I have written down business targets before.
Sales. Profit. Customer growth. Return rates. Cash in the bank. How quickly people should be served.
There is nothing wrong with doing that. A business needs numbers. Rent does not get paid with good intentions, and coffee does not become sustainable simply because people like the idea behind it.
But I have been thinking about a different question lately.
What are all those numbers supposed to create?
If Filgap sells more coffee every year, grows a team and eventually opens a physical space, I still want to know whether it has become the kind of business I meant to build.
That makes success a little harder to describe.
It is not one number.
The second purchase tells me more than the first
When Filgap eventually reaches the Farmers’ Market, I do not think I will judge the idea by whether I manage to sell a few bags.
A market can be busy. Squamish gets visitors. Someone may taste a coffee, like it and buy a bag because they are curious.
That would be encouraging.
It would not tell me enough.
The scene I really want to see comes later.
Someone who already knows Filgap walks up to the table.
Maybe they bought a bag two weeks earlier. Maybe they sampled the coffee before the market launch. Maybe they have already been following what I have been building.
They do not need the whole introduction again.
They are there because the previous bag is gone.
They want another one.
Perhaps they want the same coffee. Perhaps they ask what is different this week.
That would get my attention.
I do not know what the right repeat-purchase percentage will eventually be. Early markets and established markets will not look the same. But once Filgap has had time to become familiar, I would be very encouraged if a substantial part of a market day came from people who had already bought from me before.
In my head, something around half would feel like a very strong signal.
Not a rule. Not a forecast.
A signal.
I picture a table with enough coffee on it to look like a real business, not an experiment with a few bags. People are choosing coffee. Some have ordered ahead. A few bags are already set aside with labels for pickup before anything sells out.
At that point, the question has changed from:
Can I sell coffee here?
to:
Will people build a habit around buying it?
That is much closer to what I want to know.
A repeat customer needs repeatable coffee
There is another side to repeat business that matters just as much.
The coffee has to repeat too.
A great roast once is not enough.
Coffee is a preference product. No two people will agree on everything, and I do not expect everyone to like the same flavour profile I do.
But if I sell a coffee because it tastes a certain way, I need to be able to produce that quality again.
And again.
Consistency is something I care about a lot.
I would want the coffee to perform well in blind tasting. It should be able to stand next to other good coffees without depending on a story or a logo to make it impressive.
But I think consistency is even more important.
If somebody comes back because they loved a coffee last week and the next batch is completely different, I have broken part of the reason they returned.
That does not mean coffee can never change. Green coffee is agricultural. Crops change. Lots change. Seasonal coffees come and go.
Consistency does not mean freezing everything in place.
It means being able to manage those changes deliberately and keep delivering the standard the customer has learned to trust.
A repeat customer requires a repeatable product.
That connection is becoming more important to me the more I think about Filgap.
Growth cannot break the first promise
Freshness is one of the reasons Filgap exists in the first place.
That creates an interesting problem if the business grows.
More sales can be good.
More distribution can be good.
More locations may someday be good.
But each step can also increase the distance between roasting the coffee and somebody actually drinking it.
Inventory gets larger.
Products sit in more places.
Forecasting becomes more difficult.
Distribution takes time.
Eventually a business can become very successful at moving coffee while becoming worse at delivering the thing it originally cared about.
I do not want Filgap to do that.
I am not interested in treating freshness as a slogan that matters only while the company is small.
If growth eventually makes it difficult to manage coffee at the freshness and quality level I want, then the growth model needs to change.
The original gap should still be getting filled after the business becomes successful.
Otherwise the business may have grown away from its reason for existing.
The numbers still have to work
There is a romantic version of a small coffee business that I do not find very useful.
Make great coffee.
Know your customers.
Keep things small.
Everything will somehow work out.
Real businesses do not work that way.
The future Filgap I have in mind still needs to make money.
It needs to pay for green coffee, packaging, equipment, utilities and a physical space. If people work there, they need to be paid properly. Equipment needs maintenance. Taxes get paid. Unexpected things happen.
