Learning From A Good Cup Of Coffee
When Scaling Quietly Kills What Made You Special
When did you last make a decision that was commercially rational, practically necessary, and yet somehow left your organisation a little less itself?
Most leaders can name the moment, if they are honest. The problem is that it rarely feels like a moment. It feels like a series of small, sensible choices that only reveal their full cost in hindsight.
I want to talk about that today. And I am going to use a coffee shop to do it.
The Theatre of the Syphon
There was a coffee shop in a town where I used to live. It was my favourite. Not the most convenient, not the biggest menu. My favourite, because they did syphon coffee.
If you have never seen syphon coffee made, it is worth looking up. Two glass chambers, a heat source, and a process that is part chemistry, part theatre. Water heats, pressure builds, and the liquid rises into the upper chamber where it meets the ground coffee. Then, as the heat is removed, the brewed coffee is drawn back down through a vacuum filter, clean and precise. The whole thing takes several minutes. It bubbles, rises, settles, and clears. Slow enough to watch. Deliberate enough to appreciate.
When done well, it produces a clean, remarkably expressive cup. But the experience communicates something beyond the taste: this is being made with care, and it is being made for you.
Human beings have always responded to ceremony. Think about the Japanese tea ceremony, or Chinese gongfu tea practice, where the precise sequence of movements is not a delay but the point itself. The ritual is the value. The same is true for cigar enthusiasts who use a wooden match rather than a lighter, not because it burns better, but because the intention matters. In each case, the ceremony signals: this is not ordinary, and you deserve this.
That coffee shop understood something many businesses do not. They were not selling caffeine. They were selling distinction.
The Economics of Ceremony
Ceremony is expensive. Not only in money, but in time and throughput. A syphon coffee takes longer to prepare. It demands more attention. It occupies skilled hands for longer and slows the queue. When a business becomes popular, those constraints begin to bite.
The shop did the sensible thing first: they raised their prices. That was the right call. A premium product, a skilled process, and real demand. But at the volume they needed, the maths still did not work.
And that is one of the hardest truths in business. A product can be excellent. An experience can be memorable. A brand can be loved. And yet the operating model underneath can still be fragile.
So they stopped the syphon coffees. They moved to tableside French press, which was still distinctive. Then, as popularity grew again, the same pressure returned. Eventually, they became operationally much like every other coffee shop: espresso-based, faster to produce, easier to standardise. Still excellent. But no longer doing the thing that had made them stand out.
The Leadership Parallel
This is not a coffee story. It is a story about how market pressure reshapes business identity, often without anyone making a conscious decision to let it happen.
A specialism is not just a positioning choice. It is an operating choice. It affects pricing, capacity, service design, delivery speed, hiring, and margin structure. When leaders talk about differentiation, they often treat it as a branding question. It is not. It is an economics question.
If your offer is slower, more bespoke, more expert-led, or more manually intensive, then one of two things must be true. Either the price point has to justify that, or you have to accept lower volume. If neither of those holds, the market will push you towards standardisation, whether you plan for it or not.
This is what I think of as the Rolex and Casio problem. Rolex can do what Rolex does because the price point supports craftsmanship, scarcity, and a completely different economic model. It does not need to behave like Casio because it is not competing on the same terms. But most businesses entering a crowded market do not have that pricing authority yet. They do not have the brand equity, the margin cushion, or the established demand that would fund a fully specialist model from day one.
For most new entrants, the honest position is this: you often need to start closer to Casio before you can earn the right to operate like Rolex.
Where Leaders Come Unstuck
Where I see leaders and organisations struggle is in designing for the identity they want, rather than the market position they actually have. They build a high-touch, bespoke, time-intensive offer, price it below what would actually sustain it, and then wonder why growth creates pressure rather than reward.
In Enhanced Leadership, I explore how authenticity and purpose must be anchored in everyday action, including every decision and every silence. The same principle applies to your business model. If your specialism is genuinely who you are, then every commercial decision either reinforces or quietly undermines that. The erosion rarely arrives dramatically. It arrives as a series of reasonable compromises.
Three Questions for Leaders
So here are three questions worth sitting with, whether you are reviewing your own offer or working with a client on theirs.
Does the market value this enough to pay properly for it? Not in principle, but in practice. Are people actually buying it at a price that works? Aspiration and viability are different things, and confusing them is costly.
Can your operating model sustain the time and attention your specialism requires at scale? What happens when demand doubles? Does the model get stronger, or does it start to fracture? The answer to that question tells you a great deal about whether your distinctiveness is built into the economics or just grafted on top.
Are you building for distinction or for durability? Being honest about which one you are actually doing is the starting point for better decisions. Sometimes the right move is to deepen the specialism and raise the price to match it. Sometimes the right move is to simplify the model and protect your margins.
And sometimes the smartest structure is both: an efficient core that generates consistent revenue, and a premium specialist offer at the edges where the pricing and capacity genuinely support it.
A Framework Worth Considering
That two-tier model is often the most practical answer for coaches, consultants, and service businesses. Keep a reliable, scalable offer at the centre. Protect a smaller, higher-value, more specialist practice for clients where the model actually works.
The key discipline is separating the two clearly, and not letting volume pressure slowly erode the premium tier. Which is precisely what happened to that coffee shop.
For Coaches
If you work with leaders on strategy, commercial positioning, or growth, this tension shows up regularly. Watch for the leader who describes their offer in terms of what they love doing rather than what the market will fund. Watch for the one who is proud of how bespoke and personal their service is, but is running at unsustainable margins.
The useful questions are not about aspiration. They are about structure. What is the operating model underneath the identity? What would it take to protect the specialism at scale? And crucially: is the decision to stay specialist a strategic choice or a resistance to the harder work of building a viable model?
Those are very different problems, and they need very different coaching responses.
The Broader Point
I still think about those syphon coffees. The theatre of it. The sense that something careful was being made, specifically for you. That feeling does not come from a standard flat white, however good. But I also understand why they stopped.
Your market position is not defined only by what you love doing, or what you do best. It is defined by what you can sustain, what customers will fund, and what your model can carry without quietly breaking. If you want the economics of scale, design for scale. If you want the value of specialism, charge for specialism. And if you want both, be disciplined enough to structure them separately.
That is where strategy stops being a conversation about identity and starts becoming something you can actually build a business on.
