Upscaling from Hobbyist to Sideliner - The Business (322)

322 - Upscaling from Hobbyist to Sideliner - The Business

[music]

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show.Welcome to the fourth in this series of how to upscale your bee operation from hobbyist to sideliner. This has been an exciting month of shows to help you take that next step from hobbyist to sideliner. In the first episode, if you haven't been following us, was on building up your bees. The second episode was starting with how to build up your business and those aspects of the equipment. The third episode was how to expand your honey house operations. This episode, what are we talking about, Becky?

Becky: Oh, this is exciting. This is actually the business of bees with real beekeepers who upscaled and who are successfully running their businesses. I'm so excited. We're going to get lots of good information. I'm so glad that Tara Dawn Chapman and Jay Williams are here today to join us.

Jeff: Welcome.

Jay Williams: Thanks for having us.

Tara Dawn Chapman: Thank you. So happy to be here.

Jeff: Regular listeners may recognize Jay from being one of our regional beekeepers and has been featured in other episodes too. Welcome back, Jay. We didn't scare you away.

Jay: No, absolutely not. I'm addicted to this thing. Thanks for having me.

[laughter]

Becky: He's coming for our jobs next.

Jeff: Tara is a beekeeper in Texas, author of a book that just came out last November, For The Bees. That's exciting. Tell us a little bit about your book, Tara.

Becky: Let's learn about Tara first because I think she's got kind of an interesting story.

Tara: We're in Austin, and I'm not a legacy beekeeper. My granddad was a cotton farmer in rural West Texas, and I issued the ag life, moved to the East Coast, went to college, and then I ended up working in intelligence for the federal government for a decade. When I took my first beekeeping class, I was actually still working for the government. I was splitting my time between Afghanistan, Washington DC, and Texas in Austin, and then took my first beekeeping class. I was already looking for an exit strategy, fell in love with it, and then quit my job with benefits to hive hunting.

That was a little over, that was over 10 years ago. The business is- we're in our ninth, closing in our 10th year, at this point. I've been teaching. We do a lot of agritourism, like most that make this work financially. Most people have to do a little bit of a few things. We do a lot of things, but honey, a lot of agritourism, and education is where we spend most of our time. I just saw what I thought there was a hole in the beekeeping world space and wanted to- was stupid enough, I suppose, to figure I could fill it. That's how we got there. It came out last November. It's a beekeeping book.

Becky: You said you started taking classes, but why bees? There had to have been a story or an encounter, something that triggered it.

Tara: Yes. Do y'all remember Groupon?

Becky: No.

Tara: It still exists because, I don't know about you, but I get called all the time wanting them to me to go on Groupon. You would go on and get things at discounts was basically the one- so one of the first big discount websites. I was just perusing Groupon and there was a beekeeping class there back when I was back in Texas on one of those trips. There was no interest other than that I thought that was so weird. We talked about this before, Austin is known or at least at one point of being this really weird city. I wanted just to embrace everything weird when I was back in Texas. It was literally just because I thought it sounded so off the wall and strange. Then I took it and just fell in love with it.

Becky: I love that story.

Jeff: That's fun. Jay, for those who don't know you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jay: I never thought I'd be sitting in this chair talking to you guys about beekeeping, honestly, in a million years. I started in firefighting and my whole family's in the movie business. Nothing to do with agritourism or agriculture or anything. I started about 17 years ago, created a company called Williams Honey Farm. Really, I got a couple of colonies and my firefighting schedule meant that I worked a couple of days on and then I had four days off. I'm like, what am I going to do during my four days off? I got to fill the time. I don't know about Tara, but I got two colonies and the next week I was addicted, like obsessed.

I was like, I want a hundred. I'm going to take over the world. Couldn't sleep at night because I'm dreaming about grafting and all these other things. Throughout the years, the business has grown and I've made a ton of mistakes. One of the cornerstones of my business is I'm going to tell you everything that I screwed up on so that you don't make the same mistakes. That's been the backbone of all of our beekeeping schools, all the different niche operations that I've done or have been running. Then now I'm in a different phase of my life. Just turned 50. I'm an old guy, sort of. Because of a new phase of my life, I retired from the fire service and now I'm in the process of- multi-year process of selling Williams Honey Farm to a local resort here where I also work.

