Bear Faced Coffee
Meet Andrew Ingleby, who left a secure career behind to pursue a long-held ambition of running his own specialty coffee business. Serving high-quality coffee with a simple approach and a friendly welcome, Bear Faced Coffee is already gaining momentum through regular customers and events.
With support from Hayley at Durham Startups, Andrew received guidance on budgeting, tax and grant applications as he navigated the early months of trading. “I’d rather regret trying it than regret not giving it a go.”
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I do quality specialty coffee, which is nice, simple, not overly complicated, but is really good quality and delivered with a smile.
Like any small business — pitfalls, victories, everything like that. But we just roll with the punches, keep going and know that it takes time to really start seeing huge benefits. But we are already seeing a good amount of customers, a good amount of events, and the money going out is matching the money coming in for the most part, which is the best you can get for your first couple of months.
I just needed a change and this is something I always wanted to do. Um, and the opportunity came up for me to leave and do that and basically try and make a dream come true. So that’s what I’m doing.
**[Interviewer]** It sounds like you gave up a very good secure job and a salary to sort of take a bit of a, a chance.
Yes, uh, it is a chance, definitely it’s a chance. I did leave an industry where you are pretty much looked after really well. Um, there’s always opportunities there, but I turned 41 about a week ago, and that was approaching, I realised that if I don’t do it now, I’m probably never gonna do it. And I’m one of those people who’d rather try something and regret trying it than regret not giving it a go. So that’s why I’ve done this.
**[Interviewer]** The support that you’ve received from Durham Startups and Hayley — mm-hmm. Describe that.
Um, it’s been great. ‘Cause straight away Hayley got in touch and said, we absolutely can help you with this. She helped me look at how to budget, what to deal with in terms of tax. ‘Cause I’ve never dealt with tax in that way — somebody else always paid it for me. Um, and then she’s just been there to answer questions. She recommended grants and things that can help me, so I’ve applied for grants with Hayley’s help. So it’s been really, really great to know that there’s somebody there on hand who can basically just answer the questions I haven’t come across yet.
To grow into a really, really profitable business, but also to eventually have a cafe where Bear Faced Coffee has a static location, have the trailer as well, have a coffee cart, which can go into indoor venues as well, which obviously this can’t. Um, so that we’ve got two or three different revenue streams going at a time. But yeah, it’s long been an ambition of mine to own a cafe at some point. So that is the kind of long-term goal — and obviously take over the world with my beautiful coffee.