Hey everybody and welcome to That will never work. If you want to find out more or apply to be a guest head to Mark Randolph dot com. You'll also find an invitation there to join my discord community. So many of us dream about our passion project becoming our full time gig. Well, Alison Wickham is one of those rare people who made it a reality. Her love for honeybees became the Siller Pollinator Company. An initial uptake for her offerings was enthusiastic, but growth has stalled and this has her at a juncture. Her top revenue generator is her central Virginia Hive maintenance service, which she describes as like pool boy Herbie's. But the trouble is scalability is challenged by everything from geography to sunlight hours. On the other hand, she sees scalability in her less profitable adopted Hive program, but she thinks she needs nonprofit's partners when she's doing something so important for the survival of our food supply. Why is it so hard to get this business buzzing? Well,

let's jump into the episode and find out. Hi, I'm Mark Randolph, co founder of netflix and six other companies over the years I've heard that will never work thousands of times. But I've learned there are things we all can do to increase the chances that they will, so join me for that will never work. So Allison, welcome to that. One of her work. Thank

you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited

to be here. I'm really grateful. Thank you. May be a great way to start would be for you just kind of jump in and tell us what your your business does and how it's doing and then you can kind of figure out a way to segue into what we should

talk about today. Yeah, sure. So my business is still a pollinator company and I founded it with the mission that is simple, but has become quite complicated, which is that I want to help people help pollinators full stop. Um and what that looks like right now is we manage a lot of honeybee hives for folks. We do consulting to help them with that. Um we install pollinator habitat, meaning planting wildflowers. And we also help foster native bee populations, help foster butterfly and hummingbird populations. Uh we help people get connected to the supplies that they need to do these things. Um we have classes to help people get connected with pollinators because there's a lot of people in the world who realize that pollinators are in trouble and they want to help and they don't exactly know where to start. So that's where we come in. Um and so any any any projects that is gonna help pollinators? We say yes.

So give me a sense of the scale of this. I mean, how many people are you helping to help pollinators?

Yeah. Right now it's in the hundreds. Um we geographically spread ourselves across pretty much the entirety of central Virginia at at this moment. Um but we do have a couple of programs and services that are a little more scalable and widespread um because they're mostly maybe digital. Um So you know, it's, it's a small and humble company that has grown from just myself and a couple of $100. Um but we were working on it, we want to spread much farther and help more pollinators and more people.

So you mentioned that you have grown from just you and a few $100. And how many people now do you have traipsing across Virginia to help you?

So officially we are now a team of Uh five. but there's also my friends and family that are out there rallying as well, so,

and just to give people an idea here um What's the core thing that what's the most pop common thing that's done? Not, not, I don't need a list of everything that clients might want you to do, but if you have to say I gotta pick the one thing which most of them want me to do. What is that?

Yeah, the most common service that we provide and the largest revenue generator is our hive management service. So we manage honeybee hives for farms and estates in central Virginia.

Are there any people for whom you're doing other services that you don't manage the hives, is someone coming just hiring you to manage their milkweed? Uh habitat,

correct, yep. We have that too

many

um Fewer. Um you know, I gut check 65% of all revenues are from hive management and everything else is everything else

And I guess the number of um and by the way I'm probing you on this stuff for a reason so I'm not just being uh difficult but so 65% of the revenue I get it or how many clients do you have, who you don't manage their hives but yet you make significant revenue. In other words, The 35% of the revenue I'm trying to get a sense of, is that other services to people you're already doing the hives or these totally different types types of clients?

Um Pretty much the answer is both it divides because a large majority of our management clients will also participate in some other service. Um but we also have quite a few clients who want us for something very specific. Um I'll give you an example. We just planted five acres of flowers for an energy company. Right? And that's the only thing that they've contracted us for. Um but then I also have high management clients who say, hey, what should I plant and then we acquire that pollinator habitat business through that through that um channel.

