Tea, Business, and the Quiet Art of Being Worth It

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A followup to my talk at the BBBC, April 2026. The presentation.

I brought my tea to a business talk. Not as a trick or gimmick - as my actual argument.

Earlier this week I spent twenty or so minutes making a case that most of us have our business instinct backwards. We optimize for the wrong things, price ourselves like we're apologizing, and call it a strategy.

Then I realized that tea as a business helps make the point crystal clear.

Why drink fancy leaf when teabags are right there, and a fraction of the price?

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The contractor trap

I'll start with the thing that bothers me: hourly billing.

Superficially, it sounds fair. You work an hour, you get paid for an hour. Clean and "fair". The problem is what it incentivizes. If your revenue is directly proportional to your hours, then being efficient is actively working against you. You solve a problem in three hours instead of six - congratulations, you just got paid half. There's no mechanism for being rewarded for being good. Only for being there.

I've heard this called the contractor trap. A contractor bills time. A consultant sells outcomes. The distinction sounds semantic until you realize it determines almost everything: how you price, what you take on, how you talk about your work, and what kind of clients you attract.

Some more reading on this by the great Jonathan Stark.

Price is a signal

Here's the thing about pricing that is rarely told: your price is a statement about what you believe.

A low price signals low confidence, low care, or both. Cheap invites negotiation. It invites the kind of client who haggles, second-guesses, and treats your work like they can get it anywhere. The teabag.

This is exactly true of tea. A 200€ cake of aged pu-erh is not priced that way because someone sat down with a spreadsheet and a formula. It's priced that way because it is what it is - rare, time-compressed, unique. You don't explain the chemistry. You give someone a cup and see them figure it out.

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Three questions before you (or I) build anything

If there's one thing I want people to understand, it's this set of questions. Ask early. Ask honestly. If you can't answer all three, you don't have a business - you have a project, maybe a hobby, maybe a wish.

All three I'll frame as questions for you starting your own business, but I also ask them when you're hiring me.

Why me? What do you uniquely bring that someone else can't bring cheaper? Not "I'm good at it" - lots of people are good at things. What makes your specific combination of skills, perspective, and context the right answer for this problem, specifically?

Why now? Is this actually the moment, or just a convenience? Timing is underrated. A good idea at the wrong time ends up as just a very expensive lesson.

Is it important? To whom, how much, and what's actually on the line? If the answer is "nice to have," the budget will reflect that. You want to be working on things that hurt when they're broken.

The process of answering them tells you a lot about whether you've actually found the core of what you're doing - or whether you're still searching for it. Therefore, if someone's hiring me and they can't help me answer these questions for our collaboration... they won't be motivated to actually deliver.

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What ceremony teaches business

Gong Fu Cha - the Chinese style of tea preparation I enjoy - is almost pathologically inefficient. Small pot. High leaf-to-water ratio. Many short steeps, each twenty seconds to a minute. Same leaves, eight or ten rounds, each one different as the leaves open and change.

It takes thirty minutes to have a cup of tea "properly".

And here's what I've learned from it: the slowness is not a problem you work around. It is the point. The ceremony forces presence. You can't be doing something else. You're watching water temperature, timing steepings, noticing how the flavor shifts. The person across the table has your full attention because the process requires it.

A good business meeting is the same shape. You're not performing "meeting behavior" while checking your phone. You're actually there, actually listening, actually trying to understand what the other person needs. Ritual isn't ceremony for ceremony's sake - it's a technology for maintaining quality when attention is the scarcest resource.

(The shortcut, by the way, is a teabag. Broken leaves, rushed extraction, more bitterness. It works. It's not good. The shortcut in business is approximately the same.)

Premium, narrow, intentional

I run two businesses. The software consulting practice works on architecture and engineering for companies that are past the "can we build this at all" phase and into "we're building it wrong and need someone who's seen this before." The tea shop — Mezi šálky - stocks about 200 products and is priced for people who care, not for volume.

Both of them work on the same principle: be specific about who you're for. Not for everyone. For a particular kind of person with a particular kind of problem who values a particular kind of care.

This is not a "big growth" strategy. It's not supposed to be. The businesses I admire most are the ones that are exactly the right size for what they're trying to do - no bigger, no smaller. Running a good small business is genuinely hard and genuinely underrated.

Not bigger. Not faster. Just better, in a way that actually matters.

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Tea recommendation. I brought Qi Men Hong Cha to the talk — rich, dark, sweet, no bitterness. If you liked it and want to know where to get it or what to try next, you know where to find me.