Don’t be Bossy

Al Keating of Coffee Supreme shares with us five things he learned in the first half of his life that he trusts will prove useful in the second.

Standart

Published in

Standart Journal

10 min readJul 10, 2017

By Al Keating

Working my way from outside in

How being the new kid at school six times over taught me how to survive.

It can go one of several of ways, being the new kid at school. It’s very much sink or swim. You can learn to get by on your own, becoming your own best friend, head down, eyes front — the plain-coloured wallflowers avoid being picked, right?

Or, you can learn to work your way from the outside in, over and over, reinventing yourself at each new bell-ring, conquering aloneness and newness one roomful of strangers at a time.

For me initially, changing schools was hard. In my junior years, it always felt like starting over was a negative, fruitless waste. I’d form great friendships and become one of the gang, only to up and leave, introduced yet again to another classroom as the new guy. I went to six different schools, and three years was the longest stint I ever managed at any of them.

After a while though, I began to get better at it. I could see that it wasn’t all bad starting from scratch. In some ways, it gave me multiple chances to make first impressions. It was like being killed in a computer game, and respawning in another world, with full health, and a brand-new set of protractors.

I learned the art of meeting people and winning them over. I learned not to be intimidated by a room full of strangers, largely because I was unaware of who the cool ones were. I didn’t know who the jock and the belle and the dungeons-and-dragons-guy was, so I just struck up new friendships like they were all on the same level as me. It helped hugely.

Everyone looks out across those crowded rooms and responds in one of two ways: ‘Taser me in the Netherlands’, or, ‘Bring it on!’. For me, being thrown into new surroundings has become a chance to increase the size of the world I live in and meet new, interesting characters.

Good cogs make great machines

Playing a part in something bigger than ourselves can be the most satisfying thing — no matter how big or small.

Besides learning to make new friends, and playing football, school bored me to anxiety. Then, when I was 16, I was asked frankly to leave. Basically, when it came to doing school, I was too useless. I look back on it now with the luxury of hindsight and political-correctness — it’s clear to me I was a misunderstood creative. And bored. So I followed my parents’ orders and found myself a few odd jobs, one of which was in a dowdy little café in a basement in downtown Auckland — as a self-taught barista. Now, besides the occasional misspelt lawyer, there was no such thing in New Zealand as a Barista back in the early 90s. This was when coffee was only just becoming cool, and we all just called ourselves café workers. Being a second wave coffee-maker in a basement food-court café called Captain Delicious selling ten deep-fried donuts for every cappuccino, the promise of a decent future was only fractionally brighter than the fluorescent glow of the menu board overhead.

Even though I earned considerably more than your average 17-year-old, I figured I’d probably need to give school another shot if I wanted to do anything I might one day be proud of. So I re-enrolled back into school, chose all the subjects I was always discouraged from doing (art, design and other useless stuff like that) and got back into it. It was fun, and the girls were a bit prettier than they were in the underground food-court, but it was still school, and it still bored the shit out of me.

So, I ran far away from school and classrooms and chairs and dog-eared textbooks. I ran away to a dairy farm near a small town called Matamata (aka Hobbiton) where I lived for a year with a lovely family who put me up in their single garage, and where I helped milk 350 cows twice a day, every day.

We did this seven days a week and it was bloody hard.

I wasn’t bored anymore. I was too tired to be bored. We’d get up at 4:30 a.m. and do half a day’s work before breakfast. Then after breakfast, we’d go back to work for another day and a half doing hard labour: fixing broken stuff, digging holes, delivering new-born calves, driving the tractor backwards — all sorts of stuff — then we’d milk the cows again before dinner. We did this seven days a week, and it was bloody hard. I could never quite wash the dairy-farm stink off my hands which, though initially I found quite unpleasant, did eventually just become my new normal smell.

Now, it turned out that early on as a cow cocky I was a little bit useless too. So one day, my very patient boss took me for a long walk down to the back of the farm. He was very economical with words and emotion — common down here among men.

He explained to me that we were fortunate enough to be part of the wonderful ecosystem of our farm, that there were 350 cows — mostly Friesians, some Jerseys — there was the land, and there was us two. He went on to say that we all worked together, as partners on the farm. We all played our part, and relied on each other to play their part too.

‘We’re like 352 cogs in this big machine you see Al, and when one cog breaks down, the whole machine breaks down. We all work together to see the job done, for the common good. The cows play their part, and we play ours.’

It was a fine analogy with which I thoroughly agreed, and I valued him pointing it out. But then he spelled it out in plain English for me, and it has stuck with me ever since:

‘Are you a broken cog Al? I have only two choices when dealing with a broken cog. I can either fix it, or replace it. So, shall I fix you, or replace you?’

And that has been, in my life so far, one of the most motivating speeches from a mentor that I have ever received. It goes without saying too that I chose the former option, and took him up on his offer to fix me.