Um I know just enough to be dangerous. So I've gotta be careful, gotta make sure I ask the right questions that people who basically have never ventured off a sidewalk before and you and I are talking about here. Um so I do, as I mentioned before, I have um orchards, you know, I have 100 some odd fruit trees. So I understand the critical role that pollinators play in the quality um of your crop. Uh and I know you can certainly have it naturally pollinated just by whatever the natural um uh what would you call it, that fauna? Yeah, that actual birds, insects. Um that would pollinate it naturally, but that if you really want to supercharge your yield, you bring in bees are the hives that you manage owned by the land homeowner or these someone else's bees that you're managing?

There's both. So I do have hives that I manage and you know, we we we use them for pollination services, just like you're describing where we'll bring them right now. I've got some bees on a pumpkin job here in Virginia um and we have hives that we use as resource hives, meaning that we sell bees and honey out of them. Um but the majority of the hives and I'm managing are owned by the landowner and they are the owner of the hive. I'm the operator of the hive.

So in um we're gonna get so detailed on bees. People are gonna be going alright enough on the bees already, but I do know here in California and certainly in the county that I live in, which is an Ag county. Um this be stuff is serious um especially if you go to inland the central valley of California where you have thousands of acres of fruit trees that there's companies that basically truck in a semi loads full of beehives, leave them there for a week or two and then they move north to the next location and keep doing that sequentially. Uh I assume that's a totally different thing that does, does take place and that those people manage their own hives generally

correct. Yeah, the revenue that they're generating is on the pollination service itself and they're doing it with so many hives, like you say that it's, you know, 203 $100 a hive, but you bring in 20,000 hives, so that really adds up to a full scale business and that's the main service that they're providing and they might, they might do that on the California almond crop and then they move on to florida and do the orange blossoms and that's how they're sustaining their businesses. They're moving large numbers of hives around, which is a completely different model than what I have. Um I do some of that work very small scale locally.

So you basically are filling this gap or this, you're filling the bottom side of this pollinating market that if someone is really in this for, I'll put it this way there in this there in the ag business for, for business, in other words, they, that for them, the crop, they're raising is money and so I'm going to bring the bees in for two weeks and then get them out and the people who do that manage it themselves, but that when you're smaller and you have a small orchard or used to have backyard fruit trees. You those big guys, a little suburban neighborhood does not want a semi load of bees showing up that they then just want a hive or two and that your there's this hole in the market that you're filling. Is that basically right,

correct? Yeah. There's beekeeping as a hobby has grown exponentially since the new, the news started covering this colony collapse disorder topic um which is, you know, the honeybees are in trouble and everybody caught wind of that. And um beekeeping exploded in popularity. And with that luckily also people learn that pollinators are in trouble. All of them not just honeybees um that you know, the human influence on the natural environment is causing them some stress. So people have really gotten, you know, jumped into this hobby and something that they're really interested in. And so my company is sort of in that niche between hobbyists and commercial beekeepers where we're professionals that know what we're doing. We know how to take really good care of these bees and help people who have maybe got no idea what they're doing. Um because there's a learning curve for um this this is a very specific type of animal husbandry and it's I always tell people it's not rocket science, but it's not easy. So we're there to help.

Yeah, it sounds, I mean I I totally get it and I totally kind of understand the basic business model and just again, just to make, to tie this together, as I mentioned before, the orchard and I do have um people who help me, it's a lot of pruning to do, it's a lot of care um all year round for fruit trees and so rather than doing it all myself, I have a company that specializes in home orchard care. So this is in some ways a very similar model, this is home um pollinator care, So it sounds like you're doing okay, what is it that you you want to talk about today?

Yeah. So the thing that's been on my mind since March, basically I've been just tormented with this sort of decision making that I seem to be stuck on, which is what do we do do too to scale this business or not. And so I'm I'm I'm really fortunate in that we did, we just started doing something and it's sort of is paying the bills and it's supporting a couple of people and we are out here doing what we love and we're supporting people and we're supporting pollinators, but um for instance, I can't afford benefits for my employees. So, you know, the question becomes, do we want to grow and make some more money and build a bigger team and really create a career for people and really expand our influence or are we happy where we are? And my answer is I would like to grow the business. And now the next question is how, because with the Hive management service, we are bound by geography, whether uh,

