Beverage Development can’t be that hard can it? Can it?!
and the horse you rode in on!
Aagh! Stuff you,
So… you found ‘The Thing’, and now you’re questioning your life’s decisions. And your sanity.
Misery loves company, so they say, so let me be the first to tell you that you’re not alone. You found ‘The Thing’. Everything was going kinda OK until you had to deal with ‘The Thing’. Then you got stumped. Then, because of that, you asked a question and you found out that ‘The Thing’ was the tip of an iceberg. Now you don’t know…well perhaps you feel like you don’t know anything any more.
Should I continue? But you’ve sunk too much time and energy…and it’s so close, I can see it, yet it’s so far! But I have no idea where to go now?! I could waste everything, lose everything?! I don’t even know what I should do next because it got so darned complicated and everyone has a different opinion!
Yeah. That’s the way it goes. Well, we have a way of walking through it. We call it ‘The Journey’. Here’s a simplified version of the practical ‘what’ stages that might help you figure some stuff out. And if you get stuck… holler.
The Ideal World
In an ideal world, if you knew what you’d have to know, in hindsight…
Whatever you’d like to call it, this is the way that it should go…
You’d go through this step by step, starting from the beginning and work your way through.
Clear, transparent, you can see each step ahead of you. You can plan, organise, optimise and accelerate
The Real World
Yeah, unless you’ve been there, done that, paid through the nose and all you got was a lousy T-Shirt, a hole in your wallet and have started looking at mugs that say ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps’ unironically then you’ll never know that there’s a way to do it that makes more sense,
So what do you do at that point?
Well, you suck it up, breathe deeply, and paste a fake smile on your face whilst you go back over old ground, pretending that ‘you’re fine’.
You bounce between the stages, going over old ground, finding new ground, then going back to fill in the gaps so that you have the right picture to overlay on your vision.
At some point in the process though…. you get an ‘A-Ha!’ moment. (Take on me…) . . . then it starts to click.
You realise that you don’t know what you don’t know, and that that’s actually OK. Your pride doesn’t have to take the hit when you realise the breadth and depth and technical knowledge that goes in to knowing ‘all the things’, because you shouldn’t know ‘all the things’ because most of them don’t apply to you - the hard part is knowing which ones do.
That’s where we come in.