Not Every Cup of Coffee Needs an ROI

I've had a lot of coffee this year.

Like...a LOT of coffee.

Coffee with prospective clients. Coffee with current clients. Coffee with people I wanted to learn from. Coffee with people who wanted to learn more about me. Coffee with old friends, new connections, fellow business owners, community leaders, referral partners, and plenty of people where neither of us had any idea what might come from sitting down together.

Some of those coffees have directly led to business.

Others have led to proposals, referrals, introductions, speaking opportunities, strategic partnerships, or another person I now know I can call when someone in my network needs what they do. Some haven't led to anything professionally measurable at all. I wouldn't consider those a waste of time either.

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how easily we can turn relationship-building into another metric:

How many meetings did you have?

How many leads did they generate?

How many proposals came from them?

What was the conversion rate?

What's the ROI on all that coffee?

Those are fair questions when we're talking about a business development strategy. Activity for the sake of activity isn't a strategy, and a calendar full of coffee meetings doesn't automatically mean you have a healthy pipeline.

But I also don't think every conversation needs to justify its existence with a business outcome.

Some of the most valuable coffees I've had this year have simply made my network bigger, deeper, and more useful.

I've learned about businesses I didn't know existed. I've better understood industries I don't work in. I've met people I now happily refer business to. I've gotten advice. I've given advice. I've been challenged on ideas. I've had conversations that completely changed the direction of something I was working on.

And sometimes I've just caught up with someone I genuinely enjoy.

There's value in that too!

There's another piece of this that I think gets overlooked: visibility.

I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in a coffee shop meeting with one person and seen someone else I know. They stop by the table. We say hello. One of us says, "We need to get coffee!" and suddenly there's another conversation on the calendar.

The same thing happens at networking events. A five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee or a cocktail, turns into a meeting two weeks later. That meeting leads to an introduction. The introduction leads to another relationship.

Can I draw a perfectly straight line from that first cup of coffee to revenue?

Probably not. That's also not how relationships work.

Business development rarely happens in perfectly trackable little boxes. There's an accumulation of conversations, visibility, familiarity, introductions, follow-up, and simply being present enough that people remember you.

But, and this is where I think the distinction matters, not every coffee meeting is business development.

Some are personal. Some are an opportunity to learn from someone I respect or to better understand a business, industry, or perspective I haven't been exposed to before. Others are simply a chance to catch up with someone I enjoy, compare notes on what we're working through, and stay connected to the people in my community.

Then, every once in a while, six months later, something comes from a conversation neither of us entered expecting anything from.

Maybe that's why I'm hesitant to evaluate every coffee meeting based on what it "produced."

I would rather leave most of them asking:

"How can I support you? Who can I introduce you to?
What can I do for you?"

than:

"What did I get out of this?"

There still needs to be intentionality. If I'm spending 20 hours a week having coffee and none of those conversations are connected to the goals of my business, eventually we have a caffeine problem, not a business development strategy. 😂

But I don't want to swing so far toward productivity that every relationship becomes transactional either.

Because after a year consuming more cups of coffee than I'd probably like to count, I can say this pretty confidently:

Not every coffee meeting I've had was business development.

Not every coffee meeting resulted in business.

But almost every single one added something: to my network, my knowledge, my community, my business, or simply to me.

Most importantly… not everything valuable needs an immediate ROI.

Built by Relationships. Driven by Growth.