It's been an amazing process. I have really good support. I'm managing around 200 or so colonies between the two different hats that I wear, but I'm doing a lot of VIP yard maintenance, if that makes sense, for local residents that- particularly celebrities or people that are on the road, I will manage all their bees for them. Then I obviously do a lot of teaching, but a lot of honey tastings and really interactive, engaging operations with the public. It's been really fun. It's been a long road. Like I said, made a bunch of mistakes, but also had a great time. Hopefully, it will continue to for many years to come in whatever role or wherever I go.

Jeff: You both had a really good start as a hobbyist , hat you started with two and all of a sudden you just wanted to expand.

Tara: My hobbyist period was very short.

Jay: One week.

Tara: I look back at like the things that I was doing and-- Same experience, that I jumped in and within a few months I was like-- I went and worked for BeeWeaver, which was a bee breeder. Y'all probably are familiar in East Texas and yes, short hobbyist career.

Jeff: Let's explore that gray area between hobbyist and sideliner, and making the decision to make that jump and devote so much time and resources to that. We've already discussed about the building up of the bees part and the equipment part. What about the business side? When you think about that period of time and you're expanding rapidly, as it sounds like, what were some of the business side aspects of expanding that you focused on that maybe you should've not focused on. What would you recommend to those people who are looking at that same path to help them out?

Jay: The first mistake that I made was I tried to be everything for everybody. I tried to say, "I'm going to be a bee breeder. I'm going to produce or harvest propolis. I'm going to--" Believe it or not, I got into bee venom. I'm going to try and harvest bee venom.

Becky: Oh my gosh.

Jay: Don't do it.

[laughter]

Jay: Then I'm going to do cutouts and I'm going to speak at every single local garden club that calls me and asks me, and I'm going to drive two hours and basically do it for free. Then I'm going to have my yards 100 miles from each other. All these things that-- You got to make the mistake before you learn. I tried to do everything for everybody and I generally got myself really, really tired and I didn't really focus on the great things.

Honestly, the lesson from there is find- at least what I learned, is find what's really working, what sticks to the wall, and just go after that. Niche away. Go crazy. If you really enjoy breeding queens or you're really into artificial insemination, just stick with that one thing. Don't try and do all 100 of them because in the end I ended up losing money, honestly, and it wasn't a good business decision. I also tried to do it overnight and think certain things take a lot more time than I wanted to allow for them. As a result, I put things on a credit card instead of paying cash, all the general mistakes that I think most people would make, I did that right away. This is in the first year or two.

There was a lot of late nights of me explaining to my wife, "Just trust me on this one. Just hang out just a little bit longer. This isn't a terrible idea." The president of the local bee club, I sat him down and I had two pages of questions and he said, "Look, Jay, I'm going to stop you there. You're never going to make money at beekeeping." It was like a gut punch. I used that every single day to work even harder, because I'm making money beekeeping right now and it helped me get through to today.

Tara: You don't even really need both of us on this podcast here because we basically have the same things to say.

[laughter] It's easy to do in beekeeping.

Tara: There's dozens and dozens of ways that you could theoretically make money. I did that for many years. In fact, we're still trying to pull back from me with my too many yeses early on. I think the benefit of going through sideliner and then moving into it being your full-time job, which was what I did not do, but the benefit of that is that you can play around with things, try some things, test the market a little bit without being all in financially.

I quit my job. I was all in very early, and I wanted to do honey. I wanted to own a honey company. I didn't think about until far too late in the process and an embarrassing amount of time in that you need a lot of hives to make money off of money. Lots and lots of hives. I was lucky that I'd been reading a lot of business books. I don't come from a business background. I had a political science degree. I had read this book called The $100Startup, and one of the chapters, the theme was get paid twice. I fell into what our big money maker is, which is agritourism, because-- The chapter is get paid twice. I'm very literal, and I would hold a jar of honey and think how can I get paid twice for it? For me, I had bunches of friends that would come into town and they just wanted me to put them into bees. I thought, "I think that I could make money off of this." That's really where the agritourism piece of my journey started was I fell into it just paying attention, doing a lot of reading.