whether or not the sun is shining, um if it's dark, we're not making money, if it's raining, we're not making money. Um, so if we can't drive there in a day, we can't do the project. And I'm trying to look at, you know, when I started this business, I said yes to everything, I have all these revenue streams. My bookkeeper is actually here today and she's like, oh my gosh, why do you have so many revenue streams,

you know? But um it's allowed me to have all these doors open and now I get to decide which ones to shut and which ones to pursue. So we have this adopted Hive program right now that I would like to revamp and relaunch and see if it might be able to sort of make money while we sleep. Um, so this is a small program that we have that we've paid very little attention to and no marketing for. But the idea came to me because I had nonprofits that we're interested in having beehives, but they didn't have any money to pay for our services. So we set up beehives at the nonprofit locations and we sold shares of the Hive to customers Um at low, you know, 50 bucks a year

hive

share and that financially supports the hive so that the nonprofit can have that beehive for free. And surprisingly I have a 98 customer return rate in this program,

customer being the non profit customer being the person who adopts the

hive. Yes, folks find shares of the hive.

And how many people is, How big is the sample of this?

It's like 60 people. So it's not a big sample.

I do have some thoughts about this. Um, and let's talk about, I will confess I'm a kindred spirit with your bookkeeper, your accountant. This is what it was. And the fact that since she's there today, maybe we can get her on and the two of us can bond over how many revenue streams you have.

Um

yeah, you're doing, you're doing what I would have done at the beginning too, which is, I would just tried a lot of stuff. Um in other words, you're going, I my purpose my why is I really wanna help pollinators. I really think it's really good for the food supply chain. It's good for people. It's good for the environment. It's good and it needs help. So you started from a place which you cared about, which is great. And you said, let's think of all the possible ways that we can do this and we can certainly plant wildflower plant better habitat. We can certainly support other things.

We can place hives, we can support hives. We can help non prop. You tried a lot of things. So great, fantastic work. But The reason you do that is not to build a repeatable model that consists of 30 or 40 different things. The reason you do that is to try and hopefully have the one that works, smack you in the head and go me dummy. I'm the one that actually all these things you've tried makes a difference. Um, and I've, I've talked about this a lot, but it's kind of a very, very, extremely common principle at a startup where you just got to test things and it's not how good the ideas are.

The ideas are easy. It's how clever you can be about quickly, cheaply and easily trying things. And the reason you do them quickly cheaply and easily is because they don't need to be good because if it's a bad idea, no matter how perfectly you execute it, it's going to not make a difference. But if it's a good idea that no matter how poorly you execute it, it will immediately show up and say, this is a great, great thing. So, um, you cannot keep doing everything forever because it just won't be repeatable or scalable. Like you said, you were one of the problems, you can't have people who specialize.

You say, I'm trying to hire someone. Well, I need someone who now specializes in planting wildflowers as well as someone who specializes and just narrows it down and to get to the economic efficiency at the beginning, you're gonna have to pick. And I hate to break it to you probably one thing and do that one thing really really well. And I'll come back in a second to how to help you figure out what that one thing might be. But one thing you said really struck me which is that um I can give people a living, but I can't really give them a good living. In other words, I don't have enough to really pay them benefits

and I get it.

You're struggling. Well, the red light that went on for me is that your unit economics are bad. If that happens, it means you're doing something that someone is not willing to pay enough for, That you can afford to do it or at least not do it in a scalable way. Um and I'm not saying that all jobs have to be 80 hours, um $80 an hour jobs. Um because certainly fast food industry has figured out how to do that, but they've done that by Not having one McDonald's in one town serve uh one type of meal and one of the next town serve a different one and not have different employees and different ones. It is the most mechanized automated um System in the world. And that's because they realize that people are not that some people spend $40 for a hamburger. Um and when that happens, yes, we're gonna spend this incredible care on the hamburger. But you get where I'm going with this analogy rather than beating it to death is that you um if you want to pay your people like Michelin starred chefs, you've got to find a business that people are willing to pay those prices for the hamburger um and all this should leap out of what you're doing.

