103: Remeber Why, Then Let Go pt 1

Welcome to the Rethink Sales Podcast. I'm Mark Danilo. And I'm Michelle Seeger. And in this series, we're talking about transformation delusion.

And the question is, why do you expect big results and repeat the same old patterns? And how do we change that? And we're doing lots of cool exploration here to understand the human behaviors within business. And with us today, we have our guest, Andres Hoyas Gomez, who is co-founder of the Beans on Fire, a coffee company in Paris.

And he's got some fantastic stories he's going to tell us. Welcome, Andres. Hello, Mark. Hello, Michelle.

So glad to be here. Very glad that you have me today. So you've got an amazing story and a lot of sub-stories as well, but I think it'd be great maybe to start with your story about where you came from in Columbia and kind of rolling the clock back a little bit and how it all started. And kind of take us through, how did you get from Columbia to where you are now?

You were a consultant at McKinsey and other firms, and then you started this company, and it's just very, very interesting. So maybe tell us a little bit about your story. Thank you. Thank you.

Absolutely. So basically, it's the story how a McKinsey partner becomes a coffee roster, which indeed is not as classic, you know, as a as a track out of audit and consulting background. And so once upon a time, if I tell it like a story, once upon a time, there was a boy born and raised in Colombia, and like all my family for generations was from from Colombia. And it's first a story of belonging, like wanting to belong to the first world, you know, so I grew up in Colombia and I wanted to become a citizen of the first world of the civilization right as I as I saw it then and the things that my grandparents both sides for who were from the countryside they push their kids to go to Bogota to the big city to study so kind of my parents and their generation were engineers lawyers doctors that and my grandparents thought these were not proper jobs they felt too intellectual you know be rather than being a farmer I remember being like a merchant, you know, in the little towns where they were, but it was a social jump.

And so my parents then pushed us, so me, my little brother or sister, to come to France one year when I was eight. And so that was a moment to kind of really learn the language, discover like a new culture and so on. And back to Colombia, I went to a French school, Lycée Francais, Louis Pasteur in Bogota. and so I grew up schizophrenic and what I mean by schizophrenic is that I grew up in the Colombia of the 80s and early 90s so that was the Colombia of the Escobar years so if you have watched the Narcos series on Netflix basically the first two seasons that was kind of the backdrop of my teenager years and schizophrenic because I grew up in Colombia and at the same time I had this very let me say rigorous French education and so I grew up with the dream to go to go go go go go go go to escape kind of my driving force was to escape now and so through a scholarship I went out of high school to get into business school in France then my next fight was to have a good rank in the business school to get a good job and to get the working visa get a promotion to extend the working visa get another promotion to secure myself and thus went 25 years basically yeah so it was business school it was artur anderson was my my what i call my military service of the business life you know black pencil red pencil to the odd accounts mckinsey and company 14 years associate manager partner bigger partner and basically when i became 14 it was the first time i allowed myself to ask why why do i do all this why am i jumping from promotion to promotion project to project getting the next client getting the next project and uh and so on um and so i i shifted from wanting to belong to wanting meaning yeah i was like what is the worth of getting the next billion for i'm not going to cite names of uh you know right big banks commercial banks wholesale banks and consumer products, the companies that I was serving.

But I really wondered what can I do that has at the same time an actual impact that is kind of tangible, not in PowerPoint, but in kind of something real that I could touch. And at the same time, something that I could say is beyond the business card. Like not I am the consulting partner or the leader of this practice or the leader of this sector, or I don't know what, which I had all those credentials, right? But if you take all that clutter, what can I do?

Yeah, and so that's how I then started the exploration that then became the Coffee Ross. But let me just pause there. It's the story of basically wanting to belong. And when I became 40, so this was about 10 years ago, when I wondered why I was doing all that, beyond getting more credentials, I had to pause and recognize that I didn't know really.

So that was a big question that came to me in that moment. Yeah, you were able to do that probably at a much younger age than a lot of people that get to the end of their career and they wonder why, or maybe they never wonder, right? You know, today I find and I get to meet many people in their 30s, in their 20s, who ask themselves this question way before I did. You know, so I want to believe that whenever it comes to you, you should just embrace it, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to ask before we go into the beans on fire, I want to ask about Colombia and Escobar because I, you know, I watched Narcos and some of it was hard to watch. But what was it like living in that environment? Did you did you feel that or were affected by that at all or your family?

