Open a coffee shop after graduating from college to make the coffee taste Chinese.

On August 24, after a day of rain, Kunming finally cleared up. This may bode well for Qian Changyun. On this day, their cereal coffee team was officially established, and a business plan that had been pregnant for two years finally became a reality. Putting down his briefcase, Qian Changyun formally sat at his desk for the first time. Soft capsule coffee, concept coffee and high-quality Yunnan raw beans are their main products at present, and more ideas are brewing in the future.

Selling coffee, in the entrepreneurial field, Qian Changyun's idea is not creative; 20,000 yuan, Qian Changyun their start-up capital is also negligible, but they "want to make Yunnan people's own coffee, Yunnan coffee all over the world." Ambition is perhaps the hardest capital of Qian Changyun in the entrepreneurial army.

If you don't have to be a teacher all your life, you have to be a strong man

"living the life of the rich" is the original intention of most people to start a business. Qian Changyun started his business just to make himself more "strong", not only physically, but also mentally.

In July 2007, Qian Changyun graduated from Yunnan normal University and returned to his hometown Pu'er County as a high school Chinese teacher. This most glorious career in the sun not only brings him stability, but also brings him more confusion, which always makes him feel bound, and he is not willing to be an ordinary teacher all his life. Finally, at the end of the summer vacation in 2008, he resigned.

First, he was idle at home for more than two months. His family in the countryside could not understand his move of "losing his iron job bowl and becoming a jobless man", and his mother even completely lost touch with him financially.

Parents are honest farmers, Qian Changyun's childhood is more of the experience of being bullied. Since childhood, his trachea has not been very good and his body is weak. One summer afternoon, when he was in the second and third grade, he and his sister came to the river outside the village to fish with old-fashioned cans. Most of the people in the river are the kind of small black fish with long thumbs of adults. Suddenly they caught a small fish with a red tail. In the sun, the little red fish is crystal clear. Brother and sister are happy around this rare little fish. At this time, several naughty children in the village approached them with a "head". The child king snatched the little red fish from his hand, and he was pressed to the ground by the other side as he tried to resist, and his tearful sister tore each other feebly with her little hands.

"you must be a strong man!" "there is no hope for the strength of the body, only the heart." This ambition has been buried in his heart since childhood, but it is obviously impossible to be a teacher.

Qian Changyun tried the water for the first time to start a business, acting as an agent for snacks. But I can't get support from my family. After that, he came to Kunming with a few thousand yuan left after the failure of his first business.

Awkward: go to the bank to withdraw only 20 yuan to pay the fine

After arriving in Kunming, Qian Changyun could not find a job for a long time and ran out of money, so he only had to "rub" with his friends. When a friend goes to bed, he gets out of bed. When he eats rice noodles every day, his friend buys him a bottle of "Lao Gan Ma" meat sauce and picks up a chopstick in the rice noodles every time. When he is really sad, he walks up and down the road alone. This kind of life lasted two or three months.

"when I was the poorest, I had only two or three dollars on me." Qian Changyun remembers that one night, he received good news from a company in Kunming interviewing a salesman. The next day, when he went to the interview, he took his friend on his second-hand bike bought for 30 yuan and was stopped by a traffic policeman near Dongfeng Square. The traffic police impounded his car and asked him to pay a fine of 10 yuan. He had only two or three yuan on him, and seeing that the interview time was coming, he had to go to the nearby Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to withdraw money and pay the fine, while his passbook had only 20 yuan left.

"it was so humiliating that when I ran to the counter to withdraw my money, I dared not look up, or even look at the face of the counter staff." Qian Changyun said. This little episode, which made him feel ashamed, strengthened his determination to pursue a career.

Not long after working in this company, Qian Changyun resigned and went to Hainan Publishing House to work as an editor. When his life was stable again, he began to design his own business blueprint for more than a year, and he decided to start a business again.

The coffee in the frying pan is "too bitter"

Last year, Qian Changyun hit it off with a university classmate and a friend and decided to start a coffee business. Three people scraped together 20,000 yuan to buy simple office supplies such as computers and fax machines.

It is no accident to tie the knot to coffee. In the 1990s, Qian Changyun's hometown, Pu'er, began to grow coffee sporadically. When he was in junior high school, he first touched ripe coffee beans in his fields. "the coffee trees are beautiful, and the mature coffee beans are round, wrapped in a thick crimson, and shine in the sun." These shiny small particles, in Qian Changyun's memory, never fade like gold.