And I also think that if you specialize um it will actually help you expand. The reason I started out this whole conversation trying to focus down who your core customers were. Is that when it comes to defining what your market is, what you do, You don't define the market by drawing a boundary around all the things you do, like here's all the stuff we do. Um and when you if you draw a boundary and you're including things that are what you do, you end up with this incredible gerrymandered district, you end up with like a you know a map of Bosnia, you end up with all these weird contortions and a much much better way to define your market is defined by its center. So when someone says, what is your market, you pick the center and you really clear understanding of that, it doesn't mean you don't do things that are outside your center, but it means that you make sure that you really deliver on the center. So I think you would agree that your center is we service hives.

Um,

Now, which means a customer says I'm willing to put in 30 hives and have you serviced them. Can you also do some planting? Yes. But if someone goes, no, I don't want the hives, I just want the planting. Unless you think, well, maybe I'll do this, then they'll eventually put in 30 hives. In other words, once you kind of know that your center is here, it really helps because then your advertising and your marketing is so much clearer. It's so hard to create an image in someone's mind about what you do and what you stand for and what you're good at that. You have got to be crystal clear and you gotta smack them on the head and go,

here's what we do. Here's what we do here is what we do. Here's what we do it well, do it well. And if you're saying it's all this stuff, yes, you reach more people, you reach them in a much shallower way and it's much better to reach a smaller number of folks. People who really want your product and really communicate it and focus also allows you to hire the right people. If someone's like, I love wildflowers, but I hate bees. Um, they're not the right person. And you know, it was kind of tolerate bees,

but I'm really into wildflowers, that's not the right person either. You want someone who's phenomenally good at bees and yeah, I'll learn how I'm interested to learn more about habitat. Maybe learn how to plant better. You get the idea. Um I just think so clear to me that you've got to say we're in the B business here. I'm not, and don't necessarily mean supplying bees, but you got to say my customer wants bees at their house. There are certain size. They have a certain income. Um, what can I do to help them? And it may be basically saying, you know,

and I'm also sensitive to the issue about and stop me here if you need to. Otherwise, you know, if you ever listen to the podcast before I keep going and going cause I get so excited about this stuff. Um, is that you mentioned, um I can't do it when it's raining. I can't do it when the sun's not shining. Well if you have a subscription business that, that money flows in, whether it's raining or not, the money flows in doesn't stop coming once the sun goes down. Doesn't stop. In other words, you change the nature of what it is you're selling and rather than saying I'm selling the hours that I'm out at your place dealing with your bees, You don't know what I'm selling is you having amazing honey. What I'm selling is you have an amazing harvest. What I'm selling is you being able to sit on your patio with your lemonade and your new york times crossword puzzle and not out there flexing with your bees. That's what I'm selling. And that protection and comfort is seven x 24 you're gonna say.

Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, a huge piece of it for most of my clients is, you know what I'm selling is that they know they're doing something good, they know that they are helping pollinator populations.

Well, I would do some research here and try and understand. Are there a lot of mean? Well I guess I'll say it, I'm always cynical about that which is, yeah, I know you'll find people, but when I'm looking at what my possible market motivations are, when I define who my market is. Like I said, okay, my market is basically having people have bees without having to worry about it. Um What I'll do in my mind, this is a fairly common marketing technique is I'll create personas. So rather than having it be, I don't know if you've done this work before, but you'll basically say I'm gonna envision the quintessential Customer and there could be more than one one could be customer a is um uh john and Maria johnson uh john john is a full time uh john's housewife,

househusband Maria works for a major corporation they have an income of $100,000 a year. They were really nice house on three or four acres and they've got a handful of fruit trees in the back. Um And they think it's really cool to have bees, but they don't know shit about beekeeping and uh you can picture who these people are and what their motivations are. It's the pollinator small in nature, they don't care, they do, but that's not. They like the idea of having this beautiful backyard, it's like the explosion. Maybe not in Virginia, but certainly in California of using grapes as landscaping. These people aren't gonna make wine, they're not gonna make good wine. Uh But they love the idea of having um an acre of grapes in the backyard because it speaks to some romantic image of what the landed gentry might, and you've got to understand that what john and mary's motivation is,

