Client Stories — Better Coffee
From “not going to survive” to 57% growth
And building cash reserves. In one year.
Two founders. A business that depended on them for everything. Here’s how Better Coffee found a way forward with Levership, one step at a time.
FIELD SERVICE • OTTAWA + MONTREAL • SEPT 2025 → SEPT 2026
THE STARTING POINT
“It Felt Like Being at War.”
— Better Coffee co-founders
Better Coffee sells commercial coffee equipment, services it and trains staff to use it across Ottawa and Montreal.
Co-founders Otto Hall and Josiah Beaton did everything. The schedule lived in their heads. Cash was maxed out. They were chasing debt, with “no idea where our next sale or paycheck was coming from.”
Josiah had read 25 business books that year. “We’re not lacking for concepts.” What they lacked was someone to do the work with them.
They joined Levership in September 2025. Here’s the path they took.
How they did it
A better business.
One step at a time.
Follow the path. Open a trail marker.
See the work behind the results.
Step 01 / Find your north
Set your direction (and decide what you’ll be bad at)
Go inside this step
Inside this step
What Levership did
In a two-day planning session at the start of the program, Levership had them define their purpose and write where the business should be in 10 years and in 1 year.
Then Levership took them through two exercises from the customer’s side:
- Jobs to be Done: Clayton Christensen’s exercise for seeing their offer from the customer’s side, by naming the job customers hire them to do. Most leaders are great at naming the widget or service they sell, not the problem they solve with it.
- The Attribute Map: Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei’s exercise for choosing where to excel. List what customers care about—price, speed, quality, convenience—then pick the few you’ll be great at and the ones you’ll deliberately be average at. Her rule: “be bad in the service of good.” Trying to be great at everything spreads your money and effort too thin to win at anything.
What changed
They stopped building “a really nice job” for two people and started building a framework technicians across Canada could use.
They also stopped competing on price:
“We aren’t the cheapest. We’re not going to try and ever be the cheapest.”
Knowing they were building for a national scale changed how they built everything, down to the software: they picked a scheduling tool that could grow with the 10-year plan, so they wouldn’t have to redo the work a year later.
It changed their own roles too. Once they’d decided what the business would be bad at, they also decided what work they personally shouldn’t fill their days with, like back-to-back service calls.
Step 02 / Choose the route
Look from the outside in, then pick three priorities
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Inside this step
What Levership did
Levership walked them through an outside-in review: what’s changing in their market, with customers and with competitors, before looking at the business itself.
That became a 90-day plan with a hard limit: one big project at a time, plus a handful of quick fixes.
Most plans fail during follow-through, so the plan stays small enough to finish.
What changed
Q1 came down to three priorities:
- Scheduling
- The equipment sales pipeline
- The books
Everything else waited. They also mapped the whole workflow, from booking to payments to parts, instead of fixing each piece on its own.
Step 03 / Priority 1: Scheduling
Find the one step slowing everything down, then add the tool
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Inside this step
What Levership did
Levership applied two of its core principles:
- Most problems come from how the work is set up, not from the people doing it.
- You fix the workflow before you buy the tool.
Once scheduling showed up as the step slowing everything down, Zack, Levership’s automation specialist, shortlisted field-service software, picked FieldPulse—an 85–90% fit, built to scale—set it up and connected it to Claude.
When the first version got too complex, he helped them strip it back to “just getting people in a calendar.”
What changed
Booking a next job for every client took two full days last winter.
“I ran a version of that yesterday that took 14 minutes.”
Step 04 / Priority 2: Sales
Find which jobs make you money, then price on value
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Inside this step
What Levership did
In the pricing and sales sessions, Levership had them look at what their prices were based on, learn good-better-best pricing—three options at three price points—and track gross margin per week and per job to see which work actually pays.
Then Levership had them map their sales process step by step. The slowest step was the proposal: the longest cycle time, the most owner attention, and the one step where a deal could go quiet, because nothing tracked a proposal once it went out.
What changed
Gross margin per job showed which jobs were leaking money and costing more to service than they brought in. As Otto put it, “things that you think are making you a lot of money are actually losing you a lot.” Three changes followed:
- Pricing per job, on value. They moved off hourly billing and added preventative maintenance contracts as recurring work.
- A tighter client mix. No new residential clients, and existing home clients moved to drop-off service instead of on-site visits.
- Proposals in minutes. With proposals now similar enough to repeat, Josiah built a tool in Claude that produces good, better and best options with a matching contract and email draft in about five minutes. It used to take days.
Their best month hit $200,000 in sales.
Step 05 / Priority 3: The books
Get the books current, and track the numbers that matter
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Inside this step
What Levership did
Levership helped them build a scorecard, based on Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s Balanced Scorecard: a short list of numbers checked every week and every month, so a cash problem shows up while there’s still time to fix it.
What changed
They now build cash reserves every month instead of chasing debt.
Step 06 / Keep moving
Follow through every month
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Inside this step
What Levership did
Levership ran a monthly check-in with them: start with wins, check how many of last month’s commitments got done, review the numbers and the 90-day plan, and ask one question of every action: what is it worth in dollars?
What changed
The plan got done.
“It’s 10% of making a plan and 90% of getting the plan actually sorted out, and then on track, and then with follow-up.”
— Josiah Beaton
Opening with highlights also taught them to count wins: “Counting those wins is just as important as looking at the threats.”