Welcome to the Nightowl Book Club—where faith, leadership, and caffeine collide. Each review explores timeless principles from great books and how they shape the way we lead, serve, and create unforgettable experiences in the world of coffee catering.
Alright—No fluff. No filler. Just three sticky ideas from Made to Stick and how they’ve quietly shaped how we run Nightowl Coffee, lead teams, and design guest experiences that people actually remember.
This book answers one brutal question every business owner should ask: How do we get our ideas to make a difference?
1. The Curse of Knowledge Is Killing Your Guest Experience
One of the most dangerous ideas in this book is the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, you can’t remember what it’s like not to know it. That’s how businesses lose people. That's how brands become uninteresting and fade into oblivion (cough, cough—Radio Shack).
When a guest approached our coffee cart at our first event in 2017 and ordered a vanilla bean Frappuccino, instinct kicked in that day and we've been doing it the same every since.
I could’ve explain—at length—why that wasn’t possible. Menu limitations. Blenders. My first event. Coffee snob nonsense. Instead, this came out: “OMG yes—I’ve got something super similar coming right up.” Extra-sweet iced vanilla latte. Guest felt heard. Memory created. That’s the Curse of Knowledge defeated.
The takeaway:
- Where am I over-explaining instead of serving?
- Where am I protecting my expertise instead of protecting the guest experience?
- Where am I letting “how things work” interfere with how people feel?
At Nightowl, whether we’re running DFW coffee catering, espresso catering, or luxury mobile barista stations, the goal is never to inform—it’s to delight. The answer is never NO. There's always a way to frame every request to create a positive experience.
2. Why Simplicity Beats Perfection in Leadership
This section hit me hard because it’s something I’m actively growing in. The book introduces Commander’s Intent, a military leadership concept built around a brutal truth: the plan usually dies about ten minutes into the battle.
My original Nightowl business plan was simple—“make every girl in the world say, ‘OMG that’s the cutest coffee cart ever.’” I still don’t disagree and neither do these 12 stunning coffee cart wedding photos. But as Nightowl grew into a larger coffee cart operation with national brand activations, experiential marketing events, and high-stakes corporate coffee catering, structure became necessary.
The book captures this perfectly with the line, “Plans are useful in the sense that they are proof planning has taken place.” Commander’s Intent isn’t about controlling every move; it’s about clarity of what to do when the plans break down. When the intent is clear, teams don’t need constant direction—they can make good decisions on their own. I see our Event Leads Ellis, Pablo, Solomon, Erik, and Cameron make decisions every day on their own because they understand our intent as a company. Furthermore, when Shopbop called with a last-minute catering request—this challenge forced our sales, staffing, and ops teams to all make a decision together.
At Nightowl, our intent is simple: be contagiously energetic, competitively hospitable, and undeniably skillful. Create vivid, memorable experiences for every guest. Show the same care in small, invisible tasks as in the most visible ones. That mindset shows up everywhere—in how we hold doors, park vans, tape down cords, and load in equipment.
That’s why one of my favorite leadership quotes still holds true: “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” It sticks because it’s simple—and in leadership, simplicity is what scales.
3. You’re Not Serving Coffee. You’re Serving Morale.
The story I’ll never forget. Page 186. Dining in Iraq.
Floyd Lee, head chef at a U.S. Army base outside Baghdad, says, “I’m not just in charge of food service. I’m in charge of morale.” Lee recognized that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Serving food requires a ladle. Improving morale requires creativity, experimentation, and mastery.
When soldiers ate there, they forgot—just for a moment—where they were. And that’s Nightowl. Yes, we serve coffee. Yes, we run espresso machines, latte art, branded cups, and polished coffee carts.
But what we actually do—whether it’s coffee catering, experiential brand activations, hot chocolate bars, or high-end mobile barista stations—is help people forget they’re at work. We give them a pause. A smile. A moment where they feel served by someone who cares. That’s what sticks. And that's exactly Why IPSEN Keeps Rebooking the Same Coffee Cart (And the Same Barista).
Final Thought
If you remember nothing else from this book, remember this: Your job isn’t to deliver a product—it’s to make people feel something while delivering that product. Anyone can learn a recipe. Not everyone can create a moment.
Whether you’re running DFW coffee catering, working behind one of our Dallas-based coffee carts, or showing up to an experiential brand activation, ask yourself one simple question: Did I make this moment better for the person in front of me?
👉 If you want to bring that feeling to your next event, brand activation, or guest experience, start here:
https://www.nightowlcoffeecart.com/book
And if you’re hungry for more ideas that stick, keep digging through the blog archive:
https://www.nightowlcoffeecart.com/blog
