Episode 174: Finding a renewed sense of purpose and loving what you do with Richard Schramm of Villino

It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen for everyone. Some people go and put their life savings up and it's a disaster. It is hard. If you feel the same way, if you're not happy in your job, you should take steps towards trying to make a difference. If you don't, it's never going to happen. If I didn't go, “I'm going to go and do a coffee course to see if I like it.” Coincidentally, I find out that there's a café and go there and the guy knows my brother and gets this job and then it all happens. That didn't just happen, it happened because I took that first step of taking that first step.

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Do you love your business? You should. Sometimes we just don't. It's my hope that The My Daily Business Coach podcast helps you regain a little of that lost love by providing tips, tactics, tools, insights, inspiration, and all the good stuff to help you enjoy running your business. In addition to actionable tips and tactics that you'll be able to execute immediately, you'll also learn from creative small business owners around the world who've been able to sidestep their hustle. Also, build a business that merges their passion with their purpose and provides a profit.

Welcome to episode 174 of The My Daily Business Coach podcast. It is such a sunny day. My eyes are closed talking to the microphone and feeling this incredible sunshine coming through the window. It is the most beautiful thing. If you are, in any way, struggling, stressed, anxious, or anything else at the moment, I would urge you to get outside if you can and feel the sun on your face. If you're listening and you're in winter, there’s still sunshine sometimes. It might have been warm but get out there and feel it. It reinvigorates you.

Before we get stuck into this incredible small business interview, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on this beautiful land on which I'm feeling this sunshine, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. I also pay my respects to any other indigenous or Aboriginal people who may be reading from other places around the world. Welcome.

This small business interview is an interesting one. I receive DMs quite often about this podcast, which I love. Always keep sending them. I received one from a guy in Tasmania who was saying, “I started listening to your podcast. I was looking for something to listen to in business and I found it. I'm enjoying it. Thanks so much.” I love receiving these messages. I sent him a message back and I asked him about his business and he told me he runs cafés and coffee businesses in Tasmania.

We then got chatting and he was talking about how he didn't always do this. He used to work in corporate, used to live in Melbourne where I'm from, and made this big move. He was from Tasmania. Tasmania is a small place, especially if you're living in Sydney or Melbourne. Hello to all the Tasmanians. We love you. It's a change to go from Melbourne to Tasmania and to go from corporate to starting a business. He also mentioned that he didn't know anything about this business before he started it.

I thought this was fascinating and I said, “Do you want to come onto the podcast and share this?” He was a little bit like, “Really?” He did say in one of our conversations, “Are you sure? Do I have a story?” He has a story. When you read this interview, many people will be taking notes. Many people who perhaps read this and have not started a business will be inspired to start one. It's a great conversation.

Who am I talking about? I'm talking about Richard Schramm from Villino in Tasmania. They are roasters, they also have cafés, including a crew coffee and Villino in Hobart. It's a great conversation with somebody who took an idea, did a lot of research and planning, which I love, and then has created this entirely new lifestyle, this entirely new business, and a whole community around it as well. This is my lovely and enjoyable interview with Richard Schramm from Villino.

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Richard, welcome to the podcast.

Fiona, thanks for having me.

I am looking forward to this. You have so many things that I know will help people. You're coming to this podcast from Tasmania. I haven't looked at the news but I know that Tasmania is starting to ramp up in terms of COVID cases and everything else. I'm wondering how you're feeling given Tasmania has been relatively cut off from the rest of the world for a while.

We've been quite fortunate over the last couple of years. We've had a relative sense of normality down here. We've been quite isolated from everything that's been happening around the world. It's certainly real at the moment down here. It’s the highest case number we've ever seen. There's community transmission. It's all happening.

We are seeing a little bit of hesitation out there amongst the people. The locals, in particular, are not wanting to get out there and get amongst it. There’s even a bit of confrontation to sell the masks and things that you guys have all been dealing with for so long. The Fortress Tassie is certainly starting to peak with all of it.

It's new times. It's challenging personally and with the business as well. There's a lot more to manage. We know that it had to happen. It's also great to see people being able to reconnect with family and all those other important things from a mental health point of view that are critical as well. We have to manage it and take it day by day. We've been fairly lucky as a business. We haven't felt a huge impact from it. There's a little bit of a downturn in terms of having to close due to a loss of staff or anything like that. We've been okay.

Having said that, we've also tried to manage it carefully. We've tried to keep a segregation between areas of our business down here to make sure that we can adapt and rollout plan B, C, or C.2, whatever pops up next, and whatever new roll is rolled out about what's the contact and what's not. There's a lot to keep up with.

I had a little bit of a chuckle looking at my Dropbox folders. We use Dropbox in the business to manage all of our documentation centrally. I've got an admin folder and within that, I've got finance, HR, legal marketing, and then I've got COVID-19. It's like another business function that needs time, attention, and strategy. The big one is time.

Like anyone, we're spending a lot of time talking about it, trying to manage it, keep everyone safe, and keep the business operating as best as it can towards maximum capacity so that we can do what we do. Also, to provide a service, keep our staff safe and give them continuity of income and all those things. There are lots of pressures. First and foremost, it’s about keeping everybody safe and protected and starting to move with this new normal.

I love that you have a whole folder for it.

Love-hate.

I need to get that. I already mentioned the business, Villino.

It came from over fifteen years ago. When we started the business, coffee was maybe a little bit more focused on Italian origins. We wanted a cute, little Italian word that represented the space that we were in. A villa is a large mansion and a Villino is a small home with a yard. It's like a small villa or a townhouse or something.

For us, that represented the space that we were creating, it was a small, homely atmosphere that had a small amount of outdoor seating. With my wife, my mother-in-law, and I, it was like coming into our little home and having a nice coffee experience. That's where the name came from. Every year, we do a video of our Christmas party, fun things that have happened throughout the year. There's always a section on photos of boxes of the way people have misspelled our name or mispronounced it.

Can you talk us through what the Villino is? I know lots of people in Tasmania are familiar with it. I'm sure coffee aficionados will be familiar with it whether they're from Tasmania or outside of it. Can you talk us through what it is? You mentioned your mother-in-law and your wife. What is it and why did you start it? When did you start it?

We started the business in mid-2007. We're coming up to our fifteen-year anniversary in 2022, which is a long time in business. The business started as a small café on Criterion Street in Hobart. It's a small space. My wife and my mother-in-law were working there. Over time, we've grown to include another small takeaway coffee outlet, a hole in the wall. The business is called Ecru Coffee. That's about twenty meters down the street from Villino. We introduced that as a way to deal with our growth. We had an opportunity to go into the space. We were starting to feel a little bit of congestion in the main café space. We took the opportunity to open that and it's predominantly takeaway focused.