I would add to what Jay was saying was certainly what works, what's going to stick, what's going to actually make you money? Also, where do your interest lie? Because for me, I did think about breeding. Thank goodness I worked for a breeder early on and realized very quickly, "Oh lord, I would rather do anything on this planet than shake packages."

[laughter]

Tara: That's the most horrible experience. Also, what is going to keep you engaged? Because what a lot of people don't talk about is when you make your hobby your job, the dynamic changes. You have to find ways to enjoy it in a different way because eventually if you're successful, you're not going to be the ones working the bees anymore. If you really enjoy working the bees, you're going to have to stay a really small operation because ultimately you have to hire-- I very rarely work bees anymore. Other people work my bees for me because if I'm working bees, frankly we are losing money.

I would put more thought into your journey before jumping in. I did not do it. It sounds like Jay didn't either. Thankfully it all worked out for me. Those are the things that I would go back and do differently. One thing that I'll say that I did correctly and we continue to do, is we find ways to test new ideas or new revenue streams. For example, I wanted to start doing hive tours. No one was doing agritourism really in Austin at the time. We were the first, especially in this area, and you got to have a lot of bee suits to do hive tours. I was cold calling these meetup groups, this website that joins people together around interest. I would cold call these meetup groups that were based around outdoors, going outside hiking.

I would say, "We have this great experience," and I would pitch them like it was a real thing. It wasn't a real thing. Then only when I actually booked several tours that I use that money to go and buy the bee suits that I would need to run the tour. That was one way that we successfully bootstrapped was by testing an idea. We still do it. We had the idea to do honey sensory classes, I drafted a description, I took these photos, it was all fake and I put it up. If nobody bought it, well, what? About a few hours of building a website page? You know what I mean? Finding ways to test these ideas has been really successful for us before we invest actually any your real money.

Jay: Tara, I wonder if you had the same experience. For me, it was in 2010, but at any rate, when you started, I remember this moment when I did, in my opinion, everything perfectly, I had all my splits set up, everybody was ready, good to go for the season coming on. Then in my area, May 1st hit and not a single drop of honey was to be harvested for eight weeks or so. I realized a really important lesson in my business building, which is even if I do everything perfectly and I got all of it lined up exactly right, Mother Nature will say or can say, "Mm-mm, not going to do it for you." It was at that moment then I said, "What do I have an endless amount of?" That is me and hot air or me talking all day long, and telling about my experience and my passion, blah blah blah.

That's when all of a sudden everything made this huge pivot to agritourism and like you apiary tours, honey sensory taking the liability off of me and having to have thousands of hives. That was a huge pivot point in my business, and I honestly never looked back

Tara: 100%. That was the other thing, we were telling you to think carefully about like, "Don't stretch yourself too far." Also, the only reason that we're still around is because we did diversify in a way that our primary source of revenue is not reliant on the actual weather or in a way, bees themselves. You know what I mean? We have horrible erratic weather in Austin, and honestly, central Texas is not the great honey production area that you would think it would be. It falls in the middle of-- It's not a great honey-producing area. Further east is much better. As long as I've got a colony of bees, I can do a hive tour. If it's not raining, I can do a hive tour.

That's been really successful for us and also allowed us to tap into the B2B market, which Jay, I know that you do a lot of. I love having people come out and they buy an individual ticket for them and their wife or their kid on a tour. That is lovely. We love that. We also love when Google comes out and they bring a lot more money with them that can help pay for all the other things that maybe you love that don't pay the bills as much. That exit through the gift shop phenomenon is very real. We sell so much more honey now that we have our-- At one point, we didn't have a land, we didn't have space for many years. We did our tours at breweries and cideries and whatnot.

Now that we've got a central location, our honey ranch and we've got that true exit to the gift shop phenomenon, and we sell most of our honey from people that come out and do tours and tastings as they walk out the door, they're always excited to buy.

Jeff: That's really interesting because I'm hearing from the two of you that you're finding what you started as maybe a focus on, let's say honey. You're finding that it was really in your location, you weren't set up really necessarily to do the honey either location wise or level of effort because the honey flows are sporadic and many of the successful beekeepers either live in high production areas or they follow the bloom. As beekeepers who want to start the business and maintain a business in your primary location, you've had to expand and that's led you to agritourism.

