What does a coffee career look like when you’re a curious lifelong coffee geek? Meet Ramin N - sales director at Intelligentsia coffee - who shares a ton of insights, knowledge and experience from his 30 year journey in coffee. He has been a barista, cafe owner, trainer, technician, sales manager, sales director and a kind of general manager of a co-roasting business with a foray into retail. 

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation We wanted to better understand how sales works in a medium sized specialty roaster. This is valuable for anyone working in sales or who wants to work in sales to know what skills and experience are valuable in this role.  

We talked about the evolution of Intelligentsia coffee from the early days of specialty coffee in the US to today. We learned how they are adapting to new trends in the market and also how they are seeing these trends reflected in sales. 

The key take-away for us was that continuous curiosity and an entrepreneurial mindset - that takes ownership or has a strong sense of agency, will position you well in the industry for your career development and also for managing some of the more challenging times that life throws at us.