Our retail operations consist of the main café at 30 Criterion Street and then the smaller takeaway. When I say small, it's seven square meters inside. No one comes in. It's a window that we pop up and we serve straight out into the street. Somehow, I think a bit of foresight there for how serving coffee in COVID times might have been required and we got lucky there. That's the retail side of our business.

A few years into operating the café, we started roasting our own coffee. That was in about 2010 or 2011. We got a small warehouse space and purchased a coffee roaster from Germany and we started roasting our own beans. The idea there was to deal with some of the inconsistency in supply that we were getting. We had a few ups and downs in the early days. We wanted to get more control over what we were doing.

We were passionate about specialty coffee and about what we were presenting to our customers. We thought the best way to fully control that and put forward the best experience was to go and start coffee roasting, which we knew nothing about. We then bring that into our business so that we could vertically integrate. There were cost drivers there as well in terms of supplying ourselves. We bought that into the business a few years in. Now, that's essentially the scope of our operations in addition to our webstore as well, which is seeing quite a bit of growth over the last couple of years like a lot of online businesses have.

The roasting side of the business is the backbone of what we do, it's the thing that's made our business long-term viable and scalable. We roast for quite several local Tasmanian cafés, restaurants, and small businesses. We're well-known throughout Tasmania. We have some presence in other states. We act as a guest roaster for some cafés around other states. Our focus is pretty much in our home patch here where we can be here and we can support the locals and we can give timely support and service to them.

A big thing with specialty coffee is freshness and that's something that we can have as a point of difference to our local customer base as well. Also, a timely response to problems that they have as well. I don’t know what other people are doing but we're one of the biggest coffee roasters in the state. We have a fantastic customer base that is loyal to us. We love them and we try to roast them delicious coffee day in and day out and get it out to the people of Tasmania and beyond.

Also, helping those people get through the pandemic and of course all the years before that as well. You're doing so much. I love how you casually say, “We started coffee roasting even though we didn't know about it.”

It sounds casual but there was a fair amount of analysis that went into it.

When we started chatting on Instagram DMs, you were talking about the fact that you didn't start in this field. You had a career in something different. I'm wondering if you can talk us through why you made the career change. Also, why coffee? Why cafés? Is that something you've always been obsessed with? How did you go from one to the other?

Your podcast is about the why of your business. I was thinking about this. For me, there are whys from two angles. There are whys from a personal point of view, which are about satisfying desires that I had to operate my own business to try and ultimately build long-term financial independence through having our own business, which would generate income. We wanted to get some more flexibility around the work in the long run and not have to be there every single day being the person generating the income and if you don't go, that doesn't happen.

Also, to do work that was personally fulfilling and rewarding. Coming from large-scale IT transformation projects for giant organizations, doing hours of work on a spreadsheet that someone says, “We've changed direction now,” or to do something that feels like a drop in the ocean of a large project. For me, I wanted to see a more personal impact or reward for the things that I was doing. These were some of the reasons why I wanted to make a change.

In terms of the why of the business, what it does, and the product that we chose to sell, we wanted to bring an amazing specialty coffee product to the people of Tasmania. Me understanding what that was and building my knowledge around it was a bit of a journey. When I made this decision to do this type of business, I wanted to do it the best that I could and to put forward the best possible offering to the people of Tasmania not wanting to do things in the house.

We had a little blackboard at the front of the business when we first opened and it said, “Fresh coffee made well consistently.” It summed up a lot of things at the time that we were doing. Fresh coffee wasn't even a standard thing. There was a lot of imported coffee. I might seem crazy talking about this but this was over fifteen years ago and in Tasmania, which has a lag of however many years behind Melbourne and Sydney.

It was quite progressive to be using fresh coffee and looking at when it was roasted, what the origins of coffee were, the blend, what the flavor notes were, and pouring a free pour latte art into a drink. These were things that people used to wow over when we first put them out there. Now, if you go into a café and you don't get a nice-looking coffee, you're like, “That's unexpected.” We wanted to shake things up a little bit. There are already some great specialty coffee businesses down here. I'm not one to say that we were the first or the only one or anything like that. We wanted to make our mark and do something that stood out.

Part of it for me was I didn't originally think I'm going to leave my IT consulting job and go straight into a specialty coffee business. I'd always had an urge to do something entrepreneurial. I've always been a fairly creative person. All of the studies that I did were always down a bit more of a corporate path. I was always a little bit at a conflict of what I was doing versus what maybe my brain was wanting to do. There are two different parts of the brain. I wasn’t even a coffee drinker early on.

You didn’t drink coffee and now you’re a specialty roaster.

Now, I'm a full-blown addict and dealer. I didn't grow up in a household of a stovetop espresso or anything like that. My parents weren't coffee drinkers. I didn't drink it through uni or anything like that. I did a commerce degree down here and majored in accounting and human resource management. I met my now wife, Melissa Whilst at University. We've been together more than half their lives.

I moved to Melbourne after graduating and took a position with a multinational consulting firm, Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, which is a multinational consulting firm. At the time, it had 250,000 employees around the world. I took that standard grad path through to a great job over in Melbourne. I worked in Melbourne and Sydney. I did some time in Scotland, which was an amazing opportunity working for subsidiaries of the National Australia Bank over there. We're working with large clients like NAB, ANZ, True Energy, Telstra, and Macquarie Bank, some giant organizations.

I did a little bit of technical work. In the end, I found my niche doing change management and human performance work. Back then, I was gravitating more towards the human personal impact of what I was doing and getting involved in communication, planning. Also, taking people through the change management curve from understanding through to buying and sponsorship and the old theories around change management. I enjoyed that and doing the training to reinforce that.

I was in these teams alongside the tech people in which we're rolling out the systems. We were thinking about, “People have got to drive these systems and they've got to understand how it changes their jobs day-to-day.” I was part of that team helping to manage that side of things. I was enjoying it, made it to the manager level, was progressing, and was on a path. I looked at some of the partners around me and their lifestyles and I thought, “I'm not sure that I want to be there in a few years.” I'd always had this desire to have my own business.

Back to the My Documents folder on the computer, you've got My Photos, My Videos, and My Business Ideas. There was always a folder on my computer. There's some interesting stuff in there. I had that urge to do something a little bit different. I felt unsettled. I’m like, “We're going to make a go of this.” My wife, Melissa, grew up in Sydney but moved to Tasmania with her family where we met. She wanted to come home to Tasmania. She was living in Melbourne at the time.

