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Highlands in the north of Yemen, where among the world’s earliest coffee beans originated centuries ago. |
VET’S COFFEE COMPANY
BENEFITS YEMEN’S STABILITY AS A NATION
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is Part I of
an occasional five-part series on measuring Al Mokha Coffee Co.'s impact in Yemen.
GUEST BLOG / By Anda Greeney--Two years ago, I founded a
two-pronged enterprise with goals to be a successful coffee retailer and an
entity that used our economic engine for the benefit of the people of Yemen. We
call ourselves Al Mokha, Public Benefit Corp. and we source and market Yemen's
World’s First Coffee™.
Let me
illuminate.
We have two
customers. The first is you, the consumer, and our product is our World’s First
Coffee™. Our second customer is implied, and that’s the people of Yemen. If you
turn our World’s First Coffee™ inside out, our product is life changing jobs.
And here we can disappear down an academic rabbit hole.
A couple
months ago I spoke with an investor who, after looking at Al Mokha’s meek sales
numbers, tore me apart. She told me, “You’re an academic not a salesperson.”
Put the books away and start selling! And go take a business course at a
community college and meet with a business advisor at an SBA office.
Never mind
that I spent a year in-residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab and I have a
Harvard Business School / McKinsey consultant on my advisory board.
But here’s
the remarkable thing about being an entrepreneur: name brand education and
working hard doesn’t matter. It’s about results. Everything else is failure.
You learned something? Whoop-dee-doo. You put in a ton of effort? Cool man. The
business flourishes on sales that grow and the business starves on hard work
that goes nowhere.
The investor
was right. She looked at Al Mokha and frowned at our sales of $1000 per month.
For a
business two-years-old our bottom line seems to mumble "maybe we'll be
something someday." The investor rightly tore me a new one.
In her eyes,
and in the words of the eminently hilarious HBO show Silicon Valley, Al Mokha’s
product is our stock price and our purpose is driving it upwards.
Her
attack—vicious if I lacked thick skin—captured precisely one-half of our
double-bottom line.
The other
half of Al Mokha is our social mission. And true to form, I have wolves
prowling around the fringe there too, snarling at any sign of weakness. Michel,
one of Al Mokha’s advisors, repeats himself when he says, “I’m just not sure
about your claim on every single coffee bag. You claim ‘Supporting stability in
Yemen’ but what proof do you have?” Or the words of Greg Olson, a USAID
Implementing Partner Manager for a landmark 2005 survey of the coffee sector in
Yemen. In an email he said, “My concern is how you are using the approaches
identified in the past to strengthen the coffee value chain.”
Every
direction I step there seems to be thorns.
But that’s
not the whole story; I’m also surrounded by roses. Just today a random 500-word
email from Tom Shess, an adoring customer. Here’s a tiny excerpt: “As a coffee
lover, I have a list of favorites and your Yemen grown beans are among my top
three.”
Or Hanan
Yazid, a Yemeni American: “As a Yemeni woman who understands the power of
business as a formidable tool to build bridges between people and to foster
peace, understanding and harmony, I would like to commend you for thinking
outside the box.” She gets it, our social mission.
Roman god
Janus with two faces on old coin
What I
failed miserably at explaining to the investor were the two faces of Al Mokha.
As I, in her words, am an academic, let me call this our Janus business model.
Yes, Janus the Roman god that has two faces and has given us the month of
“January”. Janus is known for looking to the future and drawing from the past,
and is the god of transitions. Our view of development is that our customers
(you and your farming counterpart!) are inseparable, with Al Mokha in the
middle.
As a
development startup our role is tricky. In some ways we can consider our role
as an intervention we are fine-tuning. We know that markets can create wealth
for both of our customers, the question is how do we operate in the middle.
One model is
Fair Trade. But sometimes that leaves farmers and/or their workers poorer than
their “Free Trade” peers.
Another
model is Direct Trade. But is that scalable? And perhaps it’s like farmers
markets in the US where I can attest you work your butt off and hardly make a
decent wage.
A third,
turbo-charged model might be capitalism. In Vietnam communism fell and the
coffee sector rocketed from virtually zero to the second largest in the world.
While Vietnam produces Robusta coffee and Yemen Arabica coffee, the takeaway is
much the same: under the right model, rapid growth is possible.
If Yemen
could replicate Vietnam's feat they would double their GDP.
Or consider
a final model: In 1450, Yemen introduced coffee to the world. Al Mocha was the
home port and now coffee is everywhere. Let’s harness that magic.
Al Mokha’s
purpose in Yemen is life-changing jobs—notably it’s not coffee jobs. Our focus
is durable economic growth sparked by coffee. In this sense, our job is
academic. As a startup, we must apply cutting-edge economic research and
cutting edge technical innovations to something very old.
Our job is
leveraging your desire for good coffee so it has maximum impact. We want a longer
lever. Whereas one development model might have a 1x social return another
model might have a 10x impact. Our business model is searching for this impact.
We really do want your bag of coffee to change the world.
Those interested in trying Yemen's coffee
can shop at www.almokha.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Note: Part 2 thru 5 of this series will be written by Erin Fletcher, Al Mokha's Board Advisor in developmental economics.
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