Tea Business Consulting
Strategic consulting for specialty tea entrepreneurs and small businesses, grounded in years of real experience sourcing, building, and teaching Taiwanese tea.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You know your product. You care deeply about quality, origin, and the stories behind every tea you source or sell. But somewhere between the passion that got you started and the business you're trying to build, things get complicated.
Maybe you're a café owner who added a specialty tea program and realized your team can't explain what makes it worth to try it. Maybe you're a Taiwanese producer whose teas win competitions domestically but haven't found their footing internationally. Maybe you're an entrepreneur who launched a tea brand with real conviction and now faces pricing, positioning, and distribution questions you didn't expect.
Or maybe your business is doing fine — but you know it could be doing more, and you're not sure where the ceiling actually is.
Whatever the situation, you don't need generic business advice. You need someone who has lived inside this industry — who knows the farms, the competitions, the certifications, and the markets — and who can also think with you strategically about where your business goes next.
That's what this is.
Why Work with José
I'm José Ellena, co-founder of Yang Tea Taiwan. Over the years, with my wife we've built a tea business from the ground up — sourcing directly from really special tea producers across Taiwan, navigating international wholesale, developing education programs, and joining the tea education industry as a Seed Teacher for Taiwan's official Tea and Beverage Research Station (TBRS), part of the Ministry of Agriculture of Taiwan.
Before tea, I spent several years as a data analyst for major companies in Chile, and now I'm at the finish line of getting my iMBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I bring both backgrounds to every client engagement — the industry depth that only comes from doing this work, and the analytical rigor to turn what I find into a strategy you can actually execute.
I work with specialty tea businesses, entrepreneurs, and small producers around the world. My clients come from Latin and North America, Europe, and across Asia. Many of them are building something real and ambitious — they just need a thinking partner who understands the territory they're operating in.
"I don't consult from the outside looking in. I run a tea business. I know what it takes."
Where I can help
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a pre-packaged service. But over years of working in this industry, certain challenges come up again and again. These are the areas where I bring the deepest expertise — and where a well-structured strategy can make a measurable difference.
In a market flooded with "premium" claims, the businesses that stand out know exactly who they're for and why they matter to that person. I help you identify your real position, close the gap between how you see your brand and how the market actually experiences it, and build something that earns its premium.
Whether you're building from scratch or restructuring what already exists — defining your value proposition, your revenue streams, your cost logic, and your growth path in a way that holds together under real-world pressure. Not a template. A model built around your specific situation
Entering a new country or channel — particularly moving between Taiwan, Latin America, and Western markets — requires more than translating your existing approach. I help you understand the real competitive landscape, map the right entry strategy, and avoid the expensive mistakes that come from assuming what worked at home will work abroad.
Most small tea businesses run on intuition. That works until it doesn't. I bring a data analyst's eye to understanding what your numbers are actually telling you — margins, channel performance, inventory patterns, customer concentration — and translate that into decisions you can make with confidence.
Building a tea education program with real credibility requires more than good content. As a TBRS Seed Teacher, I can help you design programs, develop assessment frameworks, and connect your curriculum to the most respected certification structure in the Taiwanese specialty tea world. Even working together to certify your students!
When revenue has plateaued and you're not sure why, or when your business has outgrown how it was originally structured, I help you diagnose what's actually happening and identify the right path forward. This is often less about doing more and more about doing fewer things better.
How it works
I don't offer off-the-shelf programs. I start every engagement with a structured conversation — a business diagnostic — designed to understand your situation deeply before proposing anything.
In that first conversation, we talk about where your business is right now, where you want it to go, and what's standing in the way. I listen carefully — not just for the problems you name, but for the patterns behind them. Then I design a tailored engagement around what I actually find.
The frameworks I use come from the same strategic playbooks used by the world's leading companies — competitive analysis, business model design, market entry strategy, organizational diagnostics, and more — applied at the scale and pace that works for a small or growing specialty tea business.
This means you get corporate-level strategic thinking without the corporate-level distance from your actual situation.
A free, 30-minute call where we get to know each other and I start to understand the landscape of your business. Not a sales pitch. Rather, a real conversation.
If we're a fit, we go deeper. I conduct a structured assessment across the dimensions most relevant to your situation — looking for the real constraints, not just the symptoms you came in with.
Based on what I learn, I design an engagement specifically for you — the right scope, the right depth, the right timeline. You'll know exactly what we're working on and what you'll walk away with.
You might be in the right place if...
Not looking for shortcuts — but for someone who will engage honestly with where they are and help them build something better.
You're a specialty café or hospitality manager who wants to offer top notch Taiwanese tea — not just a premium label — and build the team knowledge and sourcing relationships to back it up.
You're a Taiwanese tea producer with great products, but limited international presence. You know what you've built is worth more than what you are currently getting for it.
You are an entrepreneur launching or growing a tea brand — in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere — and you need strategic thinking from someone who understands both the origin and the market sides.
You are building a tea school, education program, or certification pathway and you want it grounded in something real — not just good content, but structure that holds up in front of serious students and industry partners.
Your business is working, but you have hit a wall — flat revenue, unclear positioning, an operational structure that's starting to strain — and you want someone to help you see it clearly and tell you the truth.
You didn't start this business to guess your way through it. Let's put a real strategy underneath the tea you already love.