Ethan Phillips — coffee roaster, café owner, and one of the most quietly honest people I've spoken to on this show. Based in Hawke's Bay, Ethan has spent the last nine years building a wholesale roasting business and a café from the ground up, with very little money, a business partner who disappeared overnight, and more curveballs than most people see in a lifetime.

We talk about what it actually looks like to start a business on next to nothing — borrowing $25k to get a roastery going and $17k to open a café — and why not borrowing enough can be just as dangerous as borrowing too much. He takes me through the chaos of their first lease, a five-month battle with council, and the moment he went from saying "we don't want this space" to tripling down on the commitment in a single week.

But it's the stuff that happened after the doors opened that makes this episode. Three weeks after his first daughter was born, his business partner left under circumstances he's never spoken about publicly — until now. What followed was years of running a business solo while navigating his wife's postnatal depression, the Napier floods, Cyclone Gabrielle, the vaccine mandate, and a mental health reckoning he kept deferring until he simply couldn't anymore.

Ethan talks about the conscious decision he made to shut off his mental fitness and just survive — and what it cost him. He also talks about what's helped: two years of counselling, building the right people around him, and finding the things that genuinely switch him off (including a very niche hobby involving miniatures and strategy that I didn't see coming).

He's now stepping away from the café after eight years, passing the baton on, and heading south to build out a new roastery chapter on a six-hectare lifestyle block. He's excited. You'll understand why.