"Are You Dutch, or Are You Successful?"

Steve Koopman runs a $2 million Dutch bakery and bistro in Edmonton with 31 team members. His business is genuinely seasonal: most of the revenue comes in November and December, driven by Christmas sales and imported goods from the Netherlands. January and July are brutal. In July, Edmonton empties out for holidays, school is out, and nobody needs sandwiches. The shelves go bare. Customers start asking if the business is closing.

Steve's instinct was to tighten spending during slow months — keep inventory low, conserve cash, survive until the next peak. But that created a new problem: empty shelves looked like a dying business, not a seasonal one. He came to the show asking how to reconcile the tension between spending money to make money and the reality of spending more than you're taking in during the off-season.

The Identity Trap

Head coach John Felkins pushed Steve on something deeper than cash flow. "Do you want to be Dutch, or do you want to be successful?" It sounds like a harsh question, but it gets at the real issue. Steve had been treating "Dutch" as a constraint — a fixed identity that limited what he could offer and when. If you're a Dutch bakery, you import from the Netherlands for Christmas. You don't make apple pie. You don't pivot for Canada Day barbecues in July. That's not who you are.