Conviction is More Than Motivation: Why I Sold a Coffee Business After 8 Years

I sold New Kings Coffee in 2024. Eight years of building a brand, finding a roaster with forty years of experience, learning what coffee actually tastes like, working out how to position a coffee bag business in a country that thought coffee bags were something from the 1970s. And then one day I sold it.

When people ask why, I usually say something practical. The market shifted. The numbers stopped working the way I wanted them to. I had a coaching practice that was growing and I couldn’t do both well. All of that is true.

But the real answer is simpler. I didn’t care enough about coffee.

I love coffee. I drink it every day. I can tell you the difference between a Brazilian and an Ethiopian bean now, which I absolutely could not when I started. But I was never a coffee connoisseur or a coffee guru. And running a coffee business for another ten years was going to require me to be one, in a way I just wasn’t.

That’s the difference between motivation and conviction. And it took me a long time to see it.

Motivation gets you started. Conviction keeps you going.

I could motivate myself to make cold sales calls for about an hour. I could motivate myself to do the books on a Sunday evening. I could motivate myself through the runs to the post office, the trade shows, the late-night packing sessions when an order came in unexpectedly large.

What I could not do, after eight years, was generate the deep, almost stubborn belief in coffee itself that you need when the business is hard. And businesses are hard. Mine was hard for the first three years because I’d skipped most of the foundations (build it and they will come, basically), and it was hard again later for completely different reasons.

The founders I’ve coached who push through the hard stretches don’t do it on motivation. They do it on conviction. Motivation is a feeling. It comes and goes, ebbs and flows. Some days you have it, some days you don’t, and on the days you don’t, you can talk yourself out of almost anything.

Conviction is something deeper. It’s not “I feel like doing this today.” It’s “this matters enough that I’m doing it anyway.”

Where conviction actually comes from

The mistake people make with conviction is treating it as something you either have or you don’t. As if it arrives fully formed and never wavers.

In my experience, it doesn’t work like that. Conviction is built from a few specific things, and you can usually tell whether you’ve got it by asking yourself a few honest questions.

The first is whether you care about the problem you’re solving more than the solution you’ve built. I cared about the problem of bad coffee at events more than I cared about coffee bags as a category. When the format wasn’t quite landing, I had nothing deeper to fall back on.

The second is whether you’d still be doing it if it stayed hard for ten years. Not “if it eventually works.” If it stays hard. Most people answer that question honestly the first time. Then they bury the answer.

The third is whether the work itself energises you, or whether you only enjoy the bits where it’s going well. If the daily reality of the work drains you when results are flat, you’re running on motivation. Motivation will not get you through a flat year, never mind several.

Conviction is one of four

In coaching, I use a framework called the Success Framework. It has four components - Context, Clarity, Capability and Conviction - and the reason I added conviction as the fourth (it used to be three) is that I kept seeing founders with all the other ingredients in place, who still couldn’t get themselves to act on what they knew they should do.

Context is the environment you’re operating in. Clarity is knowing where you’re going. Capability is having the skills, tools and accountability to actually do the work. Conviction is the underlying belief that gets you up on a wet Tuesday in January when nothing is working and the numbers are flat.

Three out of four is not enough. I had context, clarity and capability towards the end at New Kings Coffee. What I didn’t have was the conviction to put another decade into it.

What this means if you’re trying to decide

If you’re early in a business and trying to work out whether you’ve got what it takes, “motivation” is the wrong question. Almost everyone has motivation in month two. The question is whether you’ve got conviction in month thirty-six.

If you’re further in and the business is starting to feel like a slog, the question isn’t whether you should push harder. It’s whether you’ve got the conviction underneath the motivation, or whether you’re trying to power through on willpower alone (which has a shelf life).

For me, selling the coffee business wasn’t a failure of motivation. I had plenty of that. It was an honest acknowledgement that the conviction wasn’t there for the next chapter, and that I had it in spades for something else.

That something else is helping founders work out the same things for themselves, earlier than I did. Which I clearly do have conviction about, because I’d happily do this for another twenty years and still feel like I was just getting started.

Where to go from here

If you’re not sure whether what you’re feeling is motivation, conviction, or the absence of either, my free Success Framework diagnostic gives you a clear read in five minutes. It covers all four pillars - context, clarity, capability and conviction - and tells you which one is actually the constraint right now.

If you want to talk it through with someone who has been on both sides of the question, that is what my one-to-one coaching is for.