So let me say, fortunately, not firsthand. So I was not living in Medellin, in the difficult neighborhoods and so on. So I didn't have like a first-hand exposure. But I did watch on live television the moment when the Department of Justice, basically the, you could say it's like Capitol Hill kind of equivalent in Washington.

It was taken by the guerrilla, you know, so basically the parliamentary and the Supreme Court equivalent were taken hostage and we would watch that on live television and tanks literally running into Capitol Hill to liberate the place. So that was kind of very dramatic to see. There could be bomb attacks in the city that in the morning you would hear like a boom somewhere and it was a bomb attack that happened somewhere. And so fortunately there was not for me like a direct impact.

But But again, having my French education at the same time, it kept ringing in my mind every day. I don't want to live here. I don't want to live here. Like I don't want to be in a place where even literally my life can be at risk at some point, where the society is so, let me say, so not meritocratic, at least compared to Europe or to the United States, that if you are not in the good family, you don't have opportunities.

If you did watch Narcos for me one of the more interesting things to realize is that Pablo Escobar at the same time he was like a rebel but he also wanted to belong For some time he was a parliamentary deputy like a senator or a congressperson And he resented very hard that the other sitting congresspeople would reject him as not belonging to the community. And he resented that a lot. So it's a very stratified society. A very, very stratified society.

So, you know, I have a Spanish tutor that Michelle, you know, you know about Santiago, but he lives in Bogota, Colombia. And so we do our Spanish online. And I was complaining to him the other day. I said, you know, I wasn't able to have a class because I had to go on jury duty.

And I was complaining about jury duty. And we were talking about that. And he goes, you know, we don't have that here. And I'm like, really?

And he goes, no. He said, you guys are fortunate. And he said, you know, basically the judge makes the decision and hopefully the judge, you know, is actually making the right decision. He said, you know, you guys, you guys, you know, have that, that, that, that opportunity, that privilege to be on a jury.

And I thought about it, you know, again. And yeah, so we, so we all complain, we get that letter in the mail, like, okay, what kind of excuse can I find to not go to jury duty? But it's, yeah, it's quite a privilege, but yeah. Yes, it is.

Yep. So I am going to ask you and I'm going to take you through the, I'm going to ask you to take us through the Beans on Fire journey. But before we do that, two things kind of piqued my interest in what you've said. And this all leads to transformation and being able to break through habits in ways that, you know, are so familiar to us.

The first thing I heard was you had a very, like the first 20 years, you had a very direct path. but you knew where you wanted to go because you knew where you didn't want to be, right? So maybe it was the not knowing where you didn't want to be is what helped you put all of the steps in place to get to a certain place. So it sounds like you were pretty disciplined in that approach and you always knew the next step to take.

And then, so confirm that a little bit for me first, just kind of what got you there. and then I want to talk about the process that you went through where you finally led on to or you finally led to you on this beans on fire so we'll talk about that but first I just wanted to understand a little bit about you know what it takes to get to a goal and and what it is that you experienced okay super super interesting so Well, let me say, because there are two things that I guess logically should go together, but actually in my life they didn't.

So one is a very clear determination. I was very determined, very young that I wanted to go, and that was a literal driving force. To the extent that, for example, through high school, there was this scholarship that was kind of the one there was one seat for one person in the in the last year of the of the high school to get a scholarship to go to France and since I was maybe I don't know 12 like I had only that in my mind you know to get that to get that so I was obsessed with that right when we came to the time to actually think about the next step what could happen next I chose to to to sign up for business school because it was what gave me the best chance to be selected yeah so in the french system basically in the elite schools you can do either engineer or business school or there are like a philosophy and literature schools yeah these are kind of three elite schools that are in france but the thing is that to be elected in engineer you have to be the best in math and physics only in that to be the best in literature and philosophy you need to be the best only in that and business school was a bit more wide right but there was a economics and there was math but there was also languages there was also english there was this so from my profile i was not the best in physics or not the best in literature but i had kind of the best of in a diversified topics yeah so i went to business school not because i wanted to do business or to go to consulting or to do finance or to do whatever but it was just the best next step yeah yeah and so where i say that is not very logical is that i was very determined but not to a goal because for me it didn't matter if it was business school or engineering or it could have been law like if it happened that i realized that that that my best chance was applying to a law school maybe i would be a lawyer Yeah.

