Another Cup | Trade Analyst Liesa Collins Ep. 7
Episode Summary
In this episode of Another Cup, Rob Stephen talks with Liesa Collins, Sales Analyst at Covoya Specialty Coffee. Liesa shares her unique journey from the art world to the coffee industry, highlighting her experiences and the skills she brings to her role. The discussion delves into the collaborative culture at Covoya, the importance of relationships in the coffee business, and the behind-the-scenes work that supports the industry.
Episode Notes
- Liesa transitioned from the art world to coffee.
- Her role involves a lot of data management and systems.
- Collaboration is key in the coffee industry.
- Understanding the journey of coffee from farm to cup is crucial.
- The coffee industry has a rich history and community.
- Being adaptable is essential in her role.
- The importance of relationships in business cannot be overstated.
- Learning from colleagues enhances the work experience.
- Problem-solving is a significant part of her job.
- Covoya fosters a culture of knowledge sharing.
MIKE FERGUSON: Welcome to Another Cup, part of The Exchange Coffee Podcasting Network presented by Covoya Specialty Coffee where coffee is always a collaborative voyage. Another Cup is devoted to conversations with suppliers, customers and all the relationships in between. In episode seven, Covoya's Managing Director Rob talks with Liesa, Trade Analyst at Covoya Specialty Coffee.
ROB STEPHEN: Welcome, Liesa.
LIESA COLLINS: Hello.
ROB: Hello. Here on my left, your right, is Liesa, who is our Trade Analyst at Covoya Specialty Coffee. And I am Rob. I also work here at Covoya Specialty Coffee. And we are here with Mike, our erstwhile producer, to get to know you a little bit.
LIESA: Yeah.
ROB: So welcome.
LIESA: Thanks. Happy to be here.
ROB: So you and I have known each other for a little while. And I think you have a really cool backstory. And so just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got here. Start as early as you want.
LIESA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, day one, born in the UK, me and my family moved here when I was four. Not here. We moved to Richmond, Virginia. So that is where I was raised and ended up in art school. And that was really cool. Downtown, Richmond and from art school landed at a nonprofit art center. So worked there in a couple of different jobs. I did register work. I worked in development. I ultimately landed as their office manager. So that was just a lot of everything, you know, wearing lots of different hats. And I became really good at systems and data management. Very much get that from my father. We're a very tech forward family. So yeah, so I was working there when I met Rob and that was really cool and fun to learn about what Rob did. And it always sounded very impressive and it was like a whole new world. So, I was feeling, you know, run down at the job there, been there for six years. Me and my husband were looking kind of for a new venture and Rob called me and said, hey, I got one. I got one for you. You want to come up? You want to move your whole life to probably, I know you just bought a house.
ROB: In Richmond.
LIESA: In Richmond. You know, you know all that. So yeah, we moved here for this gig and it's been incredible. It has been truly amazing.
ROB: I love your story. So when art school, what were you, what was your original intention?
LIESA: You know, I worked in an art gallery. I was in photography and film and it was less to be a working practicing artist and more to be in the networking arts management side of it. You know, being like the, the front facing gallery girl who also got to work on exhibitions was like so exciting. And so I knew that I wanted to do less of like, you know, becoming a magazine photographer or something along that or making films. I wanted to be networking and I wanted to work in that, you know, admin space. Yeah.
ROB: I mean, I don't know anywhere near as much about that world as you do, but it seems like there's a lot of managing a lot of different personalities and yet there's a numbers side to it. There's figuring out how to get stuff done on quickly and it's usually high stakes. And it sounds a like the job you have now.
LIESA: Yes, yes. It's, you know, wearing a lot of hats and having to learn how to wear those hats, you know, sitting in that cockpit, looking around, knowing all the buttons. Yeah, it's you have to be very adaptive and you have to also like care about it. You know, there's so much like heart and mission work and, you know, working in nonprofit and arts. And then also, as I've learned in coffee, like there's so much nice special stuff, to you know the admin. It's nice when it's has that duality.
ROB: So I mean if you know as our listeners would know from talking to somebody like Todd or Mark there's a lot of people that are sort of front-facing in our industry who are really good with coffee the product or you know the selling of it and the buying of it and the things like that but I think what a lot of people know or less familiar with is that there's a lot that happens behind the scenes with coffee, right? So, we talked with Melissa in our last episode who really is key to getting coffee from where it is to where it needs to be, which is a pretty key part of what we do. Right?
LIESA: Huge.