I thought, “I'll go but I want to do something different. I want to make a change and take it as an opportunity to make a change in my career and try something while I'm still young and have some fallback options.” I didn't want to go back to Tassie and do contracting work and what I was already doing. It wouldn't have felt like the right move for me. We'll talk a bit more about my addiction to spreadsheets. I jumped in and I thought, “I'm happy to take a risk but I always like to do it in a calculated way.” I sat down and did a matrix of all of the things that I could do.

I’m also an Excel addict.

Across one side, I had all of the things that I could do. On the other side, all the things that are important to me, Melissa, and our future. It had things like having a creative outlet for work, having financial security, having something that might offer flexibility, our living arrangements, something that would be fulfilling. You'll laugh at some of these. I started particularly with what I'm doing. I had become a contractor in Tassie doing the same stuff. I had looked for something like a project management role in the graphic design firm where I'm using my business skills but I'm in a creative environment. I had become an actor, which was never going to happen.

You look like an actor.

Thank you. This is something that I look back on. It has nothing to do with the creative outlets I was looking for. I did a weekend course at the VCA, the performing arts, and did an introduction to acting. I went down there and enjoyed it. I did something quite different. I put that on there and I'm like, “That doesn't tick many of them in terms of financial security, anything else, or likelihood of success.” I went on there and I threw them all out there and I married it all up and saw what scored the highest.

It was stuff around starting my own business. For some reason that I don't know, this tended to gravitate towards food-related businesses, hospitality businesses. It's fairly common. You get a lot of mum and dad people that go, “I'm going to open a café.” For me, it was a café. I had other things like a crepe shop. I considered doing crepes because I saw amazing, little crepe businesses thriving over in Scotland when I was traveling around over there and I thought, “That could be a great model. Maybe an ice cream business.” I thought, “With Tassie, maybe not.”

In the end, I landed on coffee. By then, I'd started to drink a few coffees through work, through that corporate culture, the trips down to the local café. I started on mochas and then move to cappuccinos with sugars and then progressively got more snobby as I went along. I thought, “I'm going to pursue this as an option.” I started doing a business plan. I started thinking about sites and what the business might look like.

The things that felt the safest for me at the time were things like little coffee carts and there were some good coffee carts I was seeing in the train stations of Melbourne. When I'd stream off the train, I'd see a little cart there. It’s a simple business model. I thought, “This is a safe way to step into the business, into another field.”

I started reaching out to some of the larger office buildings in Hobart and seeing if I had a space available to do that. I was researching carts, costs, doing cashflow forecasts, and things like that. That was when we moved. That was what I was thinking I would go into. That would be my first little step. We didn't have anything secure but we knew that we would make something work or I could fall back to my other work. I put the resignation in, moved to Tassie, and everyone was like, “What? You’re to Tasmania, to Slowbart.”

I’ve never heard that. That’s hilarious.

All the jokes they make about Tasmania. Looking at the time, it was nothing like it is now. We didn't have an amazing food and beverage scene and tourism wasn't as much on the radar. It was a bit of a backward move at the time when more people were leaving Tassie than were returning. The lifestyle was appealing to us as well. We made the move and then I started looking at carts.

When I was still in my corporate job, I started researching the coffee business. I signed up for a couple of courses at the William Angliss Institute of TAFE doing some coffee courses. I went down and did a little intro to coffee for half a day. One morning from work, I snuck off and took a half-day leave and went to this thing and came back and learned. I didn't know how to make coffee. I went down there, started this course, and loved it.

There are so many things about the process of making coffee, the science, a little bit of magic in it. It grabbed me. I remember when I came back into the office, everyone was like, “Have you been to a fish and chip shop or something? You smell a bit like deep frying.” I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure where that's coming from.” The café smells were on me back in the office.

I signed up for a longer course. When I signed up, the lady said when I gave her my address, “There's an amazing specialty coffee café down the road from where you live.” I didn't even know about it. I spoke to my brother who's got a successful consulting business now in Melbourne and I said, “Let's catch up and chat about this idea of me moving back to Tassie and opening a café. Let's go to the one down the road, which is great.”

We walked in there and the owner, Andrew, who's still a mentor to this day, said, “Ben, good day.” Ben was like, “Andrew.” It turns out Andrew used to own a café in the city that my brother frequented and he sold that up and moved out to Canterbury and opened a café called The Maling Room. It was an early progressive player in the specialty coffee scene of Melbourne.

He’s like, “This is my brother, Richard. He’s looking to open a café in Tassie.” Andrew opened up. He was the most generous and amazing person with all of his knowledge. He said, “I'd love to help and chat.” He offered me a weekend job down there pulling coffees. I'd work Monday to Friday. I'd then go down and get behind the machine and pull shots for hours and learn and drink way too much caffeine.

After the shift, we would chat about machinery brands and the running of cafés. When I look back, it was one of those real turning points where I've ended up today. I could have been down here with a place doing frappe, lattes, or something and not on the path at all that I'm on. He opened my eyes up to what the specialty coffee industries are all about. I'm forever grateful for that and for the time that he gave up for me.

I learned heaps and it got my passion going for specialty coffee. I remember one day on the train, I'd been there and I must have had fifteen coffees or something. I’m with Melissa and I'm like, “I'm sorry. We're going to do this. I'm excited. I feel good about it.” I was on a coffee high. It was a real turning point. I learned heaps. I felt a little bit more armed to come down.

That's something that I'd always advise people who are making a change like this if they can to reach out and find mentors in the industry, people who have been through it before, and people who can share their skills. Approach them respectfully if you’d be planning to open a café next door to them or a business in direct competition with them. There are people out there that will help. I look back on how generous people like Andrew were. I’m thinking, “Would I be the same if someone came in and knocked on the door and wanted that when you're busy?” It's a hard one. I'm forever grateful for what he offered.

I had a bit of baptism into the industry before we moved back. I came back down to Hobart and was visiting my grandparents. My father-in-law gave me a coincidence, “There’s a little café for sale in the Hobart CBD.” Brick-and-mortar was a bit too real as an actual space. We packed our bags, we shot back down from where we were and we looked at it and we're like, “Let's do this.” It wasn't a complete knee-jerk. I've done a lot of analysis. I knew what we were in for. It was like, “This is a little bit of a different plan but let's go for it.”