Jay: I don't want to isolate or eliminate the people that just want to make honey. I think there's a noble calling for that. If I was in Georgia or if I was in Florida, it may be different because I think it's easier. I don't know about Tara's flow, but in my area, it's like 8 to 10 weeks in a good year. It's not this massive month and month and month honey flow. I don't want to isolate that. I would say another way to look at this is a lesson that I learned in the beginning, and that I talk about in all my bee schools is a frame. I use all medium hives. A frame medium hives is my standard. A frame on average of honey in my hives is about three to four pounds. In my area, the average backyard upscale beekeeper is about $20 a pound. Let's just say that that frame is worth about $60. If you look at this from a business eye, yes, I can spend the time to extract that three pounds of honey and get $60 off retail value, but is there a way for me to make more money on the same exact frame of honey? I can sell that same frame of honey to a local chef for about $120 each. Even if it's not cut comb, I can teach them how to harvest that honey and serve it on a charcuterie board or whatever.

I can turn that $60 frame of retail honey and I can actually turn it into $120 if I sell it to a chef. Now I can put it on steroids and I can say, okay, instead of selling it to a local chef, instead now I'm going to take that frame of honey and I'm going to create an honey extraction party and I'm going to charge people $100 a ticket to come in and extract us honey, taste various honeys from around the world, maybe have a pairing of tequila or bourbon at the same time, and I can turn that original $60 frame of honey into a thousand dollars if I get 10 people. Do you see what I'm saying? You can really spin things around if you get really creative and think how do I think outside the box? Obviously, a lot of this is dependent on the location and the area, are you in communities that would support this sort of thing? I feel like there's way more out there than most people give themselves credit for to really start to get creative and look for how do I turn this simple product that everybody else is doing and spin it on its head and turn it from 60 to a thousand dollars.

Tara: Yes, and that applies to other areas as well if you can find ways that one revenue stream will drive another. If you decide you're really passionate about teaching and you think there's space in your market to come in and provide more education and there's room for that, then I would also consider, is it possible that you can also have a little store to sell equipment because those same people that come in- we do that, we teach them, we have a little store. You could go even further and say then I should also breed bees. We are not breeding bees. You can't do honey and bees right off of a small operation like ours. You do one or the other, but that doesn't mean you can't sell bees. We work with a breeder that doesn't have near the marketing power that we do, doesn't have the name that we do, and frankly, lives in a market where they get $100 less per nuc when they sell them to their people.

I live in Austin, I can sell their nucs for much more. There's room in there so that I can teach you, I can educate you. I've got the equipment. It's basically a wholesale distribution. I can distribute nucs from a breeder that even when they sell to me at a discount, I make money and they make money. Thinking about what your market can support and how you want to attack it, and again, one revenue stream, drive at another. I think that is the benefit of beekeeping, that we do have all these different avenues. You can choose a little pod of them and they can drive one another.

Jeff: Hey, let's take this quick opportunity to take a break and we'll be right back right after those quick words from our sponsors.

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Welcome back, everybody. Okay. That was fascinating and I want to talk more about it, but I have to ask a question. Employees, I know the bees are working for you, but have you both crossed the line, hired employees, and then encountered all of the fun that employees will generate for your taxes and other parts of your business?

Tara: Yes, employees are tricky. One of my employees listens to this podcast religiously. Hi, Sen. Yes, employees are tricky. The struggle that I see that so many make is that they're successful and they grow and they don't realize you understand the line of when you need to bring in help. That happens a lot with beekeepers, and then you work yourself to death. My first employee that I actually hired was not a beekeeper. I think hiring for a beekeeper is the hardest hire I have to make. The amount of training that goes into that. Now, let me caveat this. A beekeeper that's running a hive tour is a very different level than a beekeeper that is expected to take care of my bees, make sure they thrive, make sure they make honey or take care of a client's bees.

