I was at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, and had a great time talking to tea people and foodies who are tea curious. I kept getting the same questions I’ve heard repeated over my 5+ years in the tea business – “How do I get trained in tea?” and “Where can I get certified as a tea master?”
There are industry-sanctioned answers to these questions, but I’m going to take the risk of offending some rather important and influential people and suggest that there is no effective way to learn what you need to know to be successful in the tea business aside from working at a tea company. I am very familiar with the training that is available out there and have participated in – and sometimes led – several of the most prominent tea-training programs. These are all useful and, in some cases, worth your time and money.
That said, if business success could be wrapped up, packaged, and sold in two or three days of classes, everyone would be successful. If being a “tea master” (cue the laughter in the background) could be taught in a couple days or even a couple months, most of today’s tea buyers and blenders would not have apprenticed under other tea buyers and blenders for years and years before taking the reins themselves.
Now, some of you are thinking about a great success story you heard about a person who did it all and built a business on a shoestring budget. True – there are a lot of “success stories” in this business, though most people who are in the middle of the entrepreneurial process are going to tell you everything is great because they are entrepreneurs and both positive and self confident. I’m not trying to be a cynic, but the statistics suggest that the vast majority will fail.
In fact, there are a decent number of people who actually crossed into the holy land of profitability. There are even some who eventually could afford to pay themselves and make a decent living in the tea business. And, there are actually a handful who managed to build wealth. It CAN be done. But I would venture to say that few, if any, would say they started the process knowing what they needed to know. At some point, you just have to take the leap and learn to swim as you go.
A few brief recommendations:
1. You should be able to learn everything you need to know about tea (the leaf) for free or for the cost of a few books. Drop $500 on formal training and you’ll learn less than half of what is in a halfway decent tea book that costs $20.
2. Don’t believe everything you read or hear. Poll all of the professional trainers and consultants and tea books on a complex tea question and you’ll get competing answers. Most are regurgitating old information that, in some cases, has long since been proven wrong. Be skeptical.
3. While I believe the above, you should definitely learn what you can about the tea business from anyone and everyone you can talk to. Ask about tips for success, which vendors to buy from and which to avoid, what sells, and what to charge. You can’t learn this from a book and you’ll only get a sliver of this from any formal training. The best place to learn the industry is at the World Tea Expo, where many people in the tea business teach classes and many tea shop owners will be there and will be glad to discuss their experiences.
4. Bounce your business plan and strategies off of tea people AND business people from other industries. There are a lot of ideas that sound cool to tea people that sound like guaranteed failures to outsiders.
5. In the past couple years, I have talked to AT LEAST 50 people who either A) were unable to make their tea business work or B) decided they didn’t have the money to do it right, and instead are planning to become tea consultants, teaching others about tea and about how to be successful in tea. ASK FOR CREDENTIALS AND BE SKEPTICAL before giving a consultant your money and before trusting your savings to them. There are good tea consultants out there, but there are also a whole lot of very well-intentioned novices who will test their theories on you.
I can’t decide if I want people to read this or not because I’m stepping on a lot of toes. But at the end of the day my interest is in seeing the tea business thrive in the U.S. For that to happen, we need to make sure GOOD information is out there and BAD information is stamped out. That’s part of the reason Adagio is sponsoring TeaRetailer.com and paying me to share my experience and insights.
Finally, let me conclude by saying that I’m currently working on revamping the Adagio-sponsored educational website, TeaClass. It’s live today, but honestly it’s a long way from being “ready”. I would recommend it mainly to interested consumers at this point. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be extensively revising and expanding the content. We will be using TeaClass to train our own employees as we embark on our journey into opening the first Adagio Retail store. It will be 100% the information we teach our own people, and will remain completely free of charge. You just have to promise to give us your feedback and help us keep improving the content and the delivery. The goal is to see the U.S. tea industry boom…and that starts with good information in the hands of great retailers.
Good luck!
