Nitin’s insights..

This headline might be stating the obvious but inspirational talks are important for motivating people in all aspects of life. The trigger today was a talk from Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of coffee chain Coffee Republic, and the messages she was giving and the buzzwords/phrases she used could have emanated from any of a number of entrepreneurs on the speaker circuit. They all say the same thing, give or take a few differences, and if you’ve been to a few of these it can be repetitive – but it’s worth listening to them every now and then.

Hashemi talked us through her story of how she started up Coffee Republic, as part of a ‘Positive Action’ event to help small and medium sized businesses in Hertfordshire, England, beat the recession (see ).  While the event was a well-intentioned effort by the University of Hertfordshire’s business school to get businesses thinking positively again amid the gloom that the national media keeps dispensing, it was disappointing to see that not many people were in attendance to soak up the optimism and some good inputs from the panel session.

This was the second such event I have attended in the last six months, the previous one being the Ideas Exchange which similarly brought together a group of entrepreneurs who’d been there and done it to speak to an audience who were willing to listen. The key focus of many of these entrepreneurs today is that they have now become professional speakers at events such as this.

I suspect both events started with the mission to inspire small and medium sized businesses with stories from people who’ve made a success of their own ventures.  The difference was that the Ideas Exchange last November played to a packed audience, while Sahar Hashemi spoke to an almost a half-full auditorium.

The Coffee Republic story as told by Sahar Hashemi

In case you haven’t heard the story of Coffee Republic’s origins, Hashemi had returned to London from a trip from New York and yearned for something similar to the coffee shop she experienced there.  Her brother, who worked at Lehman Brothers, had heard about a chain called ‘Starbucks’ in Seattle and had seen reports that this was going to grow both nationally in the USA and internationally. So he said to her, ‘why don’t we start a coffee shop of our own.’ 

After overcoming the initial ‘you don’t really mean that do you?’ retort, they went about with a business plan to raise £90k for their first store in 1995.  Having been to 19 banks with firm rejections from each, they finally raised the money from the 20^th, a small city branch which didn’t even have its own cash machine, according to Hashemi.  After a slow start, they managed to open their second store a year later and then it grew into a chain and Hashemi sold out in 1991.

Pearls of wisdom

Against this backdrop, Hashemi offered the audience the following thoughts:

“Leap – and the net will appear”: referring to taking a leap of faith when thinking about starting up your business – don’t just keep thinking about it.

“Press the delete button on your doubts”: when you have a great business idea, one said of your brain is always going to raise doubts about the viability; so the art is to remove (or delete) those doubts from your head.

“Not knowing puts you in a better position”: sometimes, being clueless can actually help you in making progress in certain aspects of your business.

“You can’t wait for perfection because you’ll never get anything done”: some people try and get everything lined up to perfection and in doing so miss the opportunities; you just have to take the plunge sometimes.

“Bank managers have a way of making you think you are stupid”: here Hashemi had referred to the fact that they were taking the concept of a coffee shop to a nation of tea drinkers and they thought that it would never work.

“Bank managers are the enemies of entrepreneurs”: no explanation needed..

“Success is about notching up the ‘no’s”: basically, when people (eg. bank managers) keep saying no, you have to keep on pressing on until you get a yes.

Tags: Coffee Republic, Inspirational talk, Sahar Hashemi

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Business and entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.