So I guess what I would not apply to a leadership logic or to a business logic is that if you are determined only for a next step, because you are escaping from somewhere, you might miss what I now would call a North Star, like a higher purpose. yeah because honestly i i think in some ways you could consider that i had a successful career for i don't know 20 or something years in audit and consulting but if you reach a point where you wonder why and how did i come to this point and you don't have a very good answer for that i think that's you know like that's uh interesting to to say to say the least so i don't have regrets yeah People ask me, do you regret your McKinsey life or have you made the jump or this and that?

I don't have that regret to either have done it or either to have gone out of that. But I think it's consistent in my lab, the determination. What was not consistent for a long time is to look beyond the next promotion in the next two, three years or the next milestone to reach. And so the fun thing is that, you know, when you pass maybe 40 people start to ask you, what would you say to your younger self?

You know, you get. And I say two things. I say on the one side, I say, actually, you don't know where you will be in 10, 15, 20 years. So live your life, live the moment, enjoy more, take more of a step back in terms of what you really want to achieve, what is really meaningful for you.

Because for me, it came very late, I believe in my in my journey. Yeah. Then the second thing I tell the people who ask me that is, if I could travel in time to talk to myself when I was 20, I would not listen to me. I would say I'm too busy, you know, figuring out my applications and my exams and my things, so just don't bother me with your philosophical BS, like let me work on it.

that's pretty funny so when you what is very difficult I think is when people are established in a career so okay McKinsey partner that's that's nothing to shirk off in fact that does become an aspiration for many people right like oh it's considered the pinnacle of consulting for strategist and I mean I I'm in consulting and I worked at Accenture and I know what how I feel about McKinsey. I think it's a great place with really great people. So how do you make this shift? So many people, I think, Andres, don't get out of that, right?

Because they there and they like well I kind of made it or I continuing to do this and now they working with maybe their family needs and just things you know get a little bit more complicated as we get a little bit, you know, older in life. How did you make the decision to make that change and kind of what was the process that you went through? Yeah, thank you. So this is also, okay, So I guess the simplest story here, because there are, of course, many, many aspects to this.

But so there is one, let me say, principal element and one practical element. So the principal element is over the course of my last, let's say, two years with the firm, it became very clear to me that even if I would be successful forward, because of course, it's not easy to continue. Right. But even if I would be successful, the next 10, 15 years would be very similar to the last 10, 15 years.

And that to me was like, wow, it was like a big, big, big, big mental pause. Yeah, because I thought if I get to 55 and I know or I have the impression that I knew what my life would be and I get to 55, I kind of that's it. that to me was like a big big big big big big pause yeah because it made me wonder what else is there to life that i have not explored that i have not touched that i don't know if i can do or not do right and i don't want to get to 50 55 which i am now getting to those to that to that to that uh i am i am in that in that in that window um i didn't want to get to to this time now and have this kind of fomo right of all the avenues of life or all the things to explore So that to me was the big principle thing to say, okay, even if I am successful, I might wake up in 15 years asking me why, not knowing the answer, and now it's too late.

So that's kind of the principle element. Then there is a very practical element, which is very relevant to your question, which is that I did not live in the golden cage. And what I mean by that is that for whatever reason, personality, my background, my family and so on, I did not live above my means. Yeah, I didn't have two houses and two cars and so a number of things that people who have a good employment life, because even being a partner, even being an equity partner is still an employee life.