That space is still the space that we're in today. It was the beginning of it all. That's where I worked with my wife and my mother-in-law for the first couple of years until we were at a point where we could put staff on. We often laugh and look back when we were there working. One day, Melissa and I were in the kitchen doing some prep or something and Josie was out the front, on the till. Some customers came in and Josie leaned back and said, “Kids.” She wanted us to come out and serve a customer. I’m like, “No. You’re killing our cred.”

“I’m the founder of a major business, mom-in-law.” There's so much to unpack in that answer. I love the idea of a spreadsheet and nailing it like, “What do I want?” Also, going through everything. I also love that you went forward and did these courses like acting, “Let's see if that's going to work.” You tried. Often, people think that there has to be one giant leap. You have to go from quitting your job and the next day, you bought a café. It's amazing that you’ve done so much research behind that.

Because you've been in the business for so long, since 2007, it's massive. With where you've taken the business, have you done as much research every time? It sounds like you did so much research into what you were doing before you started. When you decided to even get the second venue even though it's tiny, was there the same amount? Was it like, “I can see that this is the next step I need to take.” Was there an amount of research and discovery?

If you speak to most people around me, they're going to say that I'm a detail-focused person. Whilst it might seem that I might jump on and take a risk on something, I always do it in a calculated way. There's also a point where you go, “I've got to take this plunge,” and you've got to own it and do it. You can be guilty at times of paralysis by analysis. At the same time, you've got to know what you're going into. There's always going to be the gut feel. Do you go for it and you back yourself to know that something's going to work?

For us, we've grown the business organically. We haven't done the next stage before we felt ready for it. When an opportunity has presented itself, either it has presented or we've made the opportunity by actively starting to look or do things. We've always felt that we're ready. There have been times we've gone to do something and pulled out of it because we weren't ready.

We looked at moving our roasting business several years ago to a large space and putting a huge café in it and we weren't ready. I had architects draw up plans, we did all the numbers, went to the bank, and it all came together that we're not ready for this in our business. It was a step too soon. I'm glad that we didn't make that move.

When it comes to taking on a new space, like the small hole-in-the-wall business, Ecru Coffee, that felt like a logical step at that point. We were already too busy in the café. The gut feeling was that it would ease the pressure on the main shop. Every time, I've gone into things cautiously optimistic. That business now is cranking and it's become a business in its own right.

You think, “Am I going to have my trade between two shops?” Initially, you dilute a little bit and then they both build and you realize that taking that step has increased your overall capacity. That's what I suppose you're hoping for when you make a move like that. For me, I'd be crunching the numbers on the bare minimum, and is it viable? For me, as long as something's not going to take us backward or put us at risk of what we've achieved today, I'm happy to take that next step and believe with our hard work and what we do that will make it work.

With roasting, I sat there behind my spreadsheet, which I love. I ran numbers, “What's it going to mean if we roast our own? Will that save us money? What about the time away from the business? How's that going to affect the business? What about the new rent and finance payments on a new bit of equipment?” I got to the point where I was comfortable with the numbers. You then get these other gaps, which are like, “Do I have the skills to do it?” I didn't. I'm like, “You’ve got to start somewhere and learn.”

For a number of weeks, we concurrently ran our existing supplier and their own coffee. We were scared, “Are people going to stop coming to our café?” We're like, “No, that's our niche and we’ll commit to it.” We've done the research. I found other mentors in coffee roasting and I've done the training. I didn't just get a roaster and put my first ever batch on. I modified a bread maker with a heat gun and a multimeter with a temperature probe. I was roasting out on the deck with chairs flying everywhere. I got to the point where I felt comfortable enough to take a plunge. It's okay to step off the edge, you just need to know what's over there.

I like that analogy. How has your wife worked with all of this? It sounds like she works in the business and works closely with you. You guys have children together. Is she all in? I work with a lot of husband-wife, wife-wife teams, or couples. Sometimes what can happen is it's great and then it's like, “We never discussed who does what in the business.” It can easily be messy. How has that gone?

I suppose the quick answer to that is that she no longer works in the business. She did in the beginning. She had done a degree in arts and psychology. She was working in Melbourne as a rehab counselor. Before we moved back, she was also making a change to where she was headed in her career. She did a grad dip in primary school teaching. When we moved down here, that's the work that she wanted to do. In a way, it was a little bit fortunate that it was hard to find teaching work at that time in Tasmania. It's like, “You've got this little café. Do you want to come in and help out?”

She was amazing. She came in and helped us out in the business when it wasn't her chosen career or what she wanted to do. She came in and did a great job. It worked out perfectly. She started to pick up a little bit of relief work. It then became a few more days. As that happened, we could backfill her with a staff member that we could pay for because we had an income coming in from somewhere else. Over time, we were able to build up a team.

For the first couple of years, it was just the family. Long term, that'd be hard to sustain. We were living with her parents because we'd move down here. Financially, it was challenging to have any business and everything. We were living together, driving to work together, coming home, and talking about work. It was all-consuming. We've been fortunate that we've been able to forge separate careers. She's still an amazing sounding board for me and supportive in everything that we do in the business.

She's not involved in the day-to-day and it's good. We have separate things. She's been primary school teaching. She's gone from being full-time to having one of our children and then cutting back and then building back up through relief to part-time to full-time and then the next child comes along. It had been a bit of a cycle. We're now in the stage where our youngest one is old enough. Melissa is heading back into work again and it's great.

We have our own things and it means that you can come home and talk about different things and you have those different parts of your life. I do respect people who manage to make it work day in and day out, working and living. Melissa is patient with how much I put into work and how hard I'm always working on things and focusing on them. She's supportive. I'm lucky to have that.

Good on you, Melissa. She sounds like a great partner. There are two things I wanted to talk about. You have worked for years and years in IT consulting, change management, and all of that communication, strategy, and team management. I was reading somewhere that only 15% of people like what they do for work. I'm wondering what advice you'd give to someone who's reading this, who's sick of the corporate world, and wants to change but is scared.

You said that you can take the leap as long as you can see what’s below. Also, you've already given so many insights into the spreadsheets and other things. Is there anything else you would say to someone who's reading this and is like, “This guy is living my dream.” You had Andrew. It sounds like your brother is good as well. You've done a lot of this. You had a lot of this background of understanding how to plan things out. What would you say to someone who maybe doesn't have that who's reading this and thinking, “I’d love to do that.”