ROB: And so, with that in mind, and we'll sort go back and revisit sort of what your journey through coffee has been like, but what do you do? And sort of, what's the, what's the thing about how you go about your day to day that customers would be sort of either surprised or interested to know happens?
LIESA: Yeah, yeah. So started out trading assistant. So it was a lot of contract writing. It was a lot of customer response being available if our traders are ever doing other things. It's just kind of being on that front line ready to help out whenever. Sending releases through. I was a part of the Futures team pretty early on. That was something that was brand new. And so a lot of that is doing market fixes for our customers as well. Yeah, kind of just a, hey, help. And, you know, me being like, I can help. I got you.
ROB: No, I think you're being very modest. I describe your position as the glue, right? And so, there's a lot of things that if everything went according to plan would just work. One of the things that is occasionally frustrating but mostly challenging and rewarding about coffee is that things very rarely go to plan.
LIESA: Right.
ROB: And so you sort of need to have someone who has eyes on everything who can say, all right, this is gonna happen over here and be decisive and understand the ramifications of it and the financial impact and all that stuff. And so, I had the opportunity to watch you do that at your last role, because I knew you personally outside of work, and just watched you navigate those kinds of situations and said, yeah, you'd be great at this.
LIESA: Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sticky when it comes to being the glue, so it's good.
ROB: So what's it been like to get parachuted into the coffee industry and knowing nothing about it. Then, you know, I don't think you even drink coffee.
LIESA: No, I do drink coffee, but it's iced all year round. Yes. And there's always some oat milk in there. So, I love I have appreciation for the pure coffee and I have more now. But, yeah, jumping into this was wild. There's so much history and so much community and it's all across the world. I think my first week here, everyone was like, hey, well, everybody needs coffee. You know, we always say that. We're always like, it's something everybody drinks. Could be Joe, you could be Sue, like everyone's drinking coffee, you know? And so that's been really fun to be like taking it from, you know, we grew up drinking, you know, whatever kind of coffee in our house to now understanding how it gets from farm to roaster to customer is just incredible. There's so many steps. There's a lot of good people. It's, yeah, I mean, when I was in my first cupping, it was like, wait, you guys can talk about coffee like this? What do you mean, stone fruit? What do you mean this tastes like cotton candy? I just, have no, you know, it's up in my whole world.
ROB: All the coffee's coffee flavored.
LIESA: It's like this bean water has so much depth.
ROB: Yeah. I mean, it's been really interesting over the years as I worked in coffee is, you know, some people come in and they know, they know even more than they should. And right, and some people come in with absolutely fresh eyes and, know, really started at ground zero, but everyone progresses at their own pace. Right? And it's been really cool watching how quickly you've taken to it. There's a part of it that you and I kind of learned together, which is the, so not to say that I started from zero, but the futures part of it.
So, in this role is the first time I ever really had to manage a full-on futures book, you know, from beginning to end. And so a lot of the time that I was learning, you were learning it as well. There's been a few nights where we've been sitting here at six o'clock still going, wait, what?
LIESA: It's a crazy world. Like, you know, market trading period is wild and, you know, almost exclusive in the way that a lot of people understand it. But like commodities trading has like another, you know, like level to it. And so not only having to learn like market, you know, practices, but also seeing how it relates to us and it being so non-tangible, you know, it's like it is related to physical coffee, but you also have this, you know, this futures coffee. It's just crazy. It's, hard to wrap your mind around. And yeah, that was the biggest learning curve for me, at least. Not the math part of it. I always was good at math, but everything else.
ROB: So what's your favorite thing about working at Covoya? Not to put you on the spot.
LIESA: No, no, no. I love that question. It's very collaborative. I don't know if we've ever talked about it before, we have an open floor plan. And so it's almost inescapable to not have to hear everybody else's conversations and also, you know, jump into them when it's like, wait, I have something to add to that. It's like one of my favorite things is when we actually have a full office and everyone can just, you know, be rolling so fast getting problems fixed and coffee sold. Yeah, I like that. I care a lot about working for something cool. Like it sounds pretty surface level, but coming from the art world, it's like, it's just so cool. Like this business is so cool. And I like being a part of it for that reason. It's a cool flex. Yeah, I love it.
ROB: We have a full office today, which is, yeah, and having that warm fuzzy feeling. It feels so good. Yeah, it's so nice. Yeah. You know, the open plan where everyone hears everyone talking, it's by design.
LIESA: Right.
