How things decay

story of chai

I love chai ☕️

I often go for tea at a shop next to the office. It opened around 10 months back. One of the things that I really liked about this place was that the quality of tea was really good and most importantly the staff was super friendly.

We had a friendly connection - I knew the staff by their names and they actually knew my taste.

We reached a point where I didn’t have to tell them my preferences (black coffee in the morning, chai otherwise).

And then came the S word - scalability.

The tea business was so good that these guys started expanding the tea shop to sandwich/juice as well. They got an adjacent shop and moved the sandwich/juice over there.

The main guy who was handling the tea shop moved on to the sandwich/juice shop as it needed that 0-1 rigour.

The tea shop however got an employee and that’s where things get interesting.

This dude is always overworked, cribs like he is underpaid, and always super frustrated. He’s making really bad quality tea and has no relationship with any of his customers. People tried giving the feedback to them (the place is a hit in this area as most startup teams were hooked on to his chai), but no real improvement happened.

And guess what?

It’s all coming down - the tea shop has almost closed. And even the sandwich shop is not doing that great.

Now, nobody wants to give feedback to them.

Sounds, familiar? I believe this is what happens to most companies who build a great product + customer relationship and then fail to scale it.

Call it lack of systems thinking, but I believe it’s way too difficult to implement when things are going great.

What do you think the tea shop guy should have done differently (assuming limited resources)?