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From lockdown leap of faith to start-up success

How James Bellis of Balance Coffee created a fast-growing business, with sales fuelled by Clearpay

James Bellis top tips for for fast-track success

Do what you love "I don’t think you can get through the tough times if it isn’t something you love – when the wobbly moments come you need to love what you’re doing.
Have a solid support network “You need friends and family there for you, as it can be quite lonely setting up a business – the number of hours I’ve spent on my own behind my laptop! Also, it’s vital to connect with people who have been through what you’re doing now – I find it so helpful talking to someone further along in a business than I am, for a different perspective.”
Perfect your website. “I’d underscore this one with a massive black marker pen! It doesn’t matter how much you spend on paid ads if your website isn’t optimised to make sales – visits to the website have to convert to sales [to be profitable].”

“It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve known the entire time it would work,” says James Bellis, founder of Balance Coffee. And it’s this confidence that sets Bellis and his online coffee business apart.

And yet the coffee subscription and equipment website had an inauspicious start. Pre-pandemic, Bellis worked for an Italian coffee machine brand that supplied high-end restaurants and coffee roasters, and had plans to launch his own social-media agency for the food and drink industry.

The pandemic put an end to both jobs, but Bellis didn’t let COVID-19 stop him for long.

“I didn’t have many ideas, so I relied on what I knew best, coffee. With all the coffee shops shut in London I saw that people were scrabbling about to get the stuff they wanted delivered to home – including good coffee. By May 2020, I had launched Balance, completely from scratch.”

Learning on the job

Launching an online coffee subscription service meant learning “a whole new skill set from scratch – including marketing – which was pretty tough”.

Bellis employed freelance help in the form of web developers and writers, which made a huge difference to his marketing strategy. “My business model has always been to bring in people who are more expert than me to do the things I can’t, but to be as involved as possible in every aspect.”

Using content to drive leads

He used Facebook and Instagram to raise awareness of the brand, and as soon as the website was live, Bellis used his insider knowledge (collected over his eight-year career in the coffee industry) to start a blog linked to the site.

Covering everything from making the perfect iced coffee and cocktail recipes, to how to froth milk without a machine, the blog proved invaluable for attracting customers to the website, many of whom then went on to make a purchase and spread the word.

“Traffic to the blog organically boosted the numbers visiting the website, thus helping it climb further up search engines. There were lots of spikes in traffic during the first lockdown, from people wondering how to make coffee or perfect their home-coffee making.

Today, 40 per cent of the traffic to the site originates from the blog, and 5 per cent of that leads to sales.

Joining forces with smaller brands

To grow awareness of the brand, Bellis teamed up with other small businesses in the food and drink industry.

“We partnered with an alternative milk brand, a wine brand and a chocolate company to promote Balance. The collab we did with an oat-milk brand (on their website) sold 500 bags of coffee; on our socials this [encouraged] around 300 comments. I would absolutely recommend teaming up with a complimentary brand of the same standard as your own; chances are, if you admire their product, they will admire yours, and this leads to great brand awareness.”

Growing with Clearpay

Signing up with Clearpay proved to be another way to attract new customers.

“I liked how easy it made things for customers and I knew customer experience had to be at the heart of the website. Clearpay were easy to work with and it was fast to get set up. There’s a community feel to being a Clearpay brand and they understand what small businesses go through. The Clearpay blog is a great resource for marketing tips and insights, too, and we’ve even acquired new customers from being listed on the Clearpay [shop directory] website.”

Surprisingly it isn’t necessarily Balance’s big-ticket items customers use Clearpay for, it’s the coffee subscription. “Subscriptions account for 70 per cent of overall sales and have doubled since April this year.”

Future proofing plans

And how is business 18 months on from the launch? Bellis is more confident than ever.

“I now have a team of 12 people with plans to grow further,” he says. “We’re selling half a tonne of coffee a month and predict sales will reach a tonne a month by April 2022.”

Another priority? Sustainability. “It took me a while after launch to get to grips with what we could do to limit our impact on the planet. We now plant trees in Scotland and in the coffee-belt in Africa – the places we source our beans from.”

One thing Bellis hasn’t quite tackled yet is downtime. “I work six or seven days a week – I have done so since Balance started. My mum keeps telling me to take a break, but this business is what I do, it’s part of my life.”

Balance founder James Bellis shares his tips for fast-track success:

1) Do what you love “I don’t think you can get through the tough times if it isn’t something you love – when the wobbly moments come you need to love what you’re doing.”

2) Have a solid support network “You need friends and family there for you, as it can be quite lonely setting up a business – the number of hours I’ve spent on my own behind my laptop! Also, it’s vital to connect with people who have been through what you’re doing now – I find it so helpful talking to someone further along in a business than I am, for a different perspective.”

3) Perfect your website. “I’d underscore this one with a massive black marker pen! It doesn’t matter how much you spend on paid ads if your website isn’t optimised to make sales – visits to the website have to convert to sales [to be profitable].”

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