there's also another customer type who is chris uh and his partner um and they live in a smaller place and they make very much very little money. In fact, uh both of them work in the local coffee house. Um But they really care reading a lot about the bee population and it really bothers them. Now they have a different motivation, they have a different income level, they have a different thing they can do and the product that you would sell and the way you market to them is going to be different based on those two. And you would think through who are these personas really and use that to define what your market should be like, what should I focus on? And I picked those two for a reason that it strikes me. Those are two really interesting products. That one is I solve the problem of you having bees,

which

is it's turnkey. If you want to buy your own bees, I'll help you buy your own bees and you own them now and all that. But it's part of a service. It's an annual annual or monthly contract. You don't need to worry. You just know you've got little bees and I'll even get the honey and give you the honey, it's just full service thing and you go, oh this is so cool. Kids get to bring the honey to school because john and mary I've got to tell you have a six year old and eight year old and they It's just turnkey. And my God, that seems like such a universally cool thing for a family to have and you can make it, they don't even need to think about it. Um they help the planet one that is, you just pay And you get a little d little piece of paper that says you are a 1/16 owner and I'm gonna go and take a photo of your hive once a month. And I don't know, some I,

my friends um gifted me a part ownership of a coral reef someplace. Yeah. So I get that one too. But there forget the nonprofits. They have nothing to do with it. I mean That's just where you stick the hive. But the real customer here is the 60 people who you can convince to do this. And if you can get how many people share a hive by

the way

in the, in the in the adopt a hive

per hive.

Yeah. How many people, how many people

we could go up to 50 easily per hive we could supply because you know, part of buying into buying your share of the hive obviously is that I'm sending you some honey. Uh you have to have that.

So holy crap. That's amazing. How much do you know how much is the donation? The the donation

Right right now is $50 per year.

So it's that $2500 per year per hive. Is that enough to pay to pay people a good way to do all this.

That Actually if we could achieve $2500 per hive per year, we would be sitting pretty because you know, a fair hive management for one individual paying for me to maintain their high for them. You know, somewhere between 800 $1000. Um, It's really hard to push people past that even though it's really labor intensive. So if we could get $2500 on a hive by breaking it up amongst many people. That would be nice. That would be really

nice. Yeah. It sounds like that's that's the full speed ahead. Are there in others, but it's not forget the hives for now you're a, you're a marketing person selling $50 shares and then figuring out how to distribute the money back out. And even if you don't, you can place the Hive, I guess you have to experiment with to what degree, what motivates someone to place to invest in to, to adopt a hive. And one aspect of it, because one aspect of it is the nonprofit piece of it. You're helping this nonprofit with their hive. The other one is you're helping the planet by pollinating

because

then you can potentially even even double dip, then you make these deals and go, normally it's going to be $2500 a high. But if you're willing to split half your honey, we can get people to, I don't know. Again, I'm not, I don't know the answer. This is what experimentation and risk taking and trial and error is all about, is figuring out which of these approaches were

right. Yeah. And I'm wondering if I should full steam ahead on this idea because it actually is scalable because I can have nonprofits in colorado nonprofits in California. I can be sitting in Virginia selling shares of hives. I can hire contract beekeepers to manage these hives. It's digital.

No, I hate to cut you off. But I do want to cut you off because I slap you in the face if you stop, stop with the dreaming. Okay, stop with the dreaming. Once you get to 75, I'll pick a number once you get to 100 hives in

Virginia.

Great. Then, uh, I don't care where your donors are. Your hives are in Virginia,

my dear.

Because $2500 does not a well paid employee make

all

of your costs. Remember you want to build the Mcdonald's? Uh, God, I hate this analogy. But you know what, I'm going with it. You want to build the Mcdonald's of Hive management and you want to sell the timeshare of, of hive um, ownership. Um and yes, you are absolutely right. You're you're you're you're gonna brag to me in 12 months. You're gonna go, we now have hive owners in all 50 states and in 17 other countries because this is equivalent of, I don't know if you're old enough to remember this for a while. They had these crazy things where you can buy a crater on the moon or buy real estate, which is, which is basically it's like a pet rock

gift.