Analyze it before you go for it. I'm lucky that I love what I do. I don't just mean that I love coffee. That's something that has grown. I love running a business. I'm pretty passionate about not only our product but I get a buzz out of solving problems, growing the business, and making a difference in people's day. That's something that I wanted to do. It was in me and I was never going to be happy until I did it.

Maybe people reading are like, “I'm feeling that.” It's easy to say, “Look where I am fifteen years later.” It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen for everyone. Some people go and put their life savings up and it's a disaster. It is hard. If you feel the same way, if you're not happy in your job, you should take steps towards trying to make a difference. If you don't, it's never going to happen. If I didn't go, “I'm going to go and do a coffee course to see if I like it.” Coincidentally, I find out that there's a café and go there and the guy knows my brother, gets this job and then it all happens. That didn't just happen, it happened because I took that first step of taking that first step.

You can say, “You're lucky.” You make your own luck as well. Maybe one might be lucky with those opportunities. Maybe you try hard and there’s nothing good. You won't get any of those little lucky breaks or whatever but they won't happen if you don't do anything. Start the journey. Even in that, if you start the journey and you find that it's not there, it's not working, or it's not viable, at least you've exhausted that. You don't then feel like you're forever missing out on something. It might trigger a different train of thought or some other change. You might find a different role in your existing business that more suits your skills.

You've got to at least investigate it to get rid of that feeling that's in you. It wouldn't shut up for me. I had to take some steps. It's worked out great. There's been ups and downs along the way. It has been hard. Take those steps. Do some analysis. Write some stuff down. Write a business plan. Don't think to yourself, “I’m kidding myself here.”

Do it and put your heart into it. You'd be amazed at that self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start thinking about something and start working towards it, quite often, these opportunities do open up. We're lucky we’re where we got to. At the same time, I took a big risk. I left my job. I moved states. I started a business that I didn't have skills in. We went through some tough financial times. If you want to do it, you work at it. Give it the best chance of success.

I couldn't agree more. I love that you were like, “Start. Take one step towards it.”

I love the saying, “How do you weigh an airplane?” Everyone's like, “I'll get this massive set of scales.”

No. You take the first bolt and you weigh it. You take each piece and you weigh it. Before you realize it, you've weighed half an airplane. You're getting towards breaking down a larger problem by tackling it in smaller steps.

You have gone through some interesting things. You did mention that not everything went to plan. There was hard work involved. You mentioned living with your parents-in-law and all of that. Is there one particular challenge that came up that you were able to overcome? Was there any particular challenge at the start where you were like, “This is way harder than I thought and it might all fall by the wayside.”

One of the biggest challenges was having the courage to make the move in the first place. For me, that was about doing a lot of planning, doing my matrix, and making a business plan. I don't mind taking a risk but I always like to do it in a calculated way. Even later on in the business, you asked before about us taking the plunge in future steps.

I do run that risk of that paralysis by analysis and being too much in the detail and that's been having some people around me, which are like, “You've analyzed this. You know it's going to work. You know that it's not going to fall flat on its face. Go for it.” Having those people that can push you along when you know in yourself that it would probably be okay. Sometimes you need a nudge.

In the early days, it was difficult financially. Every day, after the close of trade, I was racing to the bank with the day's takings to be able to pay the bills, wages, and things like that. People probably look at the size of the business now and think, “It's always been like that.” It hasn't. When we launched, there was no Facebook or Instagram to open with 2,000 followers and everyone knew you were there. You had to sign a blackboard on the street corner saying, “Specialty coffee, this way.” It was a slow build.

Businesses are now lucky. Fortunately, for new business owners, you can open with more of a bang because your message can be out there before you open. We didn't have that platform. We had to build our business with runs on the ground, every single cup of coffee, and every customer that came in the store.

At the same time, that's an incredible foundation to build a business in business culture. We still try to have those values. I say to our staff, “We don't just sell great coffee, we provide an experience.” Everyone who comes in needs to have an amazing experience. It would never happen but if they didn't have a good coffee, for some reason, they’re going to be like, “I had a great experience. The staff is lovely.” There's so much a part of it. You can have an amazing drink in a place where you get grunted at by some snobby person. It's not a nice experience at all. It's all part of it.

We had to build it up. Especially in Tasmania where everyone knows everyone and it's a small community, we had to build it up slowly. That created financial pressure early on. We didn't have heaps of savings or anything like that. We'd stopped working in good jobs and suddenly had no income. Luckily, we had a supportive family and we got a little business loan, which thankfully wasn't humongous. It could have been a problem. Something you need to be careful of is to not borrow more than what you can realistically recover from if things don't work out. Don't be afraid to borrow a little bit if you think you can manage it.

We had that guaranteed by our family because we didn't have a house and banks won't touch anyone that doesn't have two houses to put up security. They always want someone to back it up. We had help from the family. My dad helped me with the fit-out a lot. We did so much of that hands-on ourselves. We laid the floor and painted the place and did heaps of it ourselves. There are ways to save money there. Early on, it was tight.

There are so many great tips there as well, even with bank loans. That's another thing. People are like, “You have to give up your job tomorrow.” I spent six months planning out my job. It's different from yours. I didn't have huge overheads but I still was like, “Here's a list of 62 people that have talked to me about needing help. I'm going to meet with every single one of them and get clients lined up.”

I was like, “I don't have this crazy trust fund to fall back on if this doesn't work.” I gave myself a year and said, “Give it a year. If it doesn't work, you're employable.” I used to work at Kohl's when I was 15. I can go get a job at Kohl's or apply for a job. I'm happy to do that than to sit in this corporate job that I hate.

I did six years at KFC. They're all great foundations. I worked from when I was 14 and 9 months or whatever it was. It was $4.05 an hour, I can still remember it. I worked my butt off and learned heaps about cleaning and service.

People and interacting.

They're all these little building blocks of who I am today and therefore what the business is. There were other challenges. I had a pretty big one. I didn't know I hated that coffee early on. I took a lot of that learning into my own hands and tried to find mentors. I got a weekend job and I bought some equipment for home to practice. I read and researched. You’ve got to make these opportunities for yourself. No one's going to say, “I want to teach you everything.” You've got to go after it.

You've said in your podcast that learning is a continuous thing. You need to continue to do that stuff and make time for that going in your business and your development. Later on, when we started roasting, I had another great mentor, Hazel De Los Reyes, from Sydney. She's got Coffee Alchemy. I met her at a training course. It’s another one of these lucky meetings for a course that I proactively went on to.

In the end, I forced my way a little bit into visiting her and helping do some packing to learn a little bit about how roastery works. She was amazing. I have a lot of respect for her. She’s an amazing coffee roaster and someone that let me learn a little bit so I could go into my next plunge in my business with a little bit of knowledge.

