops, and, let about 30% of our employees go. It was a major blow to the company. And had I not developed a values-based company, I don't know that I would have made it through 2013.
So the company recovered to a certain degree and in 2015 I sold the business and I decided to focus completely on coffee education, take everything I had known running a chain of coffee shops and help people apply those principles to smaller businesses that are running one, two or even three coffee shops.
So opened a coffee school and then work with Sustainable Coffee Institute to develop their coffee shop management classes, and then coming into COVID I had so many friends, some of my dearest friends lose their coffee shop business that they had worked so hard for. It was heart-wrenching. And so again, SCI reached out to me and asked if I would write a book to try to specifically help people right now, going through this crisis of COVID-19 during this pandemic so many people are losing their business. So I agreed and I've been on a journey writing this book.
The book is almost finished at this time, but we decided to take the principles in this book and put it in a podcast for you guys, put it in a podcast for people like you who maybe have a coffee shop. Maybe it's doing okay. Maybe it was doing okay, but you now find yourself in a pandemic and a crisis where you have to pivot. And maybe you already have some values-based business principles applied. Maybe you're already clear about your vision, mission, values. Even if you are, I think you're going to learn a lot from this book. But if you maybe have some room to improve in this area, this could be the thing that makes a difference of you coming out of this pandemic stronger, or your business not making it through.
And let me be clear, there's going to be a lot of great businesses that don't make it through, but we want to write this book, we want to make this information available on this podcast so that maybe, just maybe, some of the businesses that would not have made it through, will make it through.
And I want to be clear about my motivation. Really business is not the end goal. What I found is that when people's businesses are struggling, it causes stress on them. And that stress causes them to maybe not be the best version of themselves. It causes them to respond differently to their family. It causes them to not be so emotionally healthy, not be so physically healthy. And I find that when people's businesses are struggling, usually their physical health, emotional life, and family life are all struggling as well. So really my heart is that when you help someone's business run smoother, their whole life improves and their life runs smoother.
And that's really my motivation for this podcast, it's really my motivation for writing this book. We want to. Improve coffee businesses through great business practices so that we can improve the lives of the owners who run those businesses. I hope you'll join us on this journey. I hope that you will keep fighting for your business, but I hope you'll do it in a way that you're becoming healthier and healthier.
You're becoming a better and better version of yourself as you're also making your company better and better.