Um and I don't know where my coral reef is. My coral reefs in the Maldives. I can give you 100% certain I am never going to go visit my coral coral reef uh anytime in my lifetime. And it's the same thing, but I get little pictures of my coral reef. Uh it sends me very nice little christmas cards. it's actually more considerate than most of my friends, but I'm never gonna see it. So yes, you come back and bragged and then a year you have, you have hive owners in all 50 states in 17 countries. And then when I go, where are these hives? You go there all within a 10 mile radius of my house And I've been able to scale up to 100 hives to manage these uh 5000 um Hive owners using those, save five employees. In fact, don't tell,

you, don't tell the employees you're down to three now, but only because you're so much more efficient because you have them all in one place and you're not having your sales technique is so skilled. Alright, so you can tell, I'm going down this excited path about how you can scale this thing and how to focus on it, but don't lose sight of the other thing. Focus understand what the core of your market is and live and breathe and think that don't get distracted by someone who wants you to plant five acres of wild flowers. I mean listen, you gotta pay the bills in the short term. I get it. So yes, but you always in the back of your mind go, I'm only taking this gig because I'm working as a waiter because I'm gonna eventually, I'm still going out and acting classes, You have the dream,

don't get distracted from what you have to do to focus on what's important and then the most important one is you're experimenting. We could have a whole another podcast if you don't have time for about how to actually begin to figure out the most effective way to reach people, how to acquire these people. If you have a 90% retention rate, you're off to a great start because then if you're, if they're, if they're paying 50 bucks a year and you have an average lifetime of three years, $250 you can probably spend 10 or $15 acquisition cost on them and, and are better. Um and that's, that's great for being able to acquire someone who's basically doing something which makes them feel good and then your cost of goods is mostly your labor to manage the Hive um, somewhat your shipping for the honey, somewhat your overhead, but you should be able to make that work. It's pretty cool. It's a great idea. I'm glad you stumbled onto it and I hope it works.

Thank you.

So anything on my, my rambling resonate.

Yeah. Yeah, I did. I really appreciate the uh, it's going to rain in on the dreaming because I've forgotten that I actually have not turned a profit on the adopted Hive program at all yet. So let's start there right now. It's just costing money, but as you say, putting my mind towards um, towards bringing in customers and trying to figure out how to communicate the value of this program to people. Um And I really, I really, really appreciate what you say to about my two types of customers because I really do have two types of customers. And I have, I have customers who don't care really how much anything costs. And I have customers who really care how much things cost. And I want, I want to communicate with them both. And I think that this might be the way

you're right. It's a luxury. But I mean basically the, you basically go my, it's $2000 and narrows my market. But if I want to pay a living wage, I can't be in the business of giving $2000 worth of service for $500 just as much as it breaks my heart. If you do want to own hive, this is fantastic. You share one, you get some honey, you get regular reports on the healthier bees, you'll get a newsletter for me once a month. Um Get a postcard from the bees. I don't know whatever you can come up with it. You find drives retention, um and vitality.

What are you going to do to get people who are current hive owners to tell their friends so they can become hive owners. You can begin tearing it. You can say there's a 10, there's a $10 tier where you just feel good about it. You want the honey, it's $70 a year. And if you have different categories, you get this little jar of honey for $50 level, you get the pint jar at the $100 level. I mean there's all kinds of cool place you can go with. This is a really clever idea and you're right. It does serve both your needs. So I think it's really cool Allison, I wish you huge amounts of luck with it. Um, and um,

I'll take, I'll take my honey, you know, whenever you get around to it, that would be great. Although for God's sake, I've got a massive bucket of honey down in our pantry from someone else who has people who have these hives for pollination purposes end up drowning in the stuff. So I'm set.

All

right. Best of luck, Allison, thanks for all the stuff you're doing for the planet. You know, that that's an important thing for me as well and let's hope we can turn this into a profitable business for you.

I hope so. Thank you so much for your time. I really

appreciate it. My pleasure. Allison, thanks. You know, sometimes the most interesting entrepreneurial ideas come from a personal passion and I'm curious to see where Alison takes her company from here. But if you've got a personal passion you want to talk about and want to apply to be a guest or sign up to my newsletter or join or that won't ever work discord community. Just head to Mark Randolph dot com. Or if you're feeling social, follow me on instagram, twitter linkedin and yes, even Tiktok Hilton

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