I can train a beekeeper to do a hive tour in a literal weekend, that's no problem. But to train and bring in a real beekeeper, that is the hardest hire and the most is on the line. It takes the most amount of my time and I lose the most when that person leaves. I find ways to limit the amount of hiring up for beekeepers that I have to do, which doesn't mean that I'm in the bees all the time. It just means I think about things a little bit differently. My first hire was actually an admin because I wanted to keep my finger on all of our colonies for longer. I wanted to manage them and make sure I knew what was going on, that the risk and the responsibility was on me. The first person that I hired, and the first person I always recommend people can hire if it makes sense for you, is someone that can come in, answer your emails, do your calendar, send out your invoices, making sure you're getting paid, doing your books. Those are skills that I don't want to do, I'd much rather be out with bees, but you got to get them done. I know a guy, a remover, who's not great at sending out his bills. He'd probably be making a lot more money if he hired someone to take care of that. That was the first hire that I made. Jay, what was your first hire?

Jay: My first was my friend, and I would say don't hire your friends. I'm still friends with him and I made the mistake a couple of times, honestly, but like, I'm still friends with all of them, but I would say it's not a great idea. I did also the similar thing to Tara. I actually went with a virtual assistant to try and help. I didn't have the best of luck because I felt like I'm a cheapskate, and so the quality of virtual assistant that I was paying for wasn't quite doing it for me. My transition from employees- actually, I have less employees now than I've ever had because I'm way into automation. Everything's electronic. I never do anything by paper anymore. Everything is auto-build, auto reminders. There's a great little app out there called If This Then That, IFTTT, that I use constantly.

It's just a simple algorithm that will set up that make you do or will do the things that you don't want to do on a regular basis. I do that a lot. Honestly- and with Tara it's like it takes I think on average a hundred inquiries to find the right employee. There's a different employee that you are going to put in the yard that is willing to get stung, sweat their butt off and work really, really hard versus someone who's going to be on a tour or be in an office. It's just a different skill set. It's been quite challenging to find over the years, but now I have great people very, very well supported because of those automations, because of those really good people, and also because I batch everything. If I'm going to work, I work for two hours and then I'm done.

I used to work 24/7, honestly. At 4:00 in the morning, I'd be sending an invoice or I'd be trying to figure out what my marketing scheme was for whatever. Now I absolutely batch everything I ever do. Monday morning for two hours it'll be, let's talk about marketing or let's think about it, and then I'm done for a while that way I have a pure beginning and an end, and then only happens when I have the good employee support and I have good automations or AI behind it.

Tara: I have eight employees now. Two of those are very seasonal, meaning they come in and they do hive tours and stuff in the spring and in the fall. It was really tricky when you had one or two employees because there was no- opportunities for cross-training is slim, and there's only two of you on the team or three of you on the team. I stayed at that space for a while and then I found once I could get over- when I grew and I got over the four or five employees, then we had more opportunities to cross-train.

To lose an employee when you're a small business is devastating. It's really, really challenging. I have a very young child. My life's already very hard every day. If I lose an employee, it's really rough, but when I got up above five, it felt like there was a lot more opportunities to cross-train that if someone leaves tomorrow, it hurts but I've got other people to pitch in. I will say if you're in that space where you've moved from sidelining and you're growing and you've got one or two employees and it just feels so hard, I do think it gets easier when you actually get a little bit bigger.

Jeff: At what point did you decide to take the risk and or the financial commitment to bring in someone else, to pay someone else? What was that breaking point?

Tara: I was on the close of a total mental breakdown burnout. I was doing everything right and was just working an extraordinarily large number of hours every week. For me, I couldn't keep doing it. It was either scale back and do less, which I'm not good at doing less, I like to say yes to everybody. That was it for me, which I don't recommend that route. If you understand and know your financials and looking at-- I think the mistake that a lot of folks make is they also don't value their time. You have to make sure you're valuing your own time. Also, people, charge more for your honey. You should be at the top of your market. Look around what everybody else is paying. I put a ton into our marketing, our branding. Our product looks and feels elevated. I live in a city where people will pay for that. I probably get more than anyone else in the Southeastern United States. I can't stress enough why I always want people to charge more. Don't go to the grocery store and set that as your space.

If your market will pay it, push it a little bit. You can always go backwards. It's very hard once you set a price to go up, but you can always set a price and you're like, "Oh, I think I pushed a little bit," come back a little bit. Charge more for your honey so you can have more money to pay people to help you.

