“You can try to sell good coffee, but you won’t make any money at it.”
….
The chill of the early morning wrapped around us as we sat across from each other, steaming mugs of coffee cradled in our hands. Memories arrayed the space between us. We reminisced (laughter mingling with nostalgia) about the many startups we each embarked on, each one a testament either to a God-sized ambition or a mutual love for just being different. Probably both. We each employed our parents in our first startup. His was in construction. Mine was in retail. But we both loved coffee!
He leaned forward and shared his latest dream: a coffee shop.
“But not just any coffee shop,” he added.
“This one would be a sanctuary for coffee purists. High-quality, ethically sourced beans would be the star, brewed to perfection with no sugar frills or milk-laden concoctions. Just coffee.”
JUST coffee.
The simplicity of his vision was enchanting; it had the making of a good story. But I couldn’t ignore the reality of the market. I offered my counsel, a gentle warning, I hoped, but it seemed to come out bathed in ice-cold pragmatism. It was a great idea, but one that seemed destined to remain a pipe dream. The world, after all, was not always kind to the purest of ambitions.
(this is the moment in the movie where someone lets the air out of the balloon and it makes that “whooshing” sound).
The torpedoed enthusiasm turned the conversation.
Settling back in our chairs, we put wishful thinking aside and did what any young and overly ambitious canon of a brain would do: shot off quick wins
“Fried chicken is trendy,” I said apathetically.
“Drop-shipping Chinese products would be easy money,” he added.
“I still think esports gaming lounges are going to be huge,” I blurted.
“Flipping homes is really good money if you’re willing to cut corners,” he sheepishly mused.
The tension was numbing. We could feel the shift from contemplating grand God-inspired possibilities to seeking quick wins. It seemed clear that, with money, easy and fast did not often align with biblical, redemptive, and loving business practices.
Oh wait… yeah that’s in the Bible.
“Money that comes easily disappears quickly, but money that is gathered little by little will grow.” (Proverbs 13:11)
When Values Clash.
There was an elephant in the room.
“Can I really run a competitive business and love people at the same time?” We were both thinking it, but neither of us had the guts to say it out loud.
“If you want to make money in restaurants,” I started with mild irritation, “then don’t open a salad bar. You need to push sugar on an IV and all-you-can-eat fried food buffets! And, honestly, if you want to make products that are accessible to people of all incomes, you cannot use the highest quality ingredients.”
This was clearly an oversimplification. Godly business people have opened successful salad bars, but many have closed because the local market demand simply was not for salads. We don’t always want what’s good for us.
Bottomline: Kingdom business is tough when the world’s values clash with ours.
It can sometimes feel like you’re playing with slider scales, choosing between what’s good for the customer or good for business, what’s good for the employee or profit for me, what’s better for the customer or better for my pocket book.
At the heart of business is the fundamental role of supply and demand. But what do I do when my biblical values don’t align with what my customer wants?
Clash #1: Just Chai.
My friend Danny is from India. We thought it would be fun to sell authentic chai from his hometown in Hyderabad, India at our local farmer’s market here in rural Indiana. None of that powdered nonsense. Just chai.
So that’s what we called it. Just Chai.
Story sound familiar?
He came over to my house several weeks ago to finetune the recipe. The smell of cardamom, black tea, and vanilla dominated the kitchen.
“Ah, REAL chai!” we thought?
I tasted his first brew.
“Love it. Good chai flavor. Slightly bitter for the American palette,” I said. “You’ll probably need more sugar and a bit more milk to hit the average farmer’s market go-er.”
He wasn’t convinced, so we had my wife try it. Classic American-small-town-girl, she agreed.
He needed another opinion to be sure, so we pulled his girlfriend in as well. “I like it, she said, but you’ll need more sugar for these customers.”
You know how the story goes. Total deflation followed. We went through a few more pots of chai before we finally settled on a concoction we could all agree would definitely sell. This one was a pretty big diversion from the first… 80% sugar milk, 20%, um… what was it we were making again? Oh yeah, just chai for the other 20%.
