Small Batch Coffee Roasters

"Without Breathe, I'd dread to think where we'd be by now. It makes our HR department work like a dream"

0:05.3: Me and my friend, Brad, set up Small Batch Coffee 11 years ago now and we've come quite a long way since.

0:11.8: I’ve done many different jobs from washing dishes to working behind a bar, to now being a Managing Director. Really my day-to-day focus is around the roasting side of the business and sourcing all of our coffees.

0:28.7: Fundamentally we're a wholesale coffee roastery, but we also have nine cafe sites of our own in Brighton, Hove and Worthing. We import especially great coffees, roast them and sell them wholesale to businesses all across the UK and into Europe as well.

0:38.0: I think what makes Small Batch different is from day one we've always taken quality as the starting point of what we do, even when we didn't know a lot about coffee.

0:45.3: When we started to buy green and roasted coffee, we always knew we wanted to buy the best coffee and that went hand-in-hand with buying it in a sustainable and ethical way. That's suddenly developed over the years as the business has grown.

0:55.9: I think that quality ethos was what kind of drove our cafes and what helped make it successful and it's really kind of what we focus on and what defines us.

1:08.6: In 2015, the founder of the company came up to me and said I've got this new software package and I'd really like you to have a look at it and see how we got on with it.

1:18.2: I'm not sure how he found out about Breathe but it was definitely one of the best ideas he's ever had. Since using Breathe, it's definitely reduced the time it takes when dealing with our employee HR.

1:28.9: Years ago we were doing it all on paper. We had a lot of paperwork, we were using filing systems. We knew that that was becoming dated and we just wanted a system where we can put all our employee data in one software package that was easy to access at a click of a button.

1:48.3: For us it was really easy to import our employee data onto the system, it didn't take very long at all. At the time we only had 40 employees and since then, we've grown and we've got 110 employees now. Breathe has helped manage that.

2:05.2: Breathe's been great for our business. Personally as an employee, it makes booking annual leave super-easy. I remember doing it once in a truck in Colombia while I was driving between farms and because I needed some time off, it worked perfectly.

2:16.5: So that was great and in terms of the business, I know that it makes our HR department work like a dream.

2:23.2: Without Breathe, I'd dread to think where we'd be by now.