Are there any other books? Do you have any mantras or quotes that you live by that have helped you? You've talked about a couple of mentors and your family and everything else. What else has helped you in your business?

My path to where I am today has helped me a lot, a broad range of skills. It's been good. I always like the quote, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” It's true. If you have a lot going on, you get organized and you have to go out. Otherwise, you don't get it all done. People that do the most seem to be the ones that are already flat out. I also like the saying, “Pressure makes diamonds.” That's a good one. You put your best work out when you've got to get it done.

My brother has been a good mentor for me as well. He's been a person that when I've got to those points where I've analyzed stuff to death and I know in my heart that it's probably the right thing to do, he's been one to hold me accountable a little bit and to make me do stuff. I distinctly remember taking a walk around the block while he was visiting once down in Tassie from Melbourne.

We talked about this coffee roasting thing and I was reeling off all my numbers and how I thought it would work. He's like, “Rich, you got to do this. Do it. I don't feel like it's a huge risk. You've done the numbers. You know what will work. The next time I speak to you, I want to hear that you've contacted a supplier.” It was a little next level of accountability.

You need those mentors and people around you that can validate what you're thinking. He could have equally said, “Don't do that. It doesn't sound good.” That's all also okay as well. When you're in your own little world, sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees or you’re going to get caught up in your day-to-day.

For me, I'm lucky that I'm always driven to take on the next challenge. I’m not a great person at sitting still and resting where we are. Even on the weekends, I can't sit down. I'm always finding something to do or tinker with or build. I’ve always got the next thing in line. For me and the business, that's been good. I've been able to always think about that next challenge or that next step. I'm always driven to do that.

It's not about having the biggest business or the most profitable business. It's about me continuing to probably feel like I have new challenges and new problems to solve. That's what I get the most enjoyment out of at work and building the business in that way and taking on open-ended projects and, so far, achieving them and going well.

You've talked about Dropbox and file management. People can't say, “Everything looks tidy and organized in your office.” Are there platforms, apps, software systems, point of sale, or stuff that you love and it's helped you run your business, particularly from the tech side?

Coming from a consulting background, I'm a firm believer in processes, systems, and tools that can take away the need of people. The dependency on a person to make something happen rather than a system where anyone can come in and hopefully run that system. The top tool that I would be lost without in the business is Microsoft Excel. I’m spreadsheeting to the point that all the staff always get me I-love-Excel mugs for Secret Santa.

I got one of those ones when I used to work at Amazon. Someone sent me that for Christmas.

For me, I use Excel to capture a process, a structure, or a methodology that I want everybody to be able to follow. I'll build something that will capture that process and we're sure that we're going to get the same outcome every time. Everyone knows how to use it. We've got live Excel between all of the computers. If a new order comes in on one computer, we plug it in, and then that goes right over to another computer. The team can see what's happening so we communicate with it.

Another one is Xero. I'm not alone here. It’s a great cloud-based tool that is super handy for us. It's always up to date with the latest accounting requirements. Having done accounting at uni, I probably tinker on it a bit more than others do. It's such a powerful tool. We'd be lost without that. We used to have a different system and it was a massive hassle to change but it was worth it. We had to wait until the end of the financial year. For the next full month, we ran two systems concurrently to make sure that we didn't have any discrepancies. It was a big hassle but I'm glad we did it. It's one of those things where we are a couple of steps backward to go a long way forwards. That's great.

Another one is SketchUp. I'm a visual person. For all of our café fit-outs, layouts, and even designing a coffee cart for a festival or something like that, I'll jump in SketchUp and I'll draw it up to scale. Being able to put a picture in front of somebody with dimensions and everything, you know what you're going to get because they can see it. It helps people to visualize things. I'm often up late at night drawing things in SketchUp. I'd be lost without that.

We also use MeisterTask a lot in the business. It’s like Monday or Asana. It’s not MindMaster. It's their task management side of things. We found that as the business grew, we had people in different areas with many different to-do list items to do. Sometimes they overlapped between sites and we needed to get everyone on the same page and organize all of our to-do items into priorities. Otherwise, you jump at the loudest one at the time.

We set up our own structure in it. We have a priority column, the immediate focus, and then all of the rest. If an idea comes up, we log it. Each month when we get through things, we pull stuff across to the priority area and we talk about it as a team and have a meeting. You can have your chats in there back and forth about updates. Someone who's not in the same physical building can see that comment. Everyone's being kept informed. That's a great tool for us.

Another one, which is industry-specific is a program called Cropster and it's a coffee roasting software. We've rolled out how coffee roasting machines have probes hanging out of them or plugged into computers. We get what looks like a heart rate monitor. We've got a detailed track of everything that's going on during the roast, which allows us to record every roast to baseline it, to roast it against the target profile.

It's been huge in giving us consistency and more data whilst roasting coffee. We can repeat what we do. We can deal with changes in temperature, changes in moisture levels of green coffee. It gives us repeatability. It also manages all of the inventory as well. We can get live snapshots of where our coffee levels are at and stock lines that are running low. It's a powerful tool. That's been a great one for us to get consistency between our different coffee roasting team members.

There’s another one that we've used for work between keeping the team informed between sites. We have three separate locations. The café needs to give the information to the roastery about how much stock they have on hand. We don't micromanage that in an inventory system. We created a few basic webforms where they can jump on and they can fill out a little stock tag and hit send and it pops up into the team's inbox. It’s handy.

Anytime we have a need for communication between the sites where we want the same data every single time, we create a basic web form that the staff can get to through a password-protected part of the website. They can jump on and fill out the form and we get back consistent data every time for communication.

Especially anyone in hospitality, I can imagine they’re taking so many notes. If you've got time for that one more, then we'll wrap up our chat.

Another one that we use is called Esendex, which is a text-to-email platform. We found it difficult in the early days as our number of customers on the wholesale side increased. They were texting me personally with orders. As other staff started to have those relationships with them, they were texting them. It was quite hard to centralize the ordering process. There are some great but quite expensive ordering platforms out there. We didn't want to depersonalize the process too much.

We've set up this text-to-email and the customer sends us a text message. We can prompt them through a schedule on a day of the week and they can shoot back with their order. The text that they send back comes to our inbox, which is our main place for managing communications. When we reply to that email, it goes back to them as a text.