And the owner needs an income too.
What I want now is not the largest possible business.
I would rather build something financially stable.
A small commercial roastery and tasting room that can operate without carrying unnecessary debt. A business where revenue and expenses settle into a healthy routine. One that can support a family business and gradually build some value of its own.
That may sound less exciting than rapid expansion.
It sounds more attractive to me now.
I have already learned that a large concept carries large requirements with it. More square footage, more equipment, more people and more debt can force a business to keep growing simply to support the structure it created at the beginning.
I would rather let Filgap earn its next step.
Small can still be ambitious
When I picture the future roastery, I do not picture a large organization.
Maybe three to five people.
Possibly more as the business develops, but probably still fewer than ten.
That does not mean I want Filgap to behave casually.
Small and serious are not opposites.
I would like the people working there to care about coffee. Not necessarily because they arrived as coffee experts, but because they are interested enough to keep learning.
I would also like them to enjoy hospitality.
There is a difference between serving someone because it is part of the job and genuinely enjoying the moment when somebody discovers a coffee, asks a question or simply feels comfortable being there.
A small team can know why things are done a certain way.
They can notice when something changes.
They can talk to customers without every interaction being reduced to a script.
That sounds like a business I would enjoy working in.
And that matters too.
Another location would need another reason
I do not have a rule that Filgap can only ever have one location.
But Squamish is not a large city.
Opening another copy of the same roastery and tasting room simply because the first one is successful does not make much sense to me right now.
If another Filgap space ever has a reason to exist, I suspect it would need a different job.
Maybe a very small espresso bar.
A tight space that does one thing particularly well.
Maybe something else I have not thought of yet.
I would rather ask:
What would this new place add?
than:
How quickly can I duplicate the first one?
A second location should solve another useful problem.
Otherwise it is just another location.
I have already tried one kind of growth
My view of this is probably shaped by something I have already experienced.
Earlier in my career, I was part of growing a coffee business from only a few shops to more than one hundred.
That was a real kind of success.
It required enormous effort, and I learned a great deal from it.
I do not need to repeat the same version of success now.
At this point in my life, doing work I genuinely enjoy for a long time matters more to me than proving how large I can make it.
Balance matters more too.
I do not want a business that succeeds by consuming most of the life around it.
I want time for family.
I want to live in the place where I chose to live.
I want to keep working on something useful here for as long as I am able to.
Squamish has given me a great deal since I moved here. If Filgap can fill a few real gaps in return, first through coffee and perhaps in other ways over time, I would consider that meaningful work.
But the business has to fit into a life.
The life cannot exist only to feed the business.
I understand that differently now than I did years ago.
Define success before growth starts defining it for you
If I were planning another business from the beginning, I would still build financial forecasts.
I would still set sales targets.
I would still calculate margins, operating costs and cash requirements.
But I would add another page before all of them.
I would ask:
- What would make a first purchase meaningful?
- What would make a second purchase meaningful?
- Which product standard can never be compromised?
- What part of the original problem must still be solved if the business becomes ten times larger?
- How much profit does the business need in order to be genuinely healthy?
- How much debt and complexity am I willing to carry?
- What size team fits the kind of business I actually want to run?
- Which kinds of growth would make the business better?
- Which kinds would only make it bigger?
- What part of my life am I unwilling to trade for more growth?
The answers will be different for every business owner.
They may change over time too.
Mine already have.
That seems like a reason to write them down.
At the end of the day
There is a future scene I can picture more easily than a sales number.
It is the end of a day at the roastery.
People have gone home.
Maybe someone had a coffee that made them unexpectedly happy. Maybe two people met there and had a conversation they needed. Someone asked about a bean. Someone discovered a coffee they want to drink again.
The team is tired, but it was a good day.
The coffee was good.
The business worked.
And I can remember those people while I am getting ready to lock the door.
If I can look around at that moment, feel happy about what happened there, go home to the rest of my life, and still want to come back the next morning, I think that would be a very good kind of success.
