Coffee People: Yoshawn Smith, Califia Farms & The Pour Up LA

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Guest: Yoshawn Smith
Company: The Pour Up LA & Califia Farms
Role: Coffee Educator & Barista-in-Residence • Based: Los Angeles, CA
Online: www.califiafarms.com • @thepourupla & @south.central.blade.club
What they drink: The Trio: A pourover or batch brew, shot of espresso, and a cappuccino.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PODCAST

Yoshawn is bringing quality coffee education to communities that may be underserved by the specialty coffee scene. Through The Pour Up LA, he is working to inspire people to be the change they want to see.
Finding people to work consistently (for the pay often offered in hospitality) is hard. There are some industry categories–like food and beverage–that have more jobs than humans, so being able to create new talent or mold passionate people is one way of building a local workforce while also uplifting those individuals by offering them new skills. It also raises the standard of expectation in a community. Those are values that Yoshawn is trying to put out into the world through his efforts at barista training and the SCBC skate programs.
Yoshawn brought up socializing while working early in the list of challenges he identified for baristas early in their journey. It’s a real skill to manage your workflow while also engaging with the humans. Socializing isn’t a requirement to be able to make a great cup of coffee, but it is the difference between selling a product and providing an experience. You don’t remember service that is accurate. You remember the feeling of connection that occurs when a barista, bartender, or waiter adds that dash of hospitality leaving you with a warm fuzzy emotional connection to both the business and that cup of coffee.
Job training in hospitality has become less about creating a foundation and more about throwing employees to the wolves. You either get it or you don’t. This is partly because there is a need for immediate help.

Even in states with low wages where tipped employees are often exploited at low hourly wages, hospitality hiring is often done in a state of need, not from a place of strengthening the team. It’s also because in some states—like here in California—there is a higher minimum wage, which makes the training period more expensive.

Although, I’d argue it is still worth it in most cases. I believe that even though employees are more likely to move to another job. It is a motivator to create better opportunities. Enabling employees to develop foundational skills benefits the business because some of those skills will lead to faster customer turnarounds and upselling. That creates more revenue and often leads to employee retention.

“You can either freak out and cry, or you can work through it, and get it done like a boss, you know, and be like, “Yup, I can do this now,” you know, but that only comes with training.”
• Yoshawn Smith

Is the Customer always right? Nah. Do you want to meet them where they are? Yeah, usually. We have a long-standing policy on this show that the best coffee is the coffee you like, with the caveat that you want to be drinking coffee that uplifts the entire coffee chain and not depressing the parts of the chain you can't always see—like the producers. So, if you like sugar, go for it. Do you want a whipped-cream doffed latte or single-origin pourover? You do you, but don't be afraid to go out of your comfort zone once in a while.
Yoshawn has gone down a long path of self-motivated coffee and service exploration. He's been asking and (now) answering the questions that coffee shops need to ask-and-answer if they want not just to survive but thrive. How can we do this better? How can we make it consistent? How can we disseminate this information to our team and our community?
By reaching out to those around him with more experience, he started creating a community of collaboration that led to improved coffee experiences and personal coffee experimentation.
Sometimes it can be valuable to pause and let your awareness of the next steps make themselves known to you. Entrepreneurs often get into a cycle of push, push, push. We try to force our way to the answers. Sitting back, as Yoshawn says, and letting the world guide you can also be a method of moving forward.
We all need outlets. We need to find that thing that gets us into a flowstate outside of work, be it skating or cycling or crafting or reading a book. Something that let's our entrepreneur brains relax and leave room for problem solving and perspective shifts in the background. If I'm not riding a bike or riding a bike isn't bringing me joy, I know something is off-kilter in my life. Being good, and being alright are two different things.
He was talking about skating when he said, "You will fall and it will not feel good," but I think that is true of so much more than skating. Accepting falls as part of the process allows us to learn how to get back up, making it easier and easier to push beyond where we though capable. Learning to get up is just as much a skill as being good enough to prevent the fall.