I hadn’t been aware of TeaClass. Very interesting. I like that you’re offering it for free while you tweak the material. I like that it’s the same training that you’re giving to your employees – my hope is that it will remain a free site that will help to educate the masses about the wonders and benefits of tea……..I’m going to hold you to your word!
Sure thing Michelle! :) There are already 20 lessons online at http://www.teaclass.com and I’ve written another 14 more advanced lessons that should be posted soon.
I’m also hoping to add a Q&A to the end of each lesson using our TeaChat technology backbone which will allow students to question the content in the lessons. This will help US keep everything fresh and accurate as new information comes out. That feedback alone is worth keeping it free. :)
Business, not just the tea business, is tough, especially in these times. It is ever changing, always an art more than a science. One thing about business plans and especially financial projections: Guesswork for the most part. Just my opinion having seen it personally and having
talked to a great many businesspeople. For just one example, many retailers (& wholesalers) are locked into high $ long-term leases that looked pretty good when they were signed. Basically, entrepreneurs in any field have to be a special breed with unbelievable tenacity and strong stomachs. Big wallets are a plus if available but this usually isn’t the case. I think people who attempt are amazing people, in any field. Somebody has to provide the jobs for those who want ‘safety’.
I’d love to know which prominent tea training programs you’ve led Charles – considering you scoff at most of what is being offered out there today. From what I have heard, and what you have previously mentioned in your own posts, the tea ventures you have been involved with have all closed their doors?
The comment that all tea knowledge can be acquired from a book is simply false.
My own tea book collection is extensive and I have read most. I thought I had quite the wealth of knowledge when I embarked on the STI series of courses. Now that I am down to my final level three course which I will complete at the WTE, I realize that the new tea knowledge I have gained by attending the courses could not come from any book I own. Yes, there has been some redundancy, but for the most part, the information & cuppings we get in the level three course is absolutely not attainable from ay book that I know of. I have yet to see you attend one of these courses Charles, so how can you make such broad generalizations? – then again, like you said – it would be a waste of time because you can learn all you want from a $20 book.
After 12 years I can say that I am still learning about the leaf and will continue to soak up all that is being written and taught.
On the business of tea itself, you do make some good points. There are no courses or manuals that I know of that will teach you: ” How to open & run a successful tea business” Most people I know who fail with a retail shop do so because they completely miss one of the three pillars of retail business success: Location, Working Capital and Customer Service. If one of these legs is not “sturdy” then there is a high probability that the new entity will not make it. I teetered on the brink with my fist Steeps location in the 90’s simply because I had no working capital left after the construction – big mistake. In the end, customer service saved my butt.
As I am a working consultant in the tea business here in Canada, I too get interested clients to check the credentials of those who purport to be successful tea entrepreneurs. Ones track record in this business speaks for itself, and I would never “test my theories” as you put it on a novice getting into the business.
What does one see when they peer into your background Mr. Cain?
I look forward to seeing what comes out of Adagio’s TeaClass, as I know Michael is truly committed to tea education.
Great post Charles. I agree with most of what you say. The concept of taking a class to be a Tea Master is clearly a marketing tool. I think a more accurate title to those courses should be at most Tea Master in Training Series or at least Perpetual Tea Student Series. I’ve spoken to people who have been in the industry for 30 years or more and they will tell you that they continue to learn new things about tea. As you suggested, much of what we all have learned has been the same information that’s been perpetuated from the beginning and not updated since. That being said, I also agree, somewhat, with Brendan.
