An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Your team are your biggest asset. As you expand your business, your people become integral to your growth. Invest in good people from day 1 and spend the extra timing during the interview stage to truly understand their capability.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing James Bellis.

James Bellis is a food and drink entrepreneur who has worked in the UK hospitality sector for 10+ years. James decided to launch a food and drink review platform called Eating in London during the 2021 Pandemic after earlier launching an ecommerce coffee brand ‘Balance Coffee’ at the beginning of lockdown 2020.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I grew up just outside of London in a middle-class family home. My parents wanted the absolute best for me and insisted I got to a grammar school a couple of towns away.

I was an immature child. I just wanted to play football and have fun and no zero care for education and development.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make the grades my parents expected of me, but they ushered me to plan b (college). At 16 years old I was spending all of my time playing computer games, and so I.T. was the only logical subject I could pick to study at college.

Unfortunately, the naivety, rebellious teenager continued and after 2 years, I only scraped a pass. To get to University where my parents were adamant I attend, I required a Merit.

That shortly after led to a pleading letter to the University of Southampton Solent. Thankfully, that paid off and I was miraculously let in.

Fast track 3 years later, and I’d repeated the same pattern. I’d come away from university with a certificate for completing the 3 years (hardly), but no qualifications.

As you can imagine, my parents were exhausted by my inability to complete anything.

It was a stark wake up call for me at 21. Leaving university, and knowing my friends had all graduated with degrees. Something shifted in my mind as I entered the real world and I began to develop a hunger and positive attitude for learning and success.

Perhaps it’s a good real life example of how your failures create your successes.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

It’s not necessarily a life lesson quote but a quote which best represents my mindset / attitude. “If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary”.

I really enjoy putting myself outside of my comfort zone and I’ve found this quote a perfect reminder in tough periods.

Who wants to be ordinary after all?

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I really enjoy reading Stoic philosophy. For example, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.

The Stoics provide me with amazing insights into the power of the mind, and your thoughts which determine your perceptions. In chaotic tech centric world, it helps to remind me of some of the fundamental life principles.

I doubt I’d have gotten through my challenging bootstrapped journey without some surface level understanding of stoicism.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

My biggest piece of advice is to not spending so much time over-thinking ideas.

No ideas are truly perfect from day one and I personally feel that getting comfortable with the idea that you’ll be forever iterating at each step of the way. It’s the only way to succeed, and when you understand that, you’ll realise that physically starting is just the beginning of a very long iteration process.

Having said that, the idea itself still needs to be pretty good. You can use competitor analysis and any market insight you have to decide what might be a good business or product to launch.

Above all, do something you care deeply about, because in the touch times you’ll need that passion to help you persevere.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

I personally believe that many businesses can be created by taking an approach of ‘I can do what they are doing but do it better’.

There are always opportunities for creating a higher quality product or an improved service. There’s a big mis-conception in the world we live in that founder has to create the next ‘Uber’ or ‘Airbnb.

A great way to research and vet your own idea has legs is to talk to lots of people. Just make sure you talk to enough people to get real perspective rather than just a handful of people.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is the best way to begin. I’m an avid planner and a big fan of brain dumping your ideas into a google doc or spreadsheet.

Let’s take Eating in London for example. Once I have the initial idea that I wanted to use our leverage in the industry to help businesses aquire more customers cost effectively as well as help consumers save money, the idea to create a membership card that provided restaurant deals in London was a no-brainer.

Differentiation is another key factor. Why will the consumer choose you vs your competitor. Then you have to look at the strengths you have that your competitor doesn’t. Initially it might even be that you’re more nimble and adaptable to begin with so you may wish to tailor your service around this and offer the consumer even more value.

In an increasingly online world, consumers crave experience more than ever. Couple this with some other fundamental benefits for most people, like saving time and your halve way there with your new idea.

If manufacturing seems like an issue. My advice is to find a small supplier. They’ll be closer to where you are in your own personal journey and they’ll likely accommodate low volumes to help to get started.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. The costs required to create a business from scratch. Make sure you have access to capital and plan effectively as most businesses nowadays fail because of cash flow. Unforeseen costs can really hurt your business such as paid campaigns that didn’t perform as they should have.

2. How broad digital marketing is. Every channel and sub-skill set is a real expertise so spend some time learning all about marketing before you take the leap if you can. I had to learn on the fly which has taken an incredible amount of time and effort.

3. Your team are your biggest asset. As you expand your business, your people become integral to your growth. Invest in good people from day 1 and spend the extra timing during the interview stage to truly understand their capability.

4. Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t make money for a while. It takes time to build up your customer base and turn a profit unless you have funding. Get prepared for lifestyle changes until you hit your goals.

5. Developing online sales takes time. There’s another misconception that setting up an online business or ecommerce store means you’ll have a free-flowing amount of customers buying your product. Far from it. You’ll need to strategically think about where your customer acquisition is coming from and how much it will cost to acquire a customer.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Once you have your idea. You’ll first need to determine your own personal goals. Do you want full autonomy by going solo (bootstrapped) or will you explore funding options such as VC.

After this, you can plan the clear next steps based on what finances you have in place.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I personally think getting early input from experts who’ve been through what you are trying to create is absolutely priceless. It’ll usually save you time and money by fast-racking you on the best early-stage direction. They can really help you form your strategy for you too.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I only have my personal experience and journey to speak to.

To go the bootstrap route these days you need to be very resilient as cash is king.

I think you could separate this into two buckets. Do you want to scale / grow fast but give up equity in the process?

Or do you want to retain complete freedom and grow slow and steady?

Your personal goals should be closely aligned with your decision so that you’re certain you’re not going down a route that conflicts, just for the sake of money.

For me personally, time and decision making freedom is more important than the instant gratification for money and that’s how I made my own decision to go down the Bootstrap route. It’s absolutely not for the faint hearted though. Prepare to get inside the boxing ring.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

As you know, I have two online businesses and they’ve both helped people / the world in different ways.

With Balance Coffee, in the early days we implemented simple sustainability initiatives to offset our carbon footprint and ensure we were giving back. We’ve planted over 500+ trees, we donate 1% of our sales to a coffee charity who provide clean water and sanitation to coffee growing communities worldwide. We’re also use 100% sustainable packaging and purchase coffee that’s 25%+ above 95% of coffee grown worldwide. We do this to give back to the farmers at origin in addition to creating a sustainable supply of coffee for the future.

For Eating in London, it’s all about helping by inspiring our audience and providing quality recommendations that are more detailed and engaging than our competitors so we build a reputable brand for the best tips in London.

Our new newly launched vip membership helps Londoners to access London’s top places at exclusive prices which I’m really proud of creating.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I think reversing the negative effects we’ve caused on our planet is the single biggest mission everyone in the world needs to get serious about. In my opinion, using business as a tool is one of the fastest way to do this. I’d love to see more and more businesses give back more, invest more to fix this crisis.

There are already some incredible companies out there putting the planet first.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Gary Vee has inspired me greatly and his positive energy has got me through some tough times during Covid. I would love to enjoy a breakfast with him and even better, make him a Balance Coffee to enjoy.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: James Bellis On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.