How 25-year-old businesswoman built a business on bee rescue
'05.05.2018'
Source: Inc.
At the age of 22, Lee-Catherine Bonner asked parents to invest in her idea of selling and installing hives in company offices. They agreed to finance her startup, but agreed that if it did not become profitable in a year, she would find a normal job. Writes Inc., three years later, its company Bee Downtown sold more 100 hives to companies such as Burt's Bees, Delta, IBM and Chick-fil-A, and Lee-Katrin herself ranked among the most promising young entrepreneurs of 30 Under 30. How to make money on the desire of corporations to be closer to nature and love of honey.
Lee-Catherine Bonner meets with the CEOs of the companies listed every day F, in order to convince them to install beehives on their territory and restore the bee population.
In the past few years, more and more people are saying that due to climate change, the use of pesticides in agriculture and parasitic mites, bees are about to become extinct. This could have disastrous consequences for the environment and for the economy as a whole - only in the United States is the contribution of these insects to cereal production estimated at $ 20 billion.
Bonner wants to help reverse this trend - and for this, she founded a startup in 2014 Bee Downtown.
Her company installs and maintains beehives in the head offices of large corporations, which are often located in the very environmental conditions (diversity of flora) that bees need. Her clients include Burt's Bees, Delta, Chick-fil-A, Intercontinental Exchange and IBM. Watching the hives, keeping order there and collecting honey companies do not need - this is a concern Bee downtown. But among the bonuses that they can offer their employees is the opportunity to study the life of bees at close range, in order to understand where the honey comes from and how the life of insects is organized.
Bonner is a fourth-generation beekeeper, her family has an apiary near Durham, North Carolina. But she did not plan to associate her life with bees until she went to study abroad, where she found out that even in the foreign press they write about the extinction of bees.
She realized that she wanted to tackle this problem, and for a start offered to install a hive on the roof of a large business center. American Tobacco Campus in Durham. The building owner agreed and introduced her to the company representatives. Burt's Beeshoney and beeswax cosmetics, whose headquarters is also located in Durham. After that, the girl, instead of looking for a job, convinced her parents to give her money for the project.
They agreed to give her $ 15 thousand, but on the condition that if she did not make a profit in a year, she would leave her venture and find a job.
At first, not all the companies she approached understood what she wanted from them. They liked the idea itself, but they thought that it represented a non-profit organization and would install hives for them for free. Investors called her business “nice”, and one simply left without hearing it, decided that she was mocking.
But the refusals helped her to formulate her pitch more clearly: instead of asking the top companies to help save the bees, she began to tell why the customers needed it. Bee downtown - a simple and cool way for a company to introduce employees to the trend of environmental friendliness and sustainable development.
Employees like it because they learn more about bees and how nature works, and they can also take honey for free. And the plus for the company is that they get a detailed report on their environmental impact - and score points in the employers' rating. According to surveys, 83% of employees have become more proud of their place of work when they have hives in the company.
For the first year of work Bee downtown the company sold more 50 hives, which allowed Lee-Catherine to support himself and hire another beekeeper. The company has now sold 120 hives in North Carolina. The amounts of contracts for three years are calculated in five-digit numbers. 4 employees are employed in the company, and revenues in 2017 were $ 350 thousand. Bonner expects to earn $ 2018 million over 1.
According to Bonner, most often she has to hear the same question from investors: how she plans to scale. She admits that beekeeping is not the fastest growing business. “This is not the same thing as developing an application and quickly unwind. This is hard manual labor, ”she says.
In August, she was able to attract $ 75 thousand from the fund Engage Venture Fund and plans to invest this money in out of state expansion. Her closest plan is to install 35-40 hives in Atlanta.
In addition, she is working on new sources of profit: from the polls, she knows that corporate employees like to participate in trainings on the device of beehives and the life of bees, but they don’t like that they are too short - one hour.
Therefore, she thinks to start holding longer individual seminars for an additional fee.
