A passion for coffee and business

After work today, I head to a restaurant with an office mate who is from Oman. He is a kind of weekend husband as he travels back and forth from KL to Miri – Miri for weekdays and KL for weekends. I thought that sounds great if you could tolerate the waiting at the airport, the two and a half hour flight across the South China Sea and sleeping alone for five nights a week. Logistically, you get the best of both worlds – avoid traffic jams during weekdays and head off to shopping haven on weekends.

We talked about stresses at work, as we always do to de-stress. It’s ironic but it seems to work. It is our way of letting out steam after hours of working in an office environment that is becoming more like a pressure cooker than a place to get things done. We chatted on anything from office politics to real world politics. 

After dinner we moved to a coffee shop next door. The interior of the shop is exquisitely designed. The walls are decorated with soft wall paper adorned with bricks pattern. It feels like you are in the basement of a house somewhere in a temperate country. It feels very cosy inside the air conditioned room shielded from the humid air and traffic noise outside. We sipped our caramel macchiato at one corner of the shop picking up again on our unfinished story about office politics from the restaurant where we just finished eating dinner.  Not too long after we settled in, young hipsters in their shorts and sandals began trickling in. Soon, all the tables were occupied. I looked around and noticed that we were probably the only senior patrons in the house. I couldn’t find anybody else with thin grey hair around.

Halfway into the conversation, a young man in his early 30s approached us. He asked how we were enjoying our drinks. It turns out he is the owner of the recently opened coffee shop. My Omani friend asks him about his venture into the business of boutique coffee shops. He explains that he is an avid coffee drinker and I could see that opening a coffee shop is probably a natural progression of following his passion for coffee. The shop is actually his second branch after opening a small coffee shop in the popular shopping mall in town two years back. It is proving to be a good venture although he admits that it’s not without risks. He talks about expanding his business to another city or even to a neighbour country with much bigger population due to the limited customer base in this small city of 400 thousand people. He needs to go out to capture a bigger market. He plans to expand and diversify his coffee business into supplying coffee making machines to local hotels, providing barrista training and other ventures related to coffee.  My Omani friend, who had been talking almost non-stop from the time we sat down, also showed his interest in opening a business venture with his new found coffee loving mate.

He revealed that before he became an expatriate here in Malaysia, he also ventured into restaurant business for a while in his home country. He saw opportunities in bringing home boutique coffee shops business like this one into Oman as his countrymen also love coffee very much. Most of the time, I just sat there listening to their conversation, chipping in only at random moments. It’s a very interesting to witness one chance meeting over a macchiato would bring people together that way and perhaps even end up in a business venture. We walked out of the shop feeling much more de-stressed. May be I should come here more often. Here I could see how a young and enterprising man has turned his passion for coffee into a thriving business.  This is what the country needs for its future.