"the first time I drank coffee, I was still in middle school." Qian Changyun remembers that it was early autumn and the season for harvesting coffee beans. Watching the coffee beans in the field becoming more and more red, Qian Changyun's family was full of curiosity about these beans. How do you drink this? What's that smell? Father decided to solve everyone's doubts and make his own coffee. My father picked coffee beans from the field and spent the whole afternoon at home shelling the coffee beans and then crushing them with the family's rice mill, because the rice mill could not completely grind the coffee beans into powder, and the coffee particles with three pieces and two pieces were mixed with the coffee powder. more like the rough "flour" used for pancakes than a drink to drink. Then his father went door to door to inform his uncles, cousins and other relatives. Everyone got together like the New year to discuss what a delicious drink it might be. Father poured coffee powder into the iron pot of cooking at home and began to stir constantly, and the smell of coffee immediately filled the whole room. Holding a rice bowl, Qian Changyun looked forward to the changes in the pot. Father scooped a large bowl of coffee for everyone, and regardless of burning their mouths, everyone eagerly began to taste it. "it's so bitter that no one says it tastes good." After the first sip of coffee, everyone frowned. The bitter taste of coffee completely broke Qian Changyun's beautiful imagination of coffee.

"at that time, we smiled and said that coffee was not for us, but for others." In retrospect, Qian Changyun realized that when he was a child, he knew the same about coffee as many people do now: it is an imported product, whether it is drinking or the cultural connotation it contains, it belongs to "someone else." this does not belong to the Chinese.

Since then, Qian Changyun has not had the habit of drinking coffee for a long time and only occasionally drinks a cup of Nestle when staying up late. "it is only in the last two or three years that I began to drink coffee purposefully when I wanted to start a coffee business."

Make coffee with "Chinese flavor"

After a year of market research, Qian Changyun now has a comprehensive understanding of the culture and market of coffee and can be called an "expert" of coffee. "Coffee is one of the three largest drinks in the world. The world drinks 7.4 billion cups of coffee a year, or an average of 7.4 billion cups per person per year." Qian Changyun realized that coffee is a vast market.

Qian Changyun and his team have a unique analysis of the coffee market. They believe that today's coffee operators, whether they are coffee shops or three-in-one coffee producers, generally have two ideological tendencies: one is to regard coffee as a kind of elegant culture of spring and snow, and to try to restore its authentic lineage in all kinds of ways, such as the coffee shop is basically the same Italy, Colombia, cappuccino. It just depends on whose environment is like and what is the difference in taste. Instant three-in-one coffee as a derivative of pure coffee, although it is another kind of coffee, it also inherits the taste and concept of pure coffee, which in essence is nothing more than a copy of pure coffee; the other completely ignores the long-term and healthy development of the coffee industry. under the banner of coffee, fish eyes mix pearls, inferior quality to deceive consumers to obtain exorbitant profits.

"Coffee has not been in China for a long time. We believe that if coffee is to develop in China, it must first 'take root' in the land of China." Thinking of his childhood experience of drinking coffee, Qian Changyun explained with a smile that coffee should be combined with the way of life and culture that Chinese people have developed for thousands of years, and coffee should be used to develop coffee, and coffee should be turned into a part of our life and culture like tea. Even coffee going out of China should be marked with obvious Chinese characteristics and "marked with Chinese culture."

Qian Changyun and his companions began to choose products in the cluttered coffee market. Out of the ordinary, they know that it will be extremely difficult to start a business by producing or selling ordinary coffee powder. Only by choosing special products and injecting cultural connotations can we get out of raising cereal coffee. "soft capsule coffee, concept coffee, fine Yunnan raw beans and so on are our main products at present." Qian Changyun said that soft capsule coffee allows anyone who does not understand coffee to make a cup of coffee with a professional standard at will. The capsule coffee they operate is the first capsule coffee produced in China, with relatively low cost and high quality. After negotiation with manufacturers, they will serve as their exclusive online agents. To manage the concept coffee, they will choose the characteristic coffee beans at home and abroad, and refine the concept according to the beautiful experience and feeling they cause to people's body and mind. for example, a coffee is boiled in a siphon pot and drunk for half a minute, it tastes sweet and refreshing, as if boating in a tranquil lake to enjoy the mild autumn sunshine, they can produce a "Mirror Lake Autumn Sun-Heart Coffee". Focusing on coffee from Baoshan, Pu'er, Honghe and other places, the grain team will also process the coffee beans produced in these places and sell small batches of high-priced boutique coffee.

Qian Changyun seems to see the future. In the office, at home, and in the coffee shop, people drink cups of coffee, all with the sign of raising grain coffee, which is a new territory of the coffee world.

Entrepreneurial experience

As a college graduate, as a civil servant? Into a public institution? There is often a contradiction between stability and opportunity, and the key is to follow your heart and do what you like. Everything is in the early stage of starting a business, and we still need to make continuous efforts to ease the pressure. When we ease the pressure, we should look at Laozi's ancient prose and learn to be a Confucian businessman from the essence of Chinese culture.