3A Blog — coffee

Recently, I’ve received a number of questions about our financial model. I’ve also seen some blog posts where people are taking a stab at what it might be. I think that’s absolutely wonderful that people are interested in the model behind Three Avocados. Based upon the interest, I wanted to take a few minutes to write a simple blog post describing the model. Simply put, in many ways, Three Avocados is no different than any other business…well, except that we give away 100% of our profits. The easiest way to think about our model is just that of a regular...

The hotel that I stayed at in Jinja, Uganda, had a business center. The business center consisted of 5 or so PC’s with internet access. For a small fee per minute, you could get online. A few of us would head down there each morning to check our email and send our families a quick note. The first day I was there, I headed down to use the computer. When I was done, I went to pay my fee. The woman running the business center told me my fee was 50 shillings.  That’s about two cents. Since it was our...

I need your help. I need to sell some coffee. A lot of coffee. Why? Two reasons. First, there are people in Africa that you’ve never met, that I’ve never met, that are in pain. They hurt. Physically and emotionally. There are orphans, widows, and babies being born with AIDS. There are children that can’t be fed. There are children getting sick and dying from drinking the very water they must drink in order to live. We can’t ignore them. We can’t pretend they don’t exist. At least I can’t. Second, my heart aches to help these people. To give...

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about why we went the non-profit route vs forming as a social enterprise. It would probably be  a little bit easier to be a for-profit organization and just donate 100% of our proceeds. For me though, there was two main reasons to form Three Avocados as a non-profit organization. The first reason is for credibility. By forming as a non-profit, our customers are ensured that no employee or board member may take a distribution from the organization. This doesn’t mean we’ll never pay employees. Quite the opposite. We’re going to have to have employees,...

I often get the question, “How did you end up selling coffee from Uganda?” Typically from people that have known me for a little while. But, sometimes from total strangers. So, here’s the story… I was going through a bit of a difficult point in my life. I had everything you could want: great wife, beautiful children, nice home, nice cars, etc. The problem is that I felt a gaping hole in my life. I ended up meeting with my pastor a few times, just chatting about life. He challenged me to raise $25,000 to build a school in Uganda....