Jay: Couldn't agree more. I think if you have a good story and you have a good brand and you are passionate about what you do and you can back it up, people I think will pay way more than you think. We charge $80 a pound at my operation I'm at right now. I thought there's no way in a million years people are going to pay that. In the end, they're getting this feeling that they're part of something, they're part of a community, and it's changed everything. When they buy it, they should feel like they know these bees were on this hillside and this is the view that they had, and this is how I treated them. My bees are like my family and they're my daughters and I care very much for them, and this is the painstaking process that it took to get here.

To Tara's point, I think about the back pain that I have, the eye surgery that I had, the broken ribs that I got, the Lyme disease that I got that one year. I think about all those things and how hard it was to produce this honey and how I stand behind that value or that price tag because it's a labor of love and I want someone to know that when they're buying it.

Jeff: How important is marketing- in terms of as you're planning your business, is marketing to everything else you do? It sounds like it's pretty high on the list.

Tara: For me, the branding and the storytelling has been really important. For better or for worse, I am the business and the business is me. I'm great at telling a story, but that's what we're doing. We're just telling stories and people are buying into those stories. That's why when people come out-- If I can get someone out to the ranch to go through our experience, they will buy extraordinarily more from our little shops than they would otherwise- because people just want to feel-- I am of the belief that most people walk around every day feeling no real passion about anything. I hope that's okay to say, but I really think that's the case for most people.

I think people want that. I think when people come out and they hear us, and my beekeepers are amazing, and they hear them talk and they learn something new, they get to feel that passion. That's exciting and they want to be a part of that. That's why we have so many repeat customers. For me, it's really like the branding- and the product looks nicer. Our honey goes in glass jars. It feels heavier. It just feels more expensive when you pick it up, when you look at it. I think that generally speaking, honey companies have a horrible history of branding. It's just so bad. Go to the grocery store and look at the aisles. It doesn't feel expensive and it doesn't take that much. You do it once. You invest early, make sure you see something that looks really great and feels really great, and then you can ride that.

Jeff: Did you start off that way? Do you wish you started your branding and marketing earlier?

Tara: We did. I had to learn a lot about marketing because branding and marketing is not the same thing. I had to learn a lot about marketing later. The branding, aesthetics is really important to me. From the get-go, we had a product that looked really nice. I didn't want a normal honey jar. In fact, I spent too much time looking for these perfect honey jars that leak and break. From the get-go, aesthetics were very important, and that's worked well for us.

Jeff: How about you, Jay?

Jay: At all our bee schools, what I tell people is, whatever you do, don't put your honey in a queen line jar like everybody else. Switch it up. Do something different to stand out from the crowd. I think it's worth mentioning at this point for your audience that maybe isn't great at marketing or doesn't really want to spend all the time and effort on it. My business currently, probably 60% of the revenue comes from local VIP yard maintenance that has zero marketing whatsoever. It's really just word of mouth where I manage the yard, 10 hives at someone's house.

If you're in a network of people that really connect with each other, and you can fill that niche of I'm going to take care of so-and-so celebrity's bees, generally they have friends who have the same situation. If you're hesitant to get into too much marketing, then I would say do a heck of a job. Go above and beyond for that person. White glove service. You'd be very surprised that it generally starts to grow if you stick around and you last long enough. We have probably, I don't know, 7 to 10 VIP yards and they are a large, large portion of our monthly revenue. That comes from zero marketing whatsoever. It was really just word of mouth and trying to do the best I could for each individual person and watching how that word of mouth spreads. Now I'm turning down yards constantly.

Tara: To that point, I will say, I think it's important to make the distinction between tangible products versus services. They're two very different businesses. We do a little bit of both, but I always encourage people, I do a ton of reading. I'm always trying to learn. Think about that, are you selling a service or are you selling a tangible product? Then look for resources for those because those are two very, very, very different businesses. If you're a remover, that's more in the camp of what Jay is saying is that, God, we're never going to not need removers. In Texas, we're never going to not people to take care of these for the ag valuation.

That's probably how most people actually making their money these days is ag valuation clients. That's a huge market in Texas. That's an example of where if you show up and do a great job, that's your marketing for you. Because that person is going to tell every other person in their neighborhood that needs the ag valuation. Every person, oh my gosh, I got bees in my soffit. For service businesses, that is really important, what Jay is saying here. It's very different for products.

Becky: Tara, will you share what the ag valuation is? Because every state doesn't have that.