They feel like they’re texting someone but we're emailing them so it suits us and suits them. It's more personal. You can still write back, “Have a great day. I got your order. Thanks.” As opposed to going to a form or something where you don't get that interaction. That's been good. Without going into them all, I've also listed Deputy, Lightspeed, Dext, BigCommerce, GoCardless, Zapier, all the social media apps, Squarespace and Facebook Messenger.

When I onboarded one of my staff members, she is incredible with automations and everything else, and she was like, “Can you list out all the platforms?” I did and there were 23. I was like, “I have way too many.” You’ve got more. They're amazing. Thank you so much. Before we finish up, what are you most proud of from your journey in business so far?

I'm extremely proud of the reputation that our business has and that we've managed to maintain it and to stay relevant over fifteen years. It's a long time to beat in an industry. Over that time, we've continued to learn, change, adapt, rebrand visually, all these things to stay relevant along the way. We've maintained our standards, which is important.

I can't answer this without saying that I'm super proud of the people in our business. I can't do it all. We need amazing people in our business. We're passionate about trying to create careers and not jobs. In the last several years, being a barista used to be something that you did when you were getting through uni or something. Now, it's a career. Specialty coffee is an industry that's creating careers. It's been a drive for me to try and grow the business to continue to create opportunities for the great people that we have. Otherwise, they're going to get bored and they're going to move on. That's understandable.

We're forever trying to continue to push the boundaries and evolve. We've got a couple of people that have been with us for over ten years. In hospitality, it is huge. Generally speaking, we have good tenure in the business, which is great. It's validating for me that it's a good place to be and that we're still doing interesting stuff.

It's also easier in your business if you have people that have been there for a long time that know how things work. You don't have to explain everything. It's a hidden cost. Constantly training new people takes up a lot of time. On top of that, I'm proud of the scale of the business that we've been able to grow and the impact that has out there in terms of how many people are enjoying our coffee.

I wanted to do something that makes more difference. I'm not changing the world by giving people a cup of coffee. When you run some numbers, there are more than 50,000 people awake that are having a cup of our coffee somewhere. It’s amazing. I would bump into people and chat with them at a party or something. It’s not that I'm going anywhere at the moment. You bump into friends and meet people and they'll say, “That's the only coffee I have at home. I bought my machine at home. That's your business.” That's the best feeling. I love that. We're in so many people's kitchens.

That's amazing. Congratulations on all of those things. Before we finish up, I have another question and I'm putting you on the spot. I want you to be super honest. What do you think when someone comes into the café and asks for a decaf coffee? Do you even do decaf?

We do decaf. We roasted delicious single-origin Colombian decaf. We treat coffees as equal. There isn’t any place for being a snob about what a customer is ordering. Maybe half decaf, half-caf, soy, hot mocha latte. There's a point to which you’re becoming a meme. Generally, I'm not fussy if someone wants to have an extra hot, large cappuccino or they want to have a decaf or something.

If they're coming into our business to have a positive experience and to enjoy what they want to enjoy. They're part of our customer base. We think of the industry and our customer base like a pyramid. That little 20% at the top, which are the people that are going to come in and fuss over the processing method or the variety of all of the coffee beans, I love that. That's absolutely what we're about but not everyone's going to be like that.

You need to recognize that and your business needs to cater to everybody. We have a great following of people who love what we do and they love coming in and having great coffee. They don't want all of the fanfare and the fuss around what we put into it. We love telling that story with people that want to hear it but we're not going to isolate you if you don't want to hear it.

I drink decaf. I went off caffeine and alcohol years ago. Occasionally, I have a glass of wine. I've had maybe one proper coffee in four years.

You have to stop there, Fiona.

Lucky for us that this is the end. When you said that you sell decaf, I'm like, “Oh my goodness.” I can say that there have been cafés that I've gotten into and asked for decaf and they're like, “We don't do that. On your way.” I wanted to ask that while I had you. Where can people connect with you if they're reading this and they're either in Tasmania or outside of Tasmania? Do you ship the coffee everywhere?

We do. We have our webstore within Australia. Our website is www.Villino.com.au. We've got a whole range of coffees on there, our blends, single origins, light or roast for filter brewing, but a bit of brew gear as well on there. We do have shipping options for all around the country. We ship out a number of times a week. My email address is Richard@Villino.com.au and our social media handle is @VillinoCoffee, that's the same for Instagram and Facebook. You can reach out in any of those channels.

If you're in Tasmania, go and see you in person.

We've got a café in the city. I'm not there a lot. These days, I’m driving the business from behind the computer rather than a coffee machine. Certainly, if I'm not there, drop in and have a chat with the team and all of our staff. They are lovely and welcoming. I'm sure they can put you in touch.

That all sounds awesome. What is next for you? You're doing so much. What's coming up?

2022 is going to be a big year for us. We've secured a new site out in Mona, which is not far out of Hobart CBD. It's a great area. It’s up and coming and lots of microbreweries, distilleries, and lots of great stuff happening out there. The building we're in now is about 185 square meters and we're looking at going out to over 500 square meters out there.

We're relocating the whole production facility into a new space. We're going to have loads of room. We'll have a tech workshop and a cupping lab, which is the quality assessment process for tasting and scoring coffee. We'll have a nice little room for that. The exciting thing is we're going to put a little café in front of it.

It's always been a huge goal of mine to put what we do in front of people. At the moment, we're geographically moving more isolated, not on the beaten track. We're moving to an area where we can put what we do in front of people. It’s going to be a small specialty coffee focus café out there and it's like a cellar door to what we do. You'll be able to have a coffee and look through the glass and see the coffee roasting process happening. I'm excited about it. It's going to be great in many ways. It's going to put out there in front of people what we do and the scale of what we do.

A lot of people don't even realize sometimes that we roast or what it's all about. We'll be able to do tours and all sorts of stuff. Also, it's going to be great from a business point of view because it's going to connect our café team and our roasting team a little bit more. We'll be able to move stuff through the café site. That means that they're going to have that closer connection to the wholesale side of the business, which can be a challenge getting into geographical locations at the moment, having a little bit of a disconnect. There are many systems and tools you want to put in place. There’s no substitute for having that personal context. It’s a huge year. We can't wait. There’s a lot of work to do to get it happening. I'm excited about what lies in 2022.

Thank you so much. Good on you for taking the first step because here you are years later, giving so much helpful advice and inspiration to people listening and I'm sure to so many other people that you come into contact with all the time. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care.

Pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your awesome podcast and for keeping me inspired and driven. Much appreciated. I have to send you out some decaf coffee.

Thanks so much. Bye.

