Steve Ballantyne, founder of STATION Cold Brew, knows a thing or two about running a successful startup. When he’s not taking care of business at STATION, overseeing the direction of the company and personally delivering products to clients, he can be found at his other business, Neighbourhood Buzz, handling the community development and marketing for institutional real estate investors.

After meeting at the Art of Entrepreneurship, I sat down with Steve to discuss the lessons he’s learned while running STATION Cold Brew, and any advice he has to share for entrepreneurs that in the process of getting their startup off the ground. He touched on ways to save costs while running a startup, the importance of spending a little extra on branding, the importance of being involved in the startup community, and more.

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Neil: Can you explain the concept behind STATION Cold Brew?

Steve: We’re Toronto’s first company dedicated to cold brew coffee. Cold brew coffee differs from “traditional” coffee in that it uses time, not heat, to brew coffee from beans. Letting cold water slowly infuse with the coffee beans results in much smoother coffee, and brings the best out of the beans.

Since it’s my money at stake, it makes things a little more real.

A health benefit of cold brew is the reduced acidity—up to 70%. We also strive for a low impact operation, using recyclable options to deliver our cold brew to customers.

How have you managed to bootstrap the start-up of a beverage company?

That’s a good question. I’ve been running another company out of the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) for almost four years now called Neighbourhood Buzz. We do community development and marketing for institutional real estate investors, mostly in the apartment space. So, real estate is really stable and really slow moving, and after doing that for quite a while, and that business stabilized, I starting getting kind of antsy and began looking for another challenge and other opportunities, and discovered cold brew while travelling to CSI’s location in New York. The way we’re doing it right now is that I’m funding STATION from my existing marketing company in real estate.

That’s quite a difference, real estate to cold brew—that has got to be fun.

Yeah, it’s completely different. I’ve thought about it for a while, whether that was smart [starting a cold brew company], because I’m not leveraging my existing network or connections. But for me, I’ve loved it because it’s so fast moving. We’re in a little more control because I’m not trying to convince a client to do something—I can just do it myself. And what’s been interesting is that I’ve been learning a lot, actually, for both companies, because things I previously needed client permission for at Neighbourhood Buzz, I can now just do through STATION. Since it’s my money at stake, it makes things a little more real. If something works for STATION, I’m able to see if there’s anything I can pull out of that, which might apply to my clients in real estate as well, so, even though they have nothing to do with each other, there’s still some relevant learning I get.

As a start-up, money can be tight at times. How do you contain costs?

Pretty much everything we do is community based. So for example, we share office space; we don’t lease a full office or own a building, we share an office space with another business, and then we share that space with the larger community at CSI. We do the same thing for our kitchen; it’s a shared kitchen space that we’re just renting by the hour when it needs to be used. We do the same thing with transport—we use Zipcar to get around—so it’s shared cars, essentially. If I can get it down to one word, it’s “sharing”. Everything is shared. The office, the kitchen, the cars, everything is shared with someone else, so we’re only charged for our exact use of those things. Continue reading →