You are not a billionaire, even if you are wealthy by an employee measure, you are not a billionaire. But I had a number of my colleagues who could not afford them to think about becoming entrepreneurs or doing something else, because the base, let me call it cost of living, not to mention specific figures, but the base cost of living made it very hard to actually get out and do something. right while my actual cost of living was very low compared to my salary and compared to my general yeah so it was actually practically quite easy for me to say okay how long do i have that i can go explore try something without putting at risk my family my basic organization and so on see if it works right and if it doesn't then hopefully i can always come back like you know after 20 something years of professional life if i cannot give myself one year to explore what have i done like he's there's a bit of that as well yeah yep so that's kind of funny because i can relate to that i i had a very similar similar path okay so that's very interesting leave yourself a little margin uh i'm with you on that one yeah and an opportunity to explore and give yourself that time and grace to really think about what is it that you want those next 10 or 20 years to look like.

All right, let's talk about Beans on Fire. This I'm very excited about. As you already heard, I love coffee. I know how to roast coffee.

I know how to make a very mean latte. In fact, I make my own coffees at home in the morning. And I think it's really fascinating what you've done. I don't know of anything like it in the US.

So talk to us a little bit about Beans on Fire. Absolutely, absolutely. So as I started to wonder what to do, as in what could be a tangible project exploration, company creation that would be meaningful for me, I could see myself in the consulting office having my coffee and wondering, I have no idea what I'm drinking. In the office at the time we had Nespresso, capsules, and at home I would drink Nescafe instantanious.

So I would basically pour two cups of, I mean, two spoons of the instantanious espresso, put milk, microwave oven, and that was my coffee with milk. Yeah. And that also gave me pause. Like coffee is a huge market, as in retail coffee and yeah, cafeterias and coffee.

It's a huge market. Nobody knows what they're drinking. So for me, that was kind of the starting point to say, what is this market where market is huge. Nobody knows what they drink.

The farmers are poor. They barely get to a living wage and many are under under poverty yeah the the industrial rosters are very few it's a very concentrated market market with very good margins for the distributor yeah but basically consumers get very bad products and they have no idea what they drink farmers are basically exploited under poverty and somebody in the middle is making a lot of money i was like there is something to see there is something to to explore here right because we're all paying what six dollars for a coffee at the coffee shop you know so somebody's making money in between that farmer yeah now in the us is even with the inflation and bad even let me go into tariffs and so on but but but yeah for sure so but it is a very intriguing market from that perspective like consumers are not getting the full value they have no idea what they get the farmers are exploited somebody's making money in between yeah then i i i kind of uh get it got exposed to the specialty coffee wave you know now you know in the us the blue bottles and the intelligentsia and all these companies and these things started like in the end of the 90s early 2000s um and what got me intrigued about specialty coffee is that it's basically a brave community of like-minded let me say entrepreneurs but it's super niche it's super niche it's very small yeah and even with this fantastic growth it has since maybe 15-20 years it continues to be very small compared to what the whole coffee market is.

And so exactly what happened when I met Maria, my co-founder in the venture, is that we wondered. She came from a Colombian farm, from a family in Colombia who actually had a farm, so she was actually more from the land in that sense. And what What she wanted was some kind of innovative projects, right? To put kind of farmers forward and to, yeah.

But our thinking was to say back then, so I'm now back in 2015, our thinking was to say, we don't want to be the 25th specialty coffee shop in Paris and maybe the seventh or eighth roaster in France We want to do something that accelerates the movement Yeah that really helps help the thing to grow more because it should grow faster and more yeah and that how we came to the logic of saying let's have a shared the roastery so the idea was to put together uh let me say like there is a software as a service to do roasting as a service yeah so it's a roastery as in we have the roaster machine the storage the quality control lab like all the equipment for the for the roastery so that whomever wants to learn roast and develop their own coffee project yeah either for home or either as a brand they can come learn roast on demand without having to invest in the whole material yeah because what became very clear to me as a business case is that to have the the roster machine with the capacity that you basically don't spend the whole week producing what you're going to sell yeah you need a machine that unless you are a really high traffic coffee shopper you are not going to use more than one day a month yeah yeah so I will not go into the numbers of kilos and batches and this and that and so on but the basic logic is a 12 kilo roster machine which is kind of the standard size for an artisanal roaster yeah unless you have like three four five coffee shops you will not use it more than one day a month yeah so there is no case if everyone yeah sorry i was just going to ask you to describe like these roasters they're huge right they weigh a lot they're on the ground they're like i don't know have you seen a coffee roaster mark you probably have only in pictures okay so i've been a coffee roasteries and and um you know up up in the northeast and i've been to roasters but they're pretty big you know and you need a very dedicated space so i'm just trying to lay some context for people that might be listening and aren't really familiar with what the roasting business is about yeah so how how how big is it um i'm not sure i have like a good um if i say it's big like six american fridges that's good that's bad a fridge yeah yeah i don't know just to have us like imagine your fridge so it's like a block like this yeah imagine two fridges tall yeah and maybe two on the side and maybe three on the back they're big i don't know yep so you're taken yeah So it's not a factory, it's not like a steel factory, right?