ROB: And it's because me and a few of the other folks here, I mean, in our early apprenticeship days, had the opportunity to sit on floors like that and hear, experience people talking and hear them go through a range of experiences from good days to bad days and solving problems and just sort of, you know, how to walk and how to talk and chew gum at the same time and all those. So to have that ability to sort of have that keep going and have someone like you come in and just get dropped in and be able to learn from everybody around you, I think it's a really cool thing.
LIESA: It's the best space to learn. Like, you know, isolated remote work, it's like, how am I supposed to, you know, there's just so much you pick up when you're here and you're in the cupping room and you're hearing conversations and yeah, it's almost necessary.
ROB: What's your sort of, you can phrase it any way you want, least favorite, most challenging part.
LIESA: I mean, I'm a problem fixer, so if I ever do come across a challenge, it's kind of like I'm a dog on a trail. So something, guess if I've ever gotten into a challenge that I couldn't solve, I couldn't fix, that becomes frustrating. I have a rock star mentality. So I tell you working on the AR side, sometimes that can be frustrating. It's like, you want coffee? You have to pay us. You know, you can pay us. We'll give you coffee.
ROB: You heard it here folks. Make Liesa's day better, will you?
LIESA: Just pay us.
ROB: Maybe we should pause for a drink.
LIESA: Okay.
ROB: What else should we talk about?
LIESA: I don't know. You've been on this show a bunch of times.
ROB: I have been on the show.
LIESA: Is there anything that you've never spoken about?
ROB: That I've never spoken of.
LIESA: That you want people to like, you know, we could talk here for probably three hours.
ROB: For me, that, you know, in the context of this conversation, you're like a super interesting case that like proves my theory of it of how this can work.
LIESA: Right.
ROB: So we're about to see it again with Hannah, who is a customer service person starting today, has never been in coffee before. But my theory of how to sort of create value in the coffee industry is that it starts with the person. It starts with their temperament and their raw skill set.
LIESA: Absolutely.
ROB: Coffee is a thing that can be trained like anything else. But you can't make somebody easy to talk to. And you can't make somebody very eager to solve problems or eager to jump in and handle things and have the right risk/reward scenario, And so you find that in people and you say, I think they'd be good in this as long as they're put in a place where they could learn. And so to watch you thrive here has been like, yeah, it's actually right.
LIESA: Yes.
ROB: You know, it's I think especially, you know, if for our listeners, for example, if you have a coffee company or you have a small roasting business or a medium roasting business or a large roasting business, if you are trying to create depth, right, it's this availability of knowledge and a culture of spreading it that sort of creates that depth. And that's something that we've all worked really hard at here and it's sort of like the only ticket, the only price of admission here is that you need to be willing to be a part of that.
LIESA: Is if you can fit in and not in like a way like that, you know, you understand what we're doing. If you are excited about working together, if our missions align, yeah, we can work with anybody.
ROB: Yeah. I also think that it creates like a feedback loop, right? Because you it's like you can work on stuff together, but whether you're a supplier in us or you're a roaster and working with us, or even with us working with other sister companies, it's like, if you have that sort of like, yeah, I'm totally in this and we're gonna solve the problem together, it creates that willingness on the other side and then stuff gets done, right? And that's, really enjoy that. And I think that that's where that the sort of glue aspect of what you do comes back into play, right? Because it's sort of like, even if we drop the ball, it's gonna get picked up. Right. And that's a part of trust.
LIESA: It is. And a lot of my job is like seeing trends in the data. And even just like having been here for two years, you start to get to know people better, which is just, you know, like if two friends were to sit down, it's like in the end, it's all data building. It's all data intake. And so with customer facing situations, you learn to get to know each other. You understand, so and so is like that. That's my favorite thing whenever you get all the traders in the same place is you guys have these incredible stories of so and so, or we're on a sales call and one of our sales reps wants to bring a certain company back. And three of you chime in and you've got advice or history there. I think that is such an incredible part of the industry. And I think here we do a really good job of not making it seem like a certain like a if you know you know club. I think you guys do a really good job of putting it into educational moments. And it's cool.
MIKE: You've been listening to Another Cup, part of The Exchange Coffee Podcasting Network presented by Covoya Specialty Coffee and produced by me, Mike Ferguson. Our theme music for this episode is “Finding the Solution” from Lemon Music Studio. You can email me with questions, thoughts, ideas, or your favorite Ted Lasso episode, wait for it. And as always, thanks for listening.
ROB: So, I understand that Ted Lasso is your favorite show. Did you want to talk about that? We have some time.
LIESA: Cut the track. Turn it off, Mike. I will never watch Ted Lasso. I no interest in it.
ROB: Yes, I thought you were an open book.
