My first experience with Shad was in his role as a contractor working for me. He was servicing a client of mine in the San Diego area and I called to follow up on a service and I got.” Yeah the dude just drove up on a Motorcycle and got everything fixed.” Customer was happy, very happy.
Shad is one true professional and he is a maverick in our industry. Together Shad, Mansi and I drove the initial push to get the guild as part of the SCA. It was really Shads efforts combined with Mansi’s support that convinced the SCA to take this wild idea and let us create a guild. To a point; the guild would not exist if it were not for the two of them, Shad and Mansi, and their efforts to work with the SCA to make it happen.
Since the creation of the guild, Shad has served as the chair or the past chair and he has been involved since day one when we drafted the ideas for the guild on a napkin at Seattle Airport. Last year he finished his tenure at past chair and decided to take a break. It was bittersweet because Shad had always been a part of our guild. Although not out of the game I wanted to do and exit interview and capture where we came from and where we were going.
Thanks for reading – Hylan
Hylan Joseph: Okay. First question is, why did you/we found the guild?
Shad Baiz: Well, the main reason I believe we did that was to, one, give technicians a community and a place to meet each other and network and talk about the unique job that we do and the unique profession that we have. The second was to provide some legitimacy to the trade and the profession through being part of a trade organization, having representation within the trade organization. Have something or somebody that could help lobby for our position to get us out of an allied products category when you sign up to get a tradeshow badge. And then I believe when we started, there was another piece that was of great interest to us I think that we probably had not been able to achieve on yet, was to bring a level of… Kind of set the bar on a set of standards or a level of workmanship and ethics and professionalism, kind of set of standard and a bar for that for the community so that there was a good reason for the consumers, the shop owners, to pay a reasonable rate for high quality service and sort of elevate technicians and have an opportunity for them to be able to make more money, elevate the small business owners and allow service companies to make a little more money, that kind of stuff. Sort of set the bars and create a standard that everybody could agree on.
HJ: I think the one other addition is, and we talked about this a lot when we were in Seattle, was letting people know who are passionate about coffee that there are other things to do than just becoming a roaster, becoming a manager and becoming an owner, that there is… Becoming a tech is actually a valid career option.
SB: Yeah, absolutely, it’s [a] great point. That’s right. It is a possible career choice.
HJ: I actually was thinking about our conversation, we were talking about how contractors work and how when you think of a contractor you think of an electrical contractor, but when you think of an espresso person you don’t think of an espresso service person. I don’t know how many times you and me talk about this. We tell somebody what we do, we are an espresso service tech, and people look at you blankly and say, you service espresso machines? To this day, I still must tell my father I don’t work in a coffee shop anymore.
SB: Yeah, absolutely.
HJ: What do you think your key takeaway is from the experience? As a founder, you’ve been in this from day one. What do you think your experiences or take away is? You’ve pretty much built the architecture while I was out and then was chair for two terms. What are your key takeaways?
SB: Well, one is that we have an amazing community. That the community of coffee technicians, especially coffee technicians, is an amazing group of people. Going into it, I don’t think I understood how many of us there were and how similar we all are in our commitment to what we are doing. So we vary a little bit in style, we vary a little bit in execution, but I don’t know that there are many people I come across… Or that I have come across very many people in this community that don’t share an amazing amount of passion for serving the customers the way that they do. And I think that was a surprise. I think I was prepared to find more entrepreneurial, corporate type people or something. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not sure what I expected to find. But that was a big take away, that it’s an amazing community, a dedicated community of people. A renewed respect and understanding for what it take to bring a diverse group of people together and move ideas and projects forward. Compromise and diplomacy are really important.
HJ: You mean you’ve learned how to herd kittens?
SB: Yeah. And this was one of my first experiences with something like this, so that was a real learning curve for me. And I think it was really cool though to be able to see it over a large enough period of time to see how much we actually achieved as a group of people like that when sometimes in the moment it feels like you’re just not getting anywhere. But then when you get to pull back a little bit, then you suddenly see, no, look at all these amazing things that have come out and amazing products that have come out. I mean the newsletter, the Slack channel, all these things that people look for and reach out for and get to use now that weren’t there before. It’s very cool. And not even to mention the education that’s come out. So I think that was very cool. And I think the other thing, and this is kind of topical now, but what the benefits of a professional association are. With Mansi’s tireless involvement, the involvement of the events team at the SCA and Ben on the education side, how important those resources are to realizing our dreams and our visions. What we hoped to see as founders or as board members or even as just guild members, having that association behind us has really made a lot of that possible in a real way, not just in a dreamy… We have ideas and we want these things kind of a way.
HJ: Yeah, it’s interesting. I always go back to that lengthy bar conversation. It’s interesting to see where we came from there and it’s interesting how, with the initial board, we have stuck to our guns and what we have tried to create. I know that education has morphed, and it’s morphed positively and negatively, but I think where we’re heading with Ben is positive. But we’ve kept the vision intact which is really hard to do in this kind of situation, in a professional situation.
SB: Yeah, I agree. You do, there is a lot of forces that want to act on you.
HJ: I got a couple more questions that I added, but what would you give as advice to new board members? Oncoming board members?
SB: Relax a little. Relax because this process takes time. And maybe relax isn’t necessarily the right word, it’s just the word that comes to mind. But I think in so many things having appropriate expectations is important. And one of the things that is almost impossible to do is to understand and expect the pace that this sort of endeavor operates at. And the time that it takes to be respectful to everybody’s ideas, everybody else’s pace or how they approach ideas, giving everybody the time and space that they need to do that in a room of 12 people takes time. And things don’t happen nearly as fast as what you may hope.