Yeah. But it is significant. And the importance of the roaster in itself is that coffee is also, specialty coffee is also a very fragmented market and coffee in general in the sense that the farmers farm, the roasters roast and the coffee shop brew. And every step is very dedicated.

Most roasters are wholesale roasters. So they distribute to coffee shops. Only a few like Blue Bottle and Intelligencia and so on are integrated in the sense that there is a roastery and a number of coffee shops. But if you look at most coffee shops, they don't roast.

Unless they are backed by a shared roastery, which is actually more and more the case. Yeah. So you took a really expensive asset and gave access to it to these entrepreneurs. Yeah.

So you've helped them. Let's look at the farmer in Colombia. Is there anything you can do for the farmer in Colombia or that you do do other than like pay a better price? What do you do on that end?

So exactly. So the starting point is that, or was that by having these, these, these shared roasting facility, we could help more people get into the business into, yeah, into, into, into roasting and also get access to sourcing. because if you are the coffee shop, you buy only from the roaster. But if you roast yourself, then it puts you in a possibility to even interact with the farmers and choose your sourcing and so on.

So it allows for more people to be integrated in the chain and to master more their production. I use the analogy with wine because it's very similar in the, let me say, the sensory aspect is very similar. Boring wine, a vineyard, masters the whole thing from the plant to the bottle. The sommelier takes care of the bottle to the cup of wine, if you want, to the glass of wine.

Boring coffee is very fragmented, so by doing this we integrate more. Then with the farmers, So that's kind of the other part of our mission, where we also have coffee shop. So to have the access to the final customer, we also have the direct sourcing. And here what is particular is that beyond buying the fair price, which is the thing that you should in any case do, in any case if you are in craft coffee, beyond paying the fair price, we have been working for 10 years with the same farmers.

It's basically one village, actually, where we started with one farmer, two farmers, five, now more than 25 in the same village, 25 families. And so because of the continuity, we have started to invest in the school. So we basically started in 2019, a program that we call Cafeteritos Digitales, which is basically digital farmers. So to the kids in the school, we provided a few laptops.

I had like a boot camp that I started myself and then has continued. A boot camp about coding and programming and little robots programming for the kids there. And so it's been very interesting because by now, a couple of kids from the school actually went to study engineering. and now one is in Puerto Rico developing sensors and I don't know what more there.

But beyond that, they started also, the kids, to be more interested in the fact that there can be a technical aspect, even a more digital technical aspect to coffee farming, not just the manual part. Interesting. And so they started to make more precise measurements of humidity in the soil, of temperature, of humidity of the harvested coffee. and that has helped reduce, for example, by a factor of 10, the input of water in the harvest.

So, you know, it feels at the beginning very far away, you know, to give digital coding classes to the kids. It feels like it has nothing to do. But actually, there is a social impact for the community and there is even a technical input that can go back to the land. because with the farmers, the bigger issue is really the generational renewal.

The fact that the kids of the farmers are willing and interested to even keep the land and continue the work. So let's pause here and pick up in part two of our conversation with Andres Hoyos-Gomez. And remember, SalesGlobe is a revenue growth consulting and services firm, and we're focused on helping our clients reach their growth aspirations through better solution development and operationalizing to get results. Thanks for joining us and remember, SalesGlobe is a revenue growth consulting and services firm focused on helping our clients reach their revenue growth aspirations through better solution development and operationalizing to get results.