Tara: I think it's a good conversation to have because if you're in a state where this exists, this is a great way to make money. It's not perfect, but if you have so many acres, you can get what's called an ag valuation. It's often called an exemption. The appraisal district offices do not like that term. Don't call it an exemption. You still have to pay taxes. It's just you get a different value. The value of your land is assessed differently. I have clients in West Austin that literally pay thousands and tens of thousands of dollars less in taxes every year because beekeeping is one of the approved ag activities.

In Texas, you don't have to be the beekeeper yourself. These people can. A whole service industry has popped up where people pay beekeepers to bring in their own bees or take care of the landowner's bees. Then they save a ton on their taxes. It's a pretty quick math equation. You either come out ahead or you don't if you're the landowner. In Central Texas, it's a big booming business at the moment.

Jeff: Great thing to check into.

Tara: That's a huge business in Texas right now. Y'all could do like a whole podcast on. A lot of it, it's people that are brand new to the world of business. That could be a whole episode of it itself. It's just incredible how it's grown in Texas.

Becky: Sorry, what's the minimum apiary size in that? Is it eight or--

Tara: In Texas, you can do between 5 and 20 acres, excluding a homestead. If you have a homestead, usually you need to have six acres.

Becky: Oh, but the minimum- I'm sorry, the minimum number of colonies.

Tara: Oh, it depends. So the county sets the rules. It usually works out to, depending on the county, a colony for every one to two acres, but they all have different rules. If you've got 10 acres, it's usually seven or eight colonies.

Becky: Probably not a beginning beekeeping move to start managing really large apiaries.

Tara: You'd be shocked.

[laughter]

Becky: That was just a word of caution.

Tara: Yes, you'd be shocked. It is how a lot of people grow out of the like, I'm a hobbyist. How do I want to make money? They lease. If you've got 20 colonies, you could service three clients. It's tricky because if you don't obey the rules, the county can come a-calling, and you don't want that. That's why it's a great podcast because a lot of people do a lot of mistakes.

Becky: The bees in the boxes have to be alive in order to count, I'm assuming.

Tara: Yes, exactly.

Jeff: Jay, do you have something like that in Tennessee?

Jay: We don't really do a lot of stuff like that, but it does bring about this point that I want to make, which is we have a lot of state funding to get you started. I don't know if other people are familiar with this sort of thing. I would say get you started. You have to have a certain number of years under your belt. I did want to mention to the listeners that we have something in Tennessee called the Tennessee Agricultural Enhancement Program, TAEP, and if you have a certain number of years, the state will really help you pay 50% of all your new equipment costs and new yard costs and expansion and everything else that I think most people don't take advantage of either because they're scared of the government or they don't want a bunch of paperwork. Whatever it is, it's definitely worth it. I've done it. Probably you can do it in our state at least eight or nine times is how many times I've done it over the years. It's just every single year at a certain time period, there's a deadline and you put it in and then your response back a few months later.

I bought trailers these extraction equipment, there's a marketing one and they can help you with marketing and website work. I really feel like if you're looking for ways to get help and get started, there's so much more out there if you just do a little bit of research and have an open mind about. I wanted to make sure I mentioned that.

Tara: We've been the benefit of lots of grants too, both public and private. Private grants are great. They give you a check and send you on your way. Public grants, less so. Texas has a Texas Young Farmers grant. They're loose and easy with young, I think it's under 40, under 45 maybe. Because that is young for a farmer. That one's a pretty easy one. The USDA has lots of grants. There's some marketing ones that no one even takes advantage of.

In Texas, we have field service offices for the USDA. Go and visit them, talk to them because there's a lot of federal grant money that goes unused and those local agents are there to help you. Just last week my local agent was like, "We've got this marketing grant and no one's applying for it. You just have to fill out a one pager and you get money." Visit those offices in your area and look for private grants as well. We got the USDA Value-Add Grant. It's big dollar USDA grant. This would be for someone a little bit further along.

Also know that a lot of these big-dollar grant programs, you can pay grant writers. I think it's one of the worst secrets in that you're going to pay a huge chunk of the money that you are going to get, but that Value-Add Grant is a matching $250,000 grant paid out over three years. It is totally legal and okay for you to pay a grant writer. They're going to take 28% of that, but 100% minus 28% goes home with me. That's good money. Looking at those, particularly if you're a little bit further along, there's a lot of grant money that goes unused.