Bye.

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What an interesting story. I know that is Richard's life. It's not just a story. The leaps that he has taken, the way his business has grown and expanded, and all of this from simply thinking, “I don't like my job. I don't like where I'm at and I want to change things.” There were so many tips and insights from my conversation with Richard. I’m glad that I asked him to come on to the podcast. It's fascinating. I remember when he said something like, “I don't know if my story's that interesting,” in one of our conversations. Everybody has an incredible story to tell and this is absolute proof of that.

I took away so many things, so many notes, so many ideas from this and I know so many of you will as well. I would love to hear from you. I would love to know what resonated with you about this conversation that I had with Richard. It might be that you're in a corporate job and you're desperate to get out of it. Maybe you have gone into a similar business to Richard or a business that is completely different from the career that you had prior and you have found a renewed sense of purpose by reading this. I would love to know.

Please reach out to me, I'm @MyDailyBusinessCoach on Instagram. I'm sure that Richard and the team at Villino would love to know as well. You can find them on Instagram as well, @VillinoCoffee. I would love to know what you took away from this. There are so many things that stood out for me but two that come to mind are, I love the idea that Richard talked about a proactive first step. I love that he enrolled in an acting course. I love that he had so much analysis around, “What do I want to do?”

Sometimes, when people talk about analysis, Excel sheets, or other things, people can think, “That will take ages.” It won’t. It could be a piece of paper and a pen and putting down your thoughts. If you don't like doing that, it could be recording a voice note to yourself, listening back to it, and feeling it. How do you sound when you talk about this or that path? This is exactly what I did when I started my own business as well.

Much of what Richard was saying resonated with me because it was a huge leap for me as well. I spent six months pulling ideas together, contacting people, meeting for coffee, understanding what would I charge? What would the outcome be? What are the deliverables? Getting a contract in place. It’s all sorts of things.

I love this idea of him saying, “You're lucky,” or it's this or that. He also took the proactive first step. People often want to say, “That person got lucky,” or, “That person did that,” and we are not acknowledging all the hard work. How daunting must it be to go to an acting class? I would find that daunting myself. I love acting. I used to always get the main roles at high school or the roles with the most script in them. My parents made me give up drama for years 11 and 12.

I would love to do something like that but that takes a lot of courage to be like, “I'm going to put myself out. I'm going to go to an acting class. I'm going to do all the things that involve trying to act in a class in front of other people.” Of course, sometimes luck plays into it but I love the idea that you also need to make this productive first step. I often say to people that I’m all for manifestation. I'm all for believing the universe gives you things. I do genuinely believe that but I also believe that you need to make the first step and meet the universe halfway. I love that idea of that proactive first step.

If you are listening to this and you’re worried about something, I would urge you to take a leaf out of Richard’s book. What is a productive first step that you could take? What is something you can book in for? Who is somebody you can go to talk to? Where can you start? It doesn't need to be this jump from this side to this side with nothing to catch you. It's one step.

For me, that first productive first step was I got a notebook and I wrote down every single person who had ever mentioned that they had a business to me, had ever asked me for advice about marketing, brand, content, or visuals. I wrote them all down. I wrote down every person I'd seen speak in an event that I thought was interesting even if I couldn't remember the name.

I remember that I went to this Westpac networking event so I wrote, “Westpac MC Networking Event, the guy with the blue suit.” I went and researched that event, found that person's name, contacted him, and ended up having a glass of wine with him. He gave me so much advice. I consulted a part of his company, which is out of New York now. You have to take that first step.

I remember especially when I used to write a lot more for magazines, and I've written for Monocle, Refinery 29, and all these places I used to have a column on the page. There was one particular person I can think of who used to always say, “I wish I could be a writer. I wish I could get my work published.” She's a good writer. She’s funny, intelligent, and witty. I used to be like, “Contact them.” She'd be like, “It's scary.” I would give her examples of what I'd sent.

No one can make you do it but you and you need to take that first step. I saw this person that was in my life see me get published again and again. Not to boast but I took those steps. It wasn't luck. It wasn't all handed to me. Eventually, I encouraged her enough and she sent off her stuff and now she's been published in so many places.

What came up a lot in this is that Richard took chances and he backed himself and was like, “I'm going to do it. I'm going to go for it. What's the worst that can happen? I've invested in half a day to learn about coffee. Maybe I hate it. Maybe that's lost money. It’s the idea that I tried something. I tried it and I saw that it wasn't for me or it is for me.” That is awesome. The other thing that goes with that is the idea of leaping off. It's great to take a massive leap but look over the edge first. Look at what you're doing. Look at where you're going. For me, that was talking to people that were doing this. It was talking to people in different businesses.

It’s a great idea to ask someone, “How did you start?” He talked about the mentor, the coffee owner that he went to see. It’s understanding what the challenges would be. If you’re going to ask people, ask them what they hate about their job. Ask them what they hate about their business because you're going to then see the challenges from a real perspective as opposed to imagining what the challenges or hardships might be.

There are so many things. I can't limit it to two. The other thing I loved was he talked openly about financial struggles, living with his parents, the sacrifices that he had to make it happen. This is something that we don't talk about enough. We don't talk about, “In order for this to happen, we had to get a second job.” “In order for this to happen, we had to sell these.” “In order for this to happen, we had to live with my parents or my in-laws,” whatever it is.

Many people have done that. When we moved back from Australia, we lived with my mom and dad. We lived with my mom and dad before we went to London as well. We were trying to save as much as we could. There are people that are doing these things all the time and perhaps it's not spoken about enough. I love that Richard did talk about that.

If you have listen to this and would like to get in touch with Richard, he was kind enough to provide his email address, which is Richard@Villino.com.au. If you're interested in following them on Instagram, you can find it @VillinoCoffee. You can also find Ecru Coffee, the small, tiny little footprint coffee place that they've opened as well that he talked about, the hole-in-the-wall in Hobart. You can find that @EcruCoffee on Instagram. You can also find them at EcruCoffee.com.au.

If you're interested in buying some coffee from Villino and perhaps you're outside of Tasmania, you can find them at Villino.com.au. If you're in Tasmania or visiting Tasmania, please go and see them and I'm sure you can say hello and, “I heard all about your story on the My Daily Business Coach podcast.” I'm sure they would love that.

Thank you again, Richard, for reaching out on Instagram and for coming on to the podcast. It was such a wealth of information. If you’re reading this and you like Richard enjoy this podcast, feel free to reach out to me. Who knows, maybe I will be interviewing you next. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time.