PayPal Stories Archive

Each month, we sit down with one of the many small businesses we work with to find out what inspired them to start their business, what challenges they have faced and overcome, and what advice they have for other aspiring business owners. For June’s Merchant Spotlight, we’re featuring Bee Raw, a Brooklyn-based honey company that founded the Bee Raw Save the Bees Fund. We sat down with founding and managing partner Zeke Freeman to hear all about Bee Raw.

 

A: I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. For nearly 10 years, I worked as a chef in some pretty famous kitchens and then went to work for Dean and Deluca. While I was working as a buyer there, a woman named Anne came in with vials of honey and a loose idea for a honey business. I worked with her to develop her product and eventually became her founding and managing partner.

 

Shortly after, Anne told me she didn’t have the capacity to take the business any further. Right then, I knew that was my entrepreneurial calling. I took over the business in 2005, gathered some family funding, added it to some funds I had saved over the years and rebranded the company as Bee Raw.

 

Growing up on a family farm in Pennsylvania, I always had a close connection with food as it was produced and had a good understanding of how American, small family farms really struggled. The work was challenging and a decreasing number of people were going into the bee keeping business. And since beekeepers make far more money in the business of pollination, not honey production, there were fewer small businesses focused on honey. At the same time, Argentina and China were dumping honey onto the global marketplace. I wanted to bring back local honey production and knew there were people like me who were looking for locally-produced honey.

 

What makes Bee Raw really special is that we partner closely with family apiaries – they’re our producers, and I’ve now been working with many of them for nearly a decade. We pay them a premium price to produce honey. And we hope that by paying a good price for their entire harvest of, say, Maine wild raspberry honey, they don’t have to travel around and that this close partnership results in healthier bees, stronger hives, and a better lifestyle. That really differentiates us from a typical honey purveyor.

 

We started the Bee Raw Save the Bees Fund in 2013 in response to the plight of honey bees. Colony collapse disorder is a significant problem worldwide. We feel like it’s our responsibility, being in this business and caring for agriculture and the environment, to help figure out how beekeepers and farmers can work better together so we continue to have a healthy environment. So we give one percent of our profits to the Bee Raw Save the Bees Fund, and we also collect funds from individual donors and other businesses we partner with. That money, in turn, helps fund research and education on beekeeping.

 

We find new customers and prospects through markets and festivals. There are a lot of great ways to attract prospects and then turn prospects into customers. We get new customers to sign up to receive emails on how to use honey, honey-based recipes and pairings. We show them the different types and tastes that are available. We also do a lot of content marketing – sharing information on what’s special about the individual varietals, how-to videos, great ways to use honey, information on where our honey comes from and how we treat our beekeepers.

 

And when customers are ready to buy, we use PayPal Here to accept payments on site. PayPal Here actually accounts for about 20 percent of our sales. For online sales, we host our website on Magento and accept PayPal as a payment option. We also use PayPal as our backend merchant processor. We actually process 100 percent of our credit card payments through PayPal, including payments from all of our direct-to-consumer customers and retailers. We treat PayPal as our primary account, which makes everything streamlined – all the revenue comes through one location and we can easily track it. It makes everything so much easier.

 

We’ve used PayPal Working Capital a few times and I’m sure we’ll use it again this year. PayPal Working Capital gives us access to a loan to fuel our honey sales*. It works like this: Honey is produced between May and August, but the fourth quarter – during the holidays – is when we get really busy. That loan helps out when we’re trying to do things like increase inventory or add sales people and money gets tight. PayPal Working Capital makes life easy because it’s immediate and we don’t have to deal with a bank. The loan gets repaid as sales are made, and I don’t have to ever worry about how I’ll pay it off. It just comes out of my account. It’s simple, and it just makes life way easier.

 

We don't measure our business by gross revenue or year-over-year sales growth. We measure the business by “ideal customer.” We track how many ideal customers we are meeting each year, how many we are turning into leads, how many are becoming customers and, most importantly, becoming Bee Raw Evangelists.

 

We find that by meeting and beating our goals for our ideal customers we are able to increase our bottom line growth at a rate far greater than our top line growth. For the first seven years in business, we grew every year by 200-300 percent. Three years ago we adjusted our strategy to focus all of our energy on our ideal customer. As such, over the past three years our bottom line has grown over 104 percent.

 

Talk to everybody. Being an entrepreneur can feel lonely – you’re the boss. It’s really important to network as much as possible – not just with the people in your business, but with people across various businesses. When you’re really open with people about your questions and any obstacles you’re facing, the world tends to be pretty giving.

 

*The lender for PayPal Working Capital in the U.S. is WebBank, a Utah-chartered Industrial Bank, member FDIC.