When we started our cafe @ Laude Classic Cars at the beginning of 2026, a well-meaning friend gave me a piece of advice that I’ve spent a good amount of time ignoring. “Don’t just do coffee,” he said. “Do coffee, and pastries, and merch, and a subscription box, and make it a whole community club experience, etc.” He wasn’t wrong about the maths, to be fair. He was wrong about almost everything else. It’s too much!
Because the older this business gets, the more convinced I am that the real luxury (for a company and for a person) is being allowed to do one thing well. Not five things adequately, just one thing, properly. So we roast, and roast, and roast; and yes we also make coffees and sell some baked goodies on the side. But for now, that’s just about all we focus on.
FYI: there’s a strong “tech” element to our business too, as that’s a passion of mine and I happen to be decent at it… but that’s more to do with enabling the management of the coffee business and empowering sales than it is a distraction from the core of the business. I’ll write a separate post on the tech side later though – I’m really looking forward to that!
Why one thing beats five
Here’s the bit I skated over for years, back when I half-suspected focus was just a nice-sounding excuse for not being ambitious enough. Doing one thing well isn’t a smaller version of doing five things. It’s a different game, and the important word is compounding. Every batch we roast teaches us something about the next one, and that knowledge stacks up really fast. Spread yourself across pastries and a wine list and a subscription box with a scented candle in it, and you end up with five shallow puddles of competence instead of one deep well. And puddles dry up the second things get hard.
There’s a business version of this and a human version, and honestly they’re the same argument wearing different clothes. For a young company (and we ARE young, we only opened the cafe at the start of 2026 and the roastery a few years prior as a hobby initially), attention is the one thing you can’t fake. People can tell, somehow, when a cup was made by folks who only make cups. That isn’t marketing, it’s just what care tastes like. Do the one thing, get the reps, and you build a kind of trust no amount of “brand experience” can shortcut. (One exception to this has to be those Bloom filtered showerheads… If I see another damn advert that very convincingly almost makes me buy their showerheads, that are actually made in China, I might just buy one. Their marketing team deserves a Bells).
And the cost of the alternative is the part nobody puts on the invoice. Every extra thing you take on doesn’t just eat the hours it takes, it taxes everything else, because your attention is now split and leaking away in the background. Five things done at 80% isn’t a 400% business. It’s just a tired one. I know because I’ve lived the split-attention version, and the coffee was always the first thing to suffer.
Craftsmanship is just attention that refuses to quit
There’s a good word which captures this attention to detail type mentality in a nutshell: craftsmanship (I’ll also accept being called an “artisan”, if you insist). That term sounds like something involving wood and a leather apron, but really it’s much simpler and much more demanding than that. It’s the decision to keep caring about the ten-thousandth version of a thing as much as you cared about the first. It’s tasting the same coffee for the fortieth time that week and still asking whether it could be a little better. And it’s also trying out a completely new roast and playing around with wacky shot times/ratios/grinds to make sure we get the best out of it. For example, I’ve asked this exact question before: could this 12 second shot time truly result in a sweeter extraction, or am I going mad? So in the spirit of experimentation, I literally tell my baristas to waste beans and have fun. On a side note, that’s actually a good one: “waste beans and have fun!”. I think that should be my new life motto.
I digress.
Coming back to the topic at hand: the computer scientist Cal Newport writes about a close cousin of the above definition of craftsmanship. Something he calls “deep work,” the increasingly rare ability to focus without distraction on something cognitively demanding. His writing on the subject is worth your time, and his central point stings a little: the ability to do one hard thing with your full attention is becoming both more valuable and more scarce, precisely because so few of us can still do it. We’ve traded depth for a kind of frantic breadth, and we mostly haven’t noticed the exchange rate.
The unglamorous truth about mastery
Nobody tells you that getting good at something is mostly boring. The romantic version like the flash of genius or the overnight breakthrough makes for a better story than the truth. And the truth is that mastery is a very long series of small, repetitive, slightly dull corrections. Roasting is exactly this. It’s a bit of chemistry, a bit of instinct, and an enormous amount of doing the same careful thing again and again until your hands know it before your brain does. And so is starting a small business by the way… there seem to be a lot of people on Instagram that built up their businesses seemingly overnight but I guarantee that in most cases they simply haven’t shown all that went on behind the scenes.
Interestingly, this is the part that surprised me: that repetition, which looks from the outside like a grind, feels from the inside like the opposite. There’s a deep, slightly stubborn satisfaction in narrowing your world down to one task and giving it everything. Psychologists have a name for that state, “flow”, and you don’t need to read the research to recognise it. You’ve felt it. It’s the reason the four hours disappeared. It’s the good tired at the end of a day when you did one thing, and did it properly. I plan to also write a bit more about this “flow state” concept in future so keep your eyes peeled for that post 🙂
Doing less, on purpose
With all the above said, none of this is an argument against ambition. It’s an argument for aiming it somewhere narrow. In a culture that tries to insist that you should be doing and having more — more skills, more side hustles, more tabs open (ok, if anyone reading this knows me, you can probably feel the hypocrisy through your screen). Choosing to do less, and to do it beautifully, starts to feel almost rebellious. For a deeper dive into my psyche on this topic of doing less, see my last two posts, on slow living and the third place.
And if you’re reading this with seventeen tabs open and a side hustle you keep meaning to start, I’m not throwing stones (hypocrite, glass house, you get it). I just want to hand you the same permission I had to give myself: you’re allowed to pick one thing. You don’t owe the world your maximum surface area. Pick the thing you’d still care about on the ten-thousandth rep, and let some of the rest fall away. It feels like falling behind for about a week. Then it starts to feel a lot more like breathing.
So we’re still just doing coffee. No home baked pastries, no wine, no subscription box with a scented candle in it. Just beans, roasted with more attention than is strictly reasonable, by people who’ve decided that’s enough. It turns out it is. And what about that friend of mine, you ask? The one that gave me the advice to expand and do everything, all at once? I made him up! That was really just my own inexperienced business brain trying to tell me I’m only a success if I take on the whole world. There’s your weekly dose of honesty.
If there’s one thing you’re secretly (and perhaps painfully slowly) getting very good at, coffee or otherwise, I’d really love to hear about it. Come tell me over the counter, or find us on Instagram @apothecary_coffee_co and leave a comment on this post. And if you’d like to taste what “doing one thing well” tastes like, our single origins are roasted to order over here.