Jay: Free money.

Becky: This is working smarter, not harder. This is such a great journey.

Tara: The paperwork for the USDA Value-Add Grant is- we would've never have done it. My grant writer owns their 28% and they also manage all of their reimbursements. It's sad and depressing to look at the bureaucracy involved with this. I happily give them their 28%. Just know that that is-- These guys are experts. They're not going to take you on because they work on contingency. They're not going to bring you on and apply for the grant for you if you're not going to get the money, so know that.

Jay: Another one thing that to mention too, when you get that $250,000 grant, I would strongly suggest, hot tip here, skim a little bit of it and put it off to the side. Stick it in. We have multiple accounts for certain things. You want a marketing account, a new equipment account, a health insurance account, all these other things that we are constantly skimming off the top to feed these accounts so that someday when you want to buy that giant extractor or whatever, you have the funding, or someday when unfortunately your assistant quits and has to move on or whatever, you're not completely out of luck. We have automation.

Every single month, we're literally just putting whatever it is. If it's $100 a month, we're putting it into a fund for beefing it up for a rainy day. We also have fun funds. We work so hard in our business that we are having to mandate, we're going to put money aside and we're going to spend this on frivolous things and we're going to celebrate the whole crew or we're going to whatever. Because it can't always be serious. When you get this hopefully big landfall of money, make sure you are responsible with it. Just like when you go to Vegas, to the blackjack table, when you put that money out there and you win it, put a little bit aside for the backup for your insurance plan in case something doesn't work out.

Jeff: There's got to be a reply to that. I think I'll just let it go there, Jay.

[laughter]

Jeff: I'm looking at the clock. I can't believe how quickly our time has gone and we've only just touched the surface of everything to consider from the business side of upscaling. I'm going to have to try to wrap this up and ask if either of you would be interested down the road to come back. I think we've been talking about making this an ongoing occasional updates if you would be interested in coming back.

Jay: Absolutely. I wish somebody had taught me all these things when I started. I really do. I wish I had a void in the beginning and I wish someone was there to say, do this, don't do that. Also feel free to fall down. It's not about if you fail, it's just what are you going to do afterwards? Do you get right back up and keep trying.

Becky: I just want to make sure we talk about your book, Tara, that we're going to put a link in the show notes.

Tara: My beekeeping book, For The Bees, came out last November. It is a beekeeping book. First of all, many of the beekeeping books are written by northern beekeepers. It's not a lot by southern beekeepers. It was really important to me that this book talked to everyone. I put an incredible amount of work to make sure that it spoke to you no matter where you are in the world or no matter your climate. Basically we do that by rather than talking about seasons, we talk about resources or lack thereof.

That basically defines a season. If you do that, you can talk to folks no matter where they are. It was also really important to me to have a biology first book because I'm of the belief that if you are successful without understanding the nuance of bee biology, you got lucky. We should be bee biologist before we're beekeepers. We don't even get to the beekeeping until chapter four. I had to fight really hard for that because I think that's the best way to learn beekeeping. It's also fun. The beekeeping books fall into two categories.

I think generally speaking that gets you in trouble. You've got the reference book, very dense, very heavy. All the info's there, but it's challenging to access as a newbie especially. Then you've got the books that are beautiful and fun and pretty to look at, but maybe lack the substance. I just feel really strongly that we can have substance but also have fun. I hired this illustrator and she did all these beautiful and super fun illustrations. There's all sorts of Easter eggs. She had this idea to illustrate the Lord's Supper, but about bees. Jesus is the queen bee in the middle, and it's got all the macronutrients on the table. It's very fun. I hope it brings people joy because that was its intent.

Jeff: Tara, Jay, you've been providing a wealth of information to our listeners. We'll have your contact information in our guest profiles that you filled out and is online. We really appreciate you sharing with everybody your experiences on building your businesses from Hobbyists to Sideliner. Thank you.

Becky: You were both so generous, so thank you.

Jay: Anytime.

Tara: Thank you.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage. We want to thank Betterbee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot everybody.

[00:48:23] [END OF AUDIO]