Here's why you should prep your business like a great coffee

Transcript

Right. Coffee. Everyone’s got opinions about coffee. Single origin, this oat milk, that artisanal bullshit that costs more than your lunch.

But here’s the thing. Good coffee isn’t about fancy beans or the Instagram worthy setup. It’s about doing the boring stuff nobody talks about. And your business.

It’s the same deal. Welcome to Lone Wolf Unleashed. I’m your host, Mike, and today we’re talking about why your business is exactly like coffee.

And why most of you are brewing burnt swill when you could be pulling perfect shots. You know what separates good coffee from brand water most people drink? It’s not the machine. It’s not even the beans.

It’s the stuff that happens before you even turn the damn thing on. Same with your business. Everyone sees the fancy website, the polished Instagram posts, the effortless client work.

Nobody sees you at 11pm cleaning out your email filters or updating your invoicing templates. But that’s where the magic happens. Let’s start with espresso. You want a good shot? Your puck prep better be perfect.

Grind, consistency, dose, weight level, distribution, tamp, pressure. Miss any of these, your shot is cooked. Might taste fine to the untrained palate, but you’ll know it’s crap. Your business systems work the same way.

That client intake process you’ve been meaning to document, that’s your grind, consistency. Your pricing structure, that’s mostly in your head. That’s uneven distribution. Your follow up process, that depends on your mood.

That’s inconsistent tan pressure. And you have the fanciest CRM in the world. But your foundation’s wonky. Everything that comes out will taste bitter.

Here’s what coffee snobs won’t tell you. Even the most expensive machine makes crap coffee. If you don’t clean it all. Grounds clog up the group head. Mineral buildup affects temperature.

Your perfect shop you pulled yesterday can’t happen if today’s machine is dirty. When’s the last time you cleaned your business machine? I’m talking about the unglamorous stuff.

Updating your client files, backing up your data, checking your recurring payments for subscriptions you forgot about. Most solo operators are running their business on a machine that hasn’t been properly maintained in months.

Then they wonder why everything feels harder than it should. Every few months you need to descale, strip everything back. Run vinegar through the system. It takes time. It’s tedious.

Your machine’s out of action for hours. But skip it. Your machine dies a slow death. Temperature goes haywire. Pressure drops. Eventually you’re pouring expensive disappointment.

Your business needs descaling too. That means auditing everything. Every process, every tool, every reoccurring task.

What’s actually necessary, what’s just build up from decision you made three years ago. Most of you are afraid to just descale. Most of you are afraid to descale because you think you need everything running all the time.

But here’s the truth. A day of downtime for proper maintenance saves you weeks of brewing crap. Customer outcomes. Maybe espresso isn’t your thing. That’s fair enough.

I have a V60, a Chemex for pour over. I have an aeropress. There are heaps of different methods, but the same principle. Preparation matters more than equipment.

Your grind size, your water temperature, your pour technique, your timing. If you skip the prep, the best beans tastes like disappointment. This is the path for solo operators who don’t need the complex setup.

You want quality without complexity. Focus on the fundamentals. Client communication, delivery standards, payment processes, boundaries, discipline.

Do these things well and you’ll outperform most operations running complex systems they don’t understand. Coffee has ratios. So there’s a 1 to 15 ratio typically for pour over, and a 1 to 2 ratio for espresso. Golden ratios that pros swear by.

What ratios do you as a solar operator swear by? Your business has ratios too. Time spent on client work vs admin, revenue per hour, client acquisition cost, lifetime value.

Most solar operators eyeball everything feels about right becomes your standard. And then you wonder why some months you’re drowning and others you’re just scraping by. Start measuring.

Not obsessively, just consistently track what matters, ignore what doesn’t. Pour over coffee has a step called blooming.

We need to do like a 40 second bloom, which means I need to pour a little bit of and wet all this coffee grounds and then I’m going to give it a little bit of a wiggle.

It’s when you prepare the grounds and you have a little well in a filter and you wet the grounds and you need to do it really consistently and evenly across all the grounds. And then you wait 30 seconds and you just watch the coffee come up. It’s all the CO2 escaping.

If you skip the bloom, your extraction will be uneven and the coffee will taste flat. Most business owners hate the bloom. They don’t want to wait. They want to pour everything in at once. They want to get it done, they want to move on.

But they’re sacrificing results. And the best results come from patience. You don’t want to have that Client who’s not ready to buy yet.

Let them bloom, that project that needs thinking time. Let it bloom, that process of improvement that requires slowing down. First it’s bloom time, so then you have the part.

Everyone sees you’ve done everything right. You’ve cleaned the machine, you’ve got the ratios right, you’ve got a good bloom. This bit’s almost automatic. Steady circles, consistent speed.

Trust the process, your client delivery, your sales calls, your project execution. This is your pour. This is everything the client sees. By the time you get here, the outcome is almost already decided.

Stop building the plane as you fly it. If you screw up the preparation, no amount of fancy pouring is going to save you. So the last thing is quality control.

So water quality matters more than most people think. When it comes to brewing coffee, the best beans in the world taste like ass if your water is not right.

So your business water is your energy, your focus, your decision making capability and your capacity. Running on three hours of sleep and five cups of yesterday’s disappointment, your water is contaminated.

Everything you produce tastes off, even when your systems are perfect. And your beans, your core skills, your unique value, they matter too. But even average beans make decent coffee with good preparation and clean water.

So here’s what pisses me off about business advice. Everyone wants to talk about beans. The premium this, the artisanal that.

The fancy equipment you need to buy, you need a CRM, you need technology, you need AI. But nobody is talking about the boring stuff. The cleaning, the ratios, the patience, the discipline.

So you’ve got solo operators spending thousands on new software, new courses, new systems. Meanwhile, their business machine hasn’t been properly maintained in years.

They’re trying to pull perfect shots on a dirty machine with inconsistent prep and wondering why everything tastes bitter. Clean your damn machine first. Document your processes. Update your templates. Check your recurring expenses. Audit your time allocation.

It’s not sexy, it won’t get you LinkedIn likes. But it’s the difference between good coffee and brown disappointment. So here’s a practical takeaway. This is this week’s homework, and it’s simple.

Pick one business process that feels inconsistent. Could be client onboarding, project delivery, invoicing, whatever’s been giving you uneven results lately.

I want you to document it every step, from start to finish. How long does each part take? Note where the things go wrong. This is your puck preparation. Get it consistent first and then you can optimize.

Don’t buy new equipment. This is not a time to be buying new software systems and things like that. Don’t look for shortcuts.

Just clean your existing machine and perfect your preparation. Good coffee and good business starts with the stuff nobody sees. And that’s it for this week’s Lone Wolf Unleashed.

If this resonated, share it with some other solo operator who’s tired of brewing disappointment. Now, I know some of you are thinking, yeah, mates, maintenance sounds great in theory, but where do I actually start? And that is a fair question.

So I put together something for you. It’s the Business Machine Maintenance Checklist.

It’s not rocket science, just the boring stuff that keeps your solo operation running smoothly instead of grinding to a halt. Daily tasks that take five minutes, weekly cleanup that saves Monday headaches, and monthly cleans that prevent quarterly disasters.

Think of it like your business equipment manual, the stuff coffee machine manufacturers putting in the manual that nobody reads until their expensive machine starts making expensive disappointment. No theory, no motivational waffle, just maintenance schedule your business actually needs.

You can grab it@lonewolf Unleashed.com Coffee it’s free, obviously, because charging for a maintenance checklist would be like charging extra for an instruction manual. Until next week, keep your machine clean and your shots consistent.