Entrepreneuship: A coffee man & a cake lady

It must be a week for meeting entrepreneurs. I just got back from an inspiring luncheon talk by Pacific Coffee Company founder Thomas Neir. He told us about perservering through the years in order to build a coffee culture brand in Asia. A lot of the things he went through really resonated with me and my own experience of being an entrepreneur. He talked about starting a coffee company and trying to create a coffee culture in Hong Kong when people here equated that to a char chan teng, one of those local cafes that serve yin yang (coffee and tea mixed together) with nai jeung do (toast with condensed milk and peanut butter) or gong jai meen (instant noodles). He talked about how people (including staff) didn't understand why he wanted to focus on serving coffee. He also talked about how important a company's relationship with their landlord(s) is. In his case, alienating Swire over installing an internet connection in their Pacific Place shop proved to be a mistake. Landlords in Hong Kong have the power to make or break a business, especially a retail business.

Someone asked him if he thought entrepreneurship can be taught. He replied that while he thought the skills required to run a business can be taught, the motivation, inspiration and the willingness to take on risk are more personality-driven and may not be teachable. I tend to agree. I don't know how many times I've heard friends say to me that the one thing keeping them from chasing after their own entrepreneurial dreams is fear. "You're so brave," they would say. But I never felt I was being brave. What I felt and still feel is probably what an artist, writer, composer, architect feels. In a sense, entrepreneurship is about having a vision or desire and trying to communicate and fulfill it. For Thomas Neir, it was the vision of the coffee culture in Hong Kong that he experienced in the Italian coffee shops in San Francisco.

There were similar threads in my conversations with Elayna Berean, who only this year founded her custom cake (they're more than cakes really, they're more like sculptures!) business, Elayna Maria Cakes. Similarly, she spent time in San Francisco training as a pastry chef after getting her MBA from Wharton. I came across her company when I received the email announcing her talk at a Wharton-organized lunch (the PCC luncheon talk was also organized by the Wharton alumni association). I couldn't make her talk because I was in Tokyo, but I immediately told NL, who's busy organizing her own wedding, about it. So NL and I met with Elayna yesterday to discuss NL's monkey wedding cake over lunch at Cafe Costa. Cake talk completed, we turned to talk about what it's like to start a high-end, highly-customised service business in a culture that still doesn't quite value (or think it should pay for) service and creative expertise. Elayna is off to a great start; she's been designing showpiece cakes for fashion events including the upcoming Juicy Couture opening party (which was why she couldn't take on my very last-minute request for bowling ball cupcakes for a birthday bowling party).

Tom made a profitable exit, selling PCC to Chevalier after more than a decade and is now eyeing an environmental business. Elayna has plans to expand her offerings. If anything, entrepreneurship is certainly a constantly evolving work-in-progress.