That’s right. We caved. Sugar milk flavored with authentic chai would do for today.
Then my wife decided to stomp on the last glimmer of hope that was still alive in this young man, “And can we make it iced? Americans don’t really like hot drinks.”
Last week we ran our first market with both products: Hot, lightly sweetened, authentic chai as one product. Iced, 80% sugar milk chai as the other.
The results are in.
Authentic chai sales for the evening – $15
Iced sugar milk sales for the evening – $80
We set out to change the way people see chai. No artificial ingredients. Real stuff. We believed that real was better and sugar was worse. These were our values.
But then we had a clash. The customer didn’t value that. So we had to ask ourselves, as a Christian, do I believe sugar is wrong in and of itself, or does it depend on how it is used?
Say the issue was artificial ingredients. Are real ingredients the only Christian thing to sell? I don’t suppose that is the case either.
But it isn’t always that simple, is it?
Clash #2: The Baker’s Dilemma.
A few years ago, Rabbi Lapin responded to a similar question from a Jewish baker on his site. He titled the response “Am I My Brother’s Weight Keeper.” The question goes like this:
I own a bakery; I specialize in sugary treats, and the reactions I get when people taste what I make sets my heart aglow. I love it when people enjoy my confections. I understand that these are ‘treats’ and that consuming these things consistently, like anything (including exercise) can be unhealthy – I really don’t know what people do with my wares once they leave my bakery, I just hope I am making the world a better place when the transaction is made.
The exception, though, is with one of my best friends’ husband. He just had weight-loss surgery (his second) and it doesn’t look like this second one will be successful either. He’s not listening to doctors, still sneaking food, etc. I pray it works out, but he will call me up and order some chocolate truffles ‘for his wife’ but I know that this isn’t the case. He may give her 1/4 of the order, and the rest are for him.
What do I do here? Is my obligation to my family/business and do I make the transaction and accept the certificate? Or, is my obligation to my genuine connection and concern for his health and the relationship with my friend?
What would you do?
Rabbi Lapin responds at length, but he makes these closing remarks: “You are not responsible for your friend’s husband’s health, though you can pray that he has the strength to do the right thing.”
What do you think? Is Rabbi Lapin right? What should a kingdom business person do? What would Jesus do?
I cannot help but hear the words of James in my ear,
“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” (James 4:17)
Or what about,
“Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12)?
Repair The World.
In the case of our chai business, Danny and I decided that selling sugary drinks is not wrong. But what if I knew my customer personally, and what if I saw them purchase glass after glass with no end in sight? What would a bartender do if the product in question was alcohol?
I remember talking to a Sikh friend of mine about business recently, and he shared with me how he was going to buy a gas station in the town my family was moving to. I was happy for him! But when it came down to it, I had to be honest. I couldn’t invest in his business model. At the end of the day, I wasn’t willing to sell all the cigarettes and lottery tickets he planned to sell to make his business profitable.
It was a clash of values.
The gas station would sell gas almost as a loss leader. They hardly made any money there. So he couldn’t just sell gasoline. And in fact, he probably couldn’t sell my just coffee or just chai business model either. That wasn’t where the market demand was. People wanted cigarettes and lottery tickets. They wanted cakes with dough conditioners and bleached flour, and drinks with food colorings and sugar content and preservatives that I wasn’t willing to serve.
In my opinion, selling those things wouldn’t have meant that I was loving my neighbor as myself. I wouldn’t buy those products. I wouldn’t give them to my kids. So I didn’t want to sell them to my community.
There is an old Hebrew phrase, “tikkun olam,” that means to “repair the world.” I believe that godly business is about repairing the world.
Kingdom business doesn’t stop with supply and demand. It doesn’t sell whatever the customer wants. Kingdom business goes a step further and asks, “How can I love my neighbor as myself? How can I serve my community? How can I repair the world with my business?”
