We were lucky to catch up with James Combs recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, James thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

We started as the world’s smallest solar powered coffee roaster in 2013 and now we’re the world’s largest solar powered coffee roaster. We grew organically from our garage to sharing a space with a local bakery. We then moved to a back alley garage suite in Corinth. We leaseed the space for 5 years before moving to our dream location in Gainesville, which is 60,000 sqft on 5 acres. We just purchased land off of the highway in Corinth for our latest coffee shop and retailer center.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

James Combs founded Combs’ Coffee in 2013 by visiting East Africa on a sourcing mission with a friend that he met while working in the finance industry. He fell in love with tea and coffee while visiting the birthplace of coffee and seeing how incredibly difficult it is to produce. Upon the arrival of the first shipment of coffee James began roasting coffee with arguable the worlds smallest solar powered coffee roasting operation in his garage in Corinth, Texas. Fast forward 8 years and James is now operating the worlds largest solar powered coffee roasting operation with a 31 KW solar array and 3 commercial machines housed within a 100+ year old Coca Cola bottling facility. He currently imports tea & cacao as well as offers local wine and craft beer.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We bootstraped our business from the outset. I am still the sole owner of the business. We started by flying to Ethiopia and Kenya to source coffee and tea in 2013 and we slowly grew into importing & roasting our own coffee and cacao. When I started the company I still had a great job in asset management, which helped me fund my exploration, education, equipment and inventory. I continued to work remote from my coffee shop for several years while I organically grew the business. Slowly but surely customers began to discover our unique offerings.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We started roasting coffee in our garage with a self engineered solar powered system. We later scaled it to what it is today. I joined the SCA and later ACE and CQI. I am a Q Arabica Grader and I also own a certified CQI training venue.

Contact Info:

• Website: Combscoffee.com
• Instagram: Combscoffee
• Facebook: Combscoffee2
• Linkedin: James Combs
• Youtube: Combscoffee