There is a great deal of valuable and useful information that can be obtained through reading books but, as Brendan has suggested, nothing beats experience. I think the best thing we could do as an industry (and I throw this out as a challenge to the Tea Association), would be to set up a mentoring system for people who are serious about developing knowledge and skills. This is something that I see as a growing tool in many professional organizations; matching up knowledgeable, experienced people, with people wanting to develop or increase their knowledge and skills. It is a great system that dates back to the old world system of Guilds and apprenticeships. Great for everyone. There is another middle way, though, between what Charles is suggesting and what Brendan states. I believe that a serious person could embark on developing a good core of knowledge about tea from the excellent books that are out there and combine that with a self directed journey of structured and organized experiential exercises and personal contacts. I started my journey through books and structured exercises where I would set aside time each morning to do structured tastings. I would taste all the different types of teas and then I graduated to comparison tastings between different varietals of the same type of tea. It is a good way to expand your palate and knowledge of tea. I experimented with different steeping times and different temperatures to discover how that would effect the taste of tea. I then expanded my knowledge base by traveling to countries that tea makes its home and seeing it in its natural habitat, talking to farmers and plantation managers and workers. I spoke to people who taste and work with tea everyday and have intimate, ancestral knowledge of tea – whoever I could get to talk to me and impart knowledge and experience. I also took a workshop and that was helpful, if not just from the contacts I made and the people I spoke with.
Throughout all the years of this journey of seeking knowledge and experience with tea, I still consider myself a novice.
Brendan, one would think I called you out by name. I don’t know you or your background, and clearly you know little of mine.
I have been a successful entrepreneur in a number of industries. I spent the first five years of my “career” in the tea business bringing the world’s largest and most successful tea retailer to the US. TeaGschwendner has roughly 150 shops in 9 countries on four continents. I was responsible for opening their first store in the US and also testing several models. In all, I led the opening of 5 shops – only ONE of which was a test model that closed. Incidentally, the store that closed was named one of the top 10 tea rooms in America by US News and World Report one month before we closed it. I also set up US distribution, launched a profitable E-Commerce website, started the North American wholesale operation and set TeaGschwendner up for franchising. While we hit a few bumps along the way, the core tea retail model which we found successful overseas was extremely successful and profitable in the US as well and was the basis for our expansion.
I HAVE been through the STI certification trainings through Level 3 and am very familiar with their program and their trainers. For the last two years I have been a speaker at the World Tea Expo’s New Business Boot Camp and my World Tea Expo core conference sessions on Tea Purchasing and Modeling a Successful Tea shop have been among the top attended sessions each year. Thanks to my training with TeaGschwendner and time spent knee deep in tea, I was asked to be a judge in the 2008 World Tea Championship along with Jane Pettigrew, James Norwood Pratt and tea buyers for G.S. Haley & Co, Tazo, Rishi Tea, and Dethlefsen & Balk. While I still have much to learn, I believe I know the leaf and the industry reasonably well.
I could continue, but regardless of my credentials I don’t believe I said what you heard. In reference to the tea training programs I wrote: “These are all useful and, in some cases, worth your time and money.” Some are better than others. The same goes for consultants. I did not say that a prospective entrepreneur should not use a consultant, I suggested they be skeptical and ask for credentials. I would think you would welcome this recommendation if you have spent 12 years in the tea business and are a consultant with solid credentials. If so you are one of the good guys and a skeptical entrepreneur will steer clear of the inexperienced consultants and find you! To be clear, I do not know who you are or what your background is, I certainly don’t see how I have disparaged or offended you aside from your incorrect assumption that I know nothing of what I speak.
I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Bushberg’s assessment that the best education comes from inside a tea company. Unfortunately the culture in the US is such that few people would have the patience to take a low paying apprentice position for several years. That said, if anyone would like to join me in Chicago and get in on the ground floor of an exciting new tea retail venture, let me know! We’ll be hiring managers and tea consultants over the coming months. Adagio has some exciting growth plans and there should be plenty of advancement opportunity over the coming years. That was one of the most exciting and rewarding parts of my time with TeaGschwendner. We had several employees join the company as part time tea consultants and end up taking full time salaried positions (Managers, Wholesale Sales, Distribution, etc.) within the company or with other tea companies.
Very interesting article, thank you. I am serious about developing my skills and education in tea. Can anyone recommend a selection of books with which one can start developing a strong knowledge base? I know that experience is essential, but I would like to be able to start somewhere.
Thanks again.