As you are all aware, our goal at the Great Canadian Coffee Break is to be your daily digital companion by bringing the right blend of positivity to you on our site and via our community on social media; 'just enough maple syrup’ to accompany that steaming cup of coffee....although that might be changing to 'just enough honey' soon!
There is nothing we love more than to share stories of GREAT Canadians doing GREAT things and this is a perfect example of exactly that!
In the Fall of 2019, Toronto based, Grade 8 student, Ian Dalrymple was asked to come up with a passion project in one of his school classes.
Little did he know that his passion project would become a growing business and he certainly didn’t anticipate the buzz that would surround the early success of Beaver Valley Honey (find them here on Instagram).
Having spent some time with Ian last week none of this is a surprise to us as he is already a serial entrepreneur and certainly had a lot to teach us when we connected.
GCCB: Thanks for your time today Ian! Can you share with us how your passion for bees/honey came into being (no pun intended!!)?
Ian: When we were asked to come up with a passion project I wanted to find something that would be fun. Some of my friends started making skateboarding videos or writing movie reviews but I wanted to do more than that and originally thought that we could have a couple of hives at school but because of COVID and school closing we had to find another place for them.
We thought about having them at home but for a number of reasons ended up moving them to our extended family’s 50 acre cottage where there are plenty of flowers for the bees and an uncontaminated water source close by. Having built the hives we needed to get some bees to fill them and made a 4 hour trip from Dancing Bees Equipment with my uncle’s truck to pick up 2000 bees but when we got back we realized one of the Queens had died and we needed to learn quickly how to replace her as she’s so important to the health of the hive.
Luckily, we found a wonderful mentor called Jocelyn at Buzzing Bush Apiary who had been working with bees for many years and who has been such a great help. With Buzzing Bush's help and a lot of research to overcome all the challenges we faced, we managed to harvest 60 jars of Beaver Valley Honey in August and are planning a second harvest in just a few weeks!
GCCB: What a fun experience it seems to have been already Ian but why did you choose to take this passion project and turn it into a business?
Ian: It has been a lot of fun already so I thought why not see if people would want to buy the honey and so with the help of a family friend we set up a stall outside a realtor’s open house in our neighbourhood and sold out! In fact ,we even took pre-orders for the next harvest.
It feels really great when you make a sale and we learned that it was important to make it easy for people to buy. Luckily our friend from Neighbourhood Coffee had let us borrow his machine to take card payments as a lot of people didn’t have cash on them! Next we need to figure out where we are going to sell the second harvest if we don’t sell out through pre-orders.
GCCB: Ian it seems like you’ve learned so much already about business, if another young (or not so young person) was thinking of taking a passion and turning it into a business what would be your top 2-3 tips?
Ian:
You always have to find a way around the challenges - don’t give up! As well as all the challenges we faced finding somewhere for the hives and creating a new queen, I’ve also been stung twice and I need to pay back my investor (Ian’s Dad) who keeps asking me to get my bookkeeping done.
Be the expert in your business! Finding a mentor has been so helpful but you also need to find out as much as you can for yourself. I’ve been watching all the videos from the University of Guelph’s Honey Bee Research Centre and reading as much as I can.
Find new ways to sell your product. We had a GREAT time selling at the open house but as I said we need to find out how and where to sell next. We’re on Instagram (here) and are thinking about building our website but not sure if we need it yet.
GCCB: Those sound like great tips to us Ian! Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the business?
Ian: I want to grow the business to maybe 50 hives and make it into a GREAT family business so that I can retire to a farm. Maybe take on Burts Bees? It will also be a great experience to help me get into university.
GCCB: Fantastic! What can we all do to help?
Ian: Pre-order your honey from us by sending me a direct message via our Instagram page and then follow us to see what happens next!
GCCB: Well that’s easy to do Ian….we know our community loves to #supportlocal and on their behalf just want to say how inspiring your story is, thanks for sharing it with us and we’ll certainly be ordering from and following Beaver Valley Honey. Congratulations on all your success so far!