The LONDON E-Business Programme provided small businesses across London with support to develop their digital skills. Recently, our E-Business Adviser, Corinne McGee, supported Zubair Anwar-Bawany with improving their online presence for their coffee business, Coffee Snobs
Could you start by telling us a bit about your business and the work that you do?
I co-founded Coffee Snobs with my best friend of 30 years, Rob. We met at university, where we consumed copious amounts of bad coffee to fuel late night studying and last-minute assignments. We would turn our noses up and say ‘there’s got to be better coffee out there’, which gave us the idea to start a coffee shop and also do something about the whole coffee industry. After a few iterations of trying to start our business whilst at uni, we remained down the traditional journey of graduating from university and getting mainstream jobs. Only later did we start the business we dreamed of.
We named our business Coffee Snobs, not because we think we’re better than others, but because we believe coffee should be better. Our core mantra is ‘doing good through coffee’ and our key principles revolve around being accessible, affordable and sustainable. We think that everyone should be able to afford a decent cup of coffee and that it should be sustainable both for the environment and the people producing it. So as we try to grow our business we keep our supply chains, people, and the climate in mind to ensure we treat them with dignity and respect. It’s about setting the bar high for price, quality, experience, and the ecosystems around coffee production.
We do also think that we know a bit more about coffee than our friends, so the name fits for several reasons!
What inspired you to start your business?
Throughout our friendship, Rob and I have probably shared over 7000 cups of coffee all over the world; some have been great, some fantastic, others disappointing, but they’ve always brought us together. That was the feeling that we wanted to capture in our coffee and in our business.
However, we were frustrated that the coffee we were purchasing or drinking at home felt substandard. We wanted to change that, and looking back, I think training as lawyers and working elsewhere first made us stronger and more capable of effecting the change we wanted to see. With our experience, we knew how to use our influence, knowledge, outreach and skills to create the better version of coffee that we wanted.
At its core, our inspiration is about making a coffee experience focus on the emotions evoked when drinking it, not just the aesthetics of the environment. So we created a purpose-driven organisation focused on the emotional experience of drinking coffee, not just buying and selling it.
What has the journey been like so far? What have been the challenges and the wins along the way?
For us, a big challenge was transitioning from successful careers into starting our own coffee business. If you’re a 25-year-old, graduated from university, and a couple years into work, saying “I’m going to quit my job and start my own business” that was frowned upon back then. Having the confidence in ourselves to take that step was a hurdle to overcome.
Something I still find challenging is that despite working with my best friend, it can still feel lonely to run your own business. As an entrepreneur you don’t have the same built-in support systems you’d find in a long-established business or corporate environment. I think we take those things for granted when we have them. In a small business, sometimes the only person you can bounce ideas off or have a conversation with is yourself.
It’s also easy to start questioning your own experience and ability. You gain a lot of experience in different areas that you’ve never touched before, but that can lead to impostor syndrome. For example, I’ve never been a marketeer before, so can I develop a strategy or sell products? But I have been selling a product this whole time. So why not trust that experience?
In terms of successes and wins, we didn’t set out to make a commercially focused organisation, so our achievement metrics are things like someone having a smile on their face when sipping their cup of coffee, that moment of relief when their life’s stresses are gone. Everything else is just a big bonus. Profit still needs to be made of course, but it’s with a purpose. We need the money to pay staff salaries, bills, we need to expand, we need to pay suppliers and take some money for ourselves. But that’s not our main metric of success.
Another win has been upskilling 120 people in the last year through our Pathways Programme. They’ve gained experience across HR, sustainability, compliance, legal, marketing, social media content creation, product development and serving coffee as the barista. It’s been great to see people bloom through that process.
On a personal level, other than the joy of providing people good coffee, I love getting to work with my best friend. We get to spend time together, we laugh, we joke, we cry – we’ve had our ups and downs. But at the end of the day our business brings a lot of joy to us and to other people and that makes all the hard work worth it.
What support have you received through the LONDON E-Business Programme and how has it helped you grow your business?
We joined the programme because we wanted to explore how digital tools could maximise our efficiency and marketing outreach. In particular, we wanted our staff to benefit from digital upskilling. We attended some social media webinars which really improved the efficiency of our online presence. I also spent time using the SBREC Beauhurst database to research access to finance.
But the bigger benefit has been that when a large organisation like the City of London Corporation recognises a small business like ours, it gives us access to infrastructure usually reserved for big corporations. Also knowing there is a team behind us feels like an arm around the shoulder – it’s less lonely as a co-founder.
It changed how others see us. With this backing, we’re no longer just a small business, we have all the infrastructure of being a large organisation. The services that were offered within that framework have been helpful and valuable to my team in terms of upscaling.
What does the future look like for your business?
We have great ambitions but we’re conscious of reality. There are a lot of challenges that we’re facing for example, rising costs, less flexibility from landlords, growing pressure around the global economy and an environment that’s not conducive for smaller businesses to grow. We’re scaling quickly now, and we have the demand, but that itself could hinder our growth. If we don’t expand our capacity to serve customers rapidly, they might leave and could develop a negative perception of our service.
Access to finance is also a limiting factor – there’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape that makes it hard to access, combined with infrastructure that’s outdated for how startups grow and scale today. In the past, a business might have taken 5-7 years to scale, but now we’re on that journey within 18 months. Not having access to the funding we need to scale means we might stay where we are forever and that doesn’t help our business develop.
Ultimately, we’re driven by purpose and people, so we have to maintain our growth pace to prioritise delivering value over profits. If we were opening 30 stores by 2025 with 55 staff, that’s easy to plan. But changing perceptions, educating on better coffee, influencing the ecosystem and improving our supply chains and packaging to create safe spaces is more complex. We need to be ensuring that equity, diversity and inclusion is not just within our business, but it’s in the businesses that we impact. If we don’t continue at the pace that we’re at and overcome the red tape, we’ll risk becoming another business that fails financially.
It’s been great to hear from you, it’s so inspiring to see how you’ve turned your passion into a business. As a final question, what advice do you have for anyone who’s thinking of starting a business?
Don’t think about it, do it. The worst thing that happened is the worst thing that will happen. Most people are fearful of failure, but it is okay to fail. We’ve had many failures in our business but we’re still around. There’s a lot of support out there now that hasn’t been available in the past. You can reach out to organisations like the City of London Corporation and people in the same industry to ask for support. If you think I could help you, feel free to reach out and I’ll help and support where I can.
You also want to know what problem you’re solving in society. When we started, all we were trying to do was give respect to both the people who buy and sell coffee. You might not know exactly what problem you’re solving when you first start but getting a clear idea of it as you’re developing will help.
Finally, don’t overthink it. Fundamentally, it’s about having faith and trusting that what you’re doing adds value. If you can get your head around that then you’ll stick to the journey. There will still be days where you wake up and think “I can’t do this” but there will also endless times where you will wake up and can’t wait to get into work.
Learn more about Coffee Snobs
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