This £80,000 mistake almost bankrupted The Protein Ball Co. Now, they’re on a roll.

The Protein Ball Co. is on a roll. The UK snack brand churns out a quarter of a million balls a day, supplies some of the biggest names in the US snack market, and has secured six figures from investors. Yet, after sitting down with Matt, we found out how close it came to falling apart before it even started.

Matt Hunt’s business idea to swap bars for balls came with a costly caveat. The dense mix of nuts, dates and protein powder wrecked his £80,000 machine within weeks of launch. Then came a £140,000 invoice that went unpaid, a second blow to a business barely off the ground. 

But Matt bounced back. He took some blunt advice from a London banker, changed course, and built a stronger business for it. We spoke to him about the mistakes he made early on, how he learnt from them, and what it really takes to get the ball rolling on an early-stage business.

Lessons learnt from the machine that didn’t play ball

Matt’s protein ball story starts with a trip across the Atlantic. Already running the healthy olive snacks brand OLOVES with his wife Hayley, they attended a trade show in Los Angeles, where they could see that protein was having a major moment – but “hadn’t really hit the UK market”. 

Back on home soil, Matt hatched his plan to launch a protein product, and knew making the snack sphericle was the easiest way to stand out on shop shelves. However, while shape helped them stand out, it wasn’t the easiest shape to produce.

Doing it at scale needed machinery, and machinery needed money. So, Matt pitched investors through the government’s EIS and SEIS schemes, and by the end of day one, he had secured around £100,000. Then, he did what many founders do well: spend it fast. 

After trialling a German machine with his own ingredients, he bought one for £80,000. “That was probably a bit of a crazy mistake,” he tells us, “because it was too high compared to the cash flow and the money that we left ourselves.”

Within three or four weeks, disaster struck. The machine broke, wrecked from the inside by the dense mix of nuts, dates, nut butters, and protein powder. “We lost about £30 or 40,000, which was a real lot of money at that time, especially as it wasn’t even our money,” Matt says. 

To get back on track, Matt bought a £15,000 laddu machine from India, which kept the business rolling for its first few years. But the episode left its mark. “We were quite lucky not to have gone bankrupt at the start,” he says. “From then on, we had to become more frugal and more business-minded very quickly.”

We say we’re going to put 30,000 into a new product launch. We want to launch it in four months. That invariably costs like 40 or 50,000 by the time you buy all your packaging. So everything costs more than what you first imagined.

Matt Hunt Founder of The Protein Ball Co

The takeaway for Matt was clear: everything will take longer and cost more than you think. He now expects projects to take two to three times as long as planned and urges other founders to do the same to avoid running out of cash or time when plans inevitably overrun. 

How one unpaid £140,000 bill changed the way Matt trades

Not every financial blow came from a bad call. Some come from things outside of Matt’s control, like money that never comes in. Two years in, with the company still finding its feet, a UK customer failed to pay Matt’s company around £140,000. 

“We thought, okay, let’s be smart,” he says. “We got lawyers involved, which cost about £50,000.” That took the total close to £200,000. Then, as the case went to court, the company closed and reopened under a different name. “A £200,000 learning process is a really long game,” Matt says. 

The experience has tightened up how he trades. New customers now pay two or three times in advance on a pro forma basis, so both sides “build up some form of history together”. 

Matt also looks into a company’s history and the products it holds before agreeing to anything, and starts small. He doesn’t want to land a £50,000 or £100,000 order only to be “chasing it three months later”.

It was an expensive education, but Matt has taken it in his stride. He says that when you run a business, you’re “an eternal student”, and each hard lesson has left the company better protected than before.

The “lightbulb” moment from a banker’s meeting

Owning up doesn’t come easily to founders, and Matt’s no different. “When you lose money or a company doesn’t pay you, it’s not something you want to bring up, because you feel a bit embarrassed,” he told us. 

Still, Matt sought advice from the head of a major London bank, an introduction from his sister, who worked there. The banker asked what he had done with his investors’ money. Matt listed marketing, machinery, and trade shows.

“Oh, stop there,” the banker said, according to Matt. He drew a dot on a whiteboard, circled it, and wrote one word. Sales. Once the business had enough of them, he explained, everything else would fall into place.

“You’re right,” Matt remembers thinking. He had been pouring time and cash into the edges of the business, from what T-shirts to wear at trade shows to whether to print branded mugs and pens. However, without sales coming in, there was no money to fund any of it anyway.

The advice stuck. Matt’s monthly meetings now come back to one question: are we on track to hit our target? Marketing and other support, he says, will grow around sales because the business will need them.

Matt has also learnt to lean on other people. Trade shows have helped him build a network he can message for tips, from which shows are worth attending to where to source packaging, and he keeps his requests small and polite. “If you seek and if you try and if you ask, you can get a few answers,” he says.

Planting the seeds: from a kitchen in Sussex to global sales

Despite the trials and tribulations Matt faced early on, The Protein Ball Co.’s growth has continued to snowball, and Matt says the biggest shift has been learning to think beyond the UK.

He once told Hayley that “if we could just hit 4,000 bags a day, we’d be made.” It took a year and a bit to get there. Today, the company is easily hitting 20-25,000 bags a day.

The UK now makes up around 20% of sales, while 40-50% comes from the US, with the rest spread across Europe and the Middle East. 

Following this success, Matt urges other founders to think bigger: “you don’t have to just concentrate and think it’s all about the UK,” he stresses.

Having a great product that you’ve just invented and looks great, tastes great, doesn’t actually mean it’s going to sell.

Matt Hunt Founder of The Protein Ball Co

Crucially, the company’s growth hasn’t come from chasing every idea. Matt and Hayley also tried a children’s protein ball and a peanut butter dog treat, but neither took off, as supermarkets saw no market for healthy kids’ snacks and the cost of getting on shelves made the dog treat hard to launch. 

Roughly 95% of the company’s focus now goes into protein balls. “We know what we’re doing, and we’re doing it really well,” Matt says. 

Matt is equally wary of hiring. He does as much as he can himself and brings in freelancers for marketing, design and video editing. His finance director is only in one or two days a month, because “the burn rate can become so quick as soon as you get staff.”

And there’s more to come. My Protein Ball Co is only now about to pass its pre-COVID level, and Matt is about to add a new machine that puts a filling inside the ball. With demand growing for natural, gut-friendly snacks, he says the rise of GLP-1 users will put the company “in a really good position”. 

If there’s one thing his story shows, it’s that the road to success rarely rolls smoothly. Yet, for founders starting out, Matt’s hard-earned lessons offer a useful place to begin.