When we work in any team or organisation, a company of our peers, we all work together in playing our part to achieve something far bigger than what we could alone achieve. It’s good to be great at something, but it’s far greater to play your part in something good.

Integrity always pays (and not just the bills)

A story about paying my debts, making things right with people I’ve wronged, and reaping the benefits for years to come.

Somewhere between failing a Bachelor of Design degree and beginning a long career in specialty coffee, I had a very brief stint as a self-employed furniture designer. Working alone was tough for me, and although I gained valuable manufacturing experience, formed some lasting relationships, and mastered the cryptic crossword, it didn’t all turn out to be overpriced craft beer and yellow Lambos. The fatal combination of my business-naivety, lack of resources, and a couple of crooked debtors meant that before long, I owed a cool 50K to a few people around town.

With limited access to cash, I was forced to get creative and do whatever I could in order to dig my way out. So, armed with the best mediocre bottle of bubbles I could justify and a few freshly-xeroxed automatic payment forms, I talked my largest creditors into letting me pay them off at a hundred bucks a week, and suggested that upon final payment of my debt, they have me over for a toast to settled dues in a smoky back office somewhere in the bowels of West Auckland’s industrial badlands. Meanwhile, in order to finance my new outgoings, and not be a total millstone around my wife’s neck, I took a job bagging and delivering coffee at a small but popular Auckland coffee roaster, and, eventually, two good things happened.

I learned the value of hard work and personal integrity.

Firstly, I paid off my debts, cleared my name, and got to drink some reasonably-priced bubbles with Sherryl, the accounts payable lady at the furniture manufacturer. To this day, I am still welcome through their front doors, and have even worked together with them recently manufacturing chairs for one of our new sites.

Secondly, I learned the value of hard work and personal integrity. Through this, I was given the opportunity to cut my teeth in specialty coffee, to work hard for someone else, and learn that keeping my word was perhaps the single most important thing I could do. At the end of the day, your name is all you have.

You can come back from debt and failure, but a shit reputation is a life sentence.

Keep better company, you're not that awesome

Why picking a team of people who are younger, cleverer, and cooler than me has worked out so well.

I firmly believe that you owe to those coming after you all the good that was first handed to you. Call it what you will — karma, passing it on, doing unto others — whatever.

I was fortunate enough to have been mentored and moulded by some very patient and generous people. People like Chris Dillon, the founder of Supreme.

When I got it wrong, they helped me right it. When I got derailed by detail, they showed me the big picture. Stuff like that. Sometimes it was hard, and their guidance bruised my young aspirational ego. But now I’m in the second half of my life (or close enough — I’m calling it poetic license), I think back to those coaches with huge amounts of gratitude.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that throwing an opportunity to the next generation can pay huge returns. I have some very talented colleagues that I work with who, as it happens, are younger than me. In some cases, the age gap is large enough that I guess they would be what you’d call ‘the next-gen’. They are far cleverer than me, cooler than me, and probably have a much brighter future than I could have ever dreamed of — but they’ll need some of my involvement to see that future realised.

I was too tired to be bored.

I work closely with some heroes of mine — people like Doug Johns, Lily West, Jonny Calder (listed together like that they sound like cool villains in a western film) — really clever people that I am very fortunate to have worked alongside. These guys, and many others in the Supreme family, are hardworking team players who make our organisation what it is. It’s them that dream up all the coolest stuff, the most far-reaching ideas, and best-executed events. Not me — not even senior management.

They’re the ones we turn towards to help us write our purpose — our ‘WHY’ — on post-it notes on the boardroom walls.

Redundant and irreplaceable

My two secret goals (that aren’t so secret anymore).

Not long after my appointment as CE at Supreme (five years ago), I set myself an ambitious goal. I decided that through succession and collaboration, I would work towards making myself redundant. Perhaps not literally — not useless and unemployed, but instead superseded, supplanted.

But I realised too that I really loved my job, and all the people I worked with — both at Supreme and in the international industry — and that I didn’t want to walk away from any of this. So, I added irreplaceable to that goal too. Redundant and irreplaceable. Oxymoronic, I guess. But, if I really am going to take seriously all the things I’ve said above, there really is no alternative. My goal really is to be so untangled from day-to-day, that I can better help those who are actually doing it better than I ever have or could.

I realise I’m also very lucky, that I can be in such a position to set goals like this.

Running out of business cards, stepping aside as CE recently, has been hugely liberating for me. Someone at work said to me the other day, ‘What do you even do around here anymore?’

I’ve arrived, basically.

As a company, we’re setting some pretty lofty goals together too, and over the next few years as we work towards those, I don’t want to miss out on any of it. We’re making a few expansion plans, building some new things, and the reality is, I need to let some new, brighter team members have their turn at it. I will watch with pride as they get to realise their own goals.

Of course, I’ll still make sure to engineer it in a way that I get most of the credit. That’s a long-cultivated skill of mine that I may or may not pass on….