Here is the latest news: at hartmud love continues to beat the numbers. And for our business partners, it should be the same.
Running a small manufacturing business for 8 years in a modest and self sustained way without any borrowed money is only possible when you stay true to your heart and follow the path of love. It teaches you many lessons on what it takes and what it makes to earn a living from your passion, but the quintessential lesson of making money as an entrepreneur is as much a cliché as the eternal mantra goes: “do what you love, and the universe will take care of your endeavor”
The moment you lose trust in your heart you get kicked out of that mindset of love pervading everything, and you enter a different game – a cold game of numbers.
When I work with other entrepreneurs in business-to-business relationships, I notice the difference immediately: instead of inquiring about the family and speaking leisurely from the heart, there’s cold straight business jargon, babbling slang of „higher turnover“, „shorter shelf life“, „boosting efficiency“ and the like. Well, it started as a friendship with entrepreneurial spirit, and ended as a „business as usual“ – a dead end.
The story is almost always the same: we got to know each other when these young dudes opened their first coffee shop working full shifts behind the counter at the coffee machine in a worn out t-shirt serving every client with a smile from the heart, and shining bright with joy like the sun. The guys do everything right, think social, act local, choose that rare hard German stoneware for serving their craft coffee treasures, and build renown in the community, taking great care to serving perfect coffees at day, and roasting micro lots in the night, training baristas and treating them as equal in an authentic team spirit way, in short: sweating love and living the passion thoroughly.
What’s done from the heart will flourish for sure, but a couple of years later the desire to become rich (aka greed) has transformed them into a different species altogether: you don’t find them behind the espresso machine anymore because they hide behind multiple computer screens in the office as self-declared managers of their business in megalomanic manner, and only stop to fantasize about their own coolness to complain about the „challenging economic situation“ and their difficulties of sourcing more underpaid senior baristas. They complain that they don’t sell enough of their coffee turned sour with contempt, and they complain about numbers in general all the time. Not enough here not enough there, the world has somehow become a tough place. The numbers are never right. There’s always space for more efficiency, cutting costs and increasing prices to fill a financial hole that is never full. That’s the point where hartmud drops out.
While being north of forty years old and ripe with experience in the world of business I have witnessed that transformation a few times, and I honestly continue to wonder why these people don’t see their own transformed self. The mirror of the heart has darkened and their constant envy and greed put them in a miserable state of mind, but they don’t seem to care. How come such transformation?
Most of the time young entrepreneurs start with a big smile in the heart full of love for their product and their clients, but when their business gets going and clients ship in the daily funds to subsist, they won’t just continue to walk that productive path slowly but steady to maturity, but get sucked up in the black hole of „finance“, seduced by some kind of dark confident investor to „leverage“ aka: take a hefty load of business credit on their balance sheet that subsequently has to be served relentlessly – and recklessly.
No wonder you change your style, try to explain to a banker or your investor that your business was meant for the sake of love and is fueled by your passion for specialty coffee, and he will give you that devilish grin from a dead cold heart and tell you that you have now entered another game, a game where that genuine love for the product must be sacrificed on the altar of money, for the sake of making money only. More money.
Entrepreneurs affected by that condition have in fact lost everything: the soul has left the venture, their shop interiors might look expensive and sexy but the vibes are cold and dumb, the underpaid baristas do their jobs but you feel they are not at ease, and here’s another cliché: a coffee made without love tastes bitter.
The business meetings that in the old times were generously accompanied by a good flat white, a conversation about the family and heartfelt matters of doing business, are replaced by cold emails, short phone calls and constant complaints of every matter. Here’s the end of the road walked together.
I certainly don’t blame these people. Personally I know that this world is full of false promise of fast money, and the good old fashioned hard working craftsmen that build and sustain a manufacturing business over decades for the sake of love and nothing else have become rare; and most young entrepreneurs don’t build a business to have a life full of work, but style their start-ups with constant dream of high leverage and big buy-outs. Even those who start with a business they love might eventually end up with a loan to serve, and when the numbers kick in little by little the love vanishes.
For the sake of my own love for what I do everyday I tend to stop doing business with the finance crowd very fast because they’re bad energy and they will certainly drive down the vibes of their surroundings in the long run. Hartmud is not for the greedy looters.
Think about the notion of the soul what you want, but my assumption is this: entrepreneurs who even in this world of fast money and cold hearts stubbornly continue to do what they love will get rewarded with love – and sustenance, sufficiently to learn the lessons life has to offer.
