The World’s Best Cup Of Coffee
We continue to up our coffee game here at the most caffeinated private equity firm in America, and most recently that included, under Taylor’s watchful eye, the acquisition of a Eureka Mignon grinder, Ratio brewer, and Acaia digital scale to ensure that we are always preparing precisely the right amount of beans precisely. So expectations were high when we brewed our first batch…
The verdict? Something seemed off. We revisited all of our assumptions one by one and then hit on the culprit. The water. The water didn’t taste great.
When it comes to achieving success at anything, there are really three paradigms that describe what might work:
You’re only as strong as your weakest link, i.e., the best you can do is your worst input.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, i.e., your inputs are all better together.
Go big or go home, i.e., your best input is your biggest driver.
Making good coffee is clearly an example of paradigm 1. We could have the best beans, grinder, and brewer in the world, but if our water is bad, our coffee will be too. In other words, we can’t organize our brewing process differently or invest in an even better brewer in order to fix our water problem.
Thankfully, one benefit of living out in the country is that I have a really deep well. So in pursuit of a better cup of coffee, I started commuting in every morning with a jug of sustainably sourced spring water from a limestone aquifer. And that did the trick. Now, not only do we now have the world’s best cup of coffee, but since I also drive an EV, our coffee’s ESG rating is off the charts.
The point is if you’re trying to do something and it’s not succeeding like you’d like it to, you need to take stock of the situation to figure out which success paradigm applies. To achieve greatness, do you need to make your best better, put your parts together better, or raise up a laggard? Once you know that, it’s much easier to target effort and investment to achieve the highest return.
-Tim
