business, not in the business.’
And we thought, we don’t really have a choice because the other piece of advice that we got was ‘keep your jobs.’. In fact, we still have our jobs. And that forced us to hire a full-time manager. We couldn’t be the people on the floor, serving the taps all day. Keeping our jobs forced us to work on the business and let go of things like sweeping the floor, and the other little tasks. It forces you to put systems in place to make sure all that stuff gets done. Standard operating procedures for the retail space became very important early on and it made us think about the business as a business instead of a hobby. We didn’t start fermenting in our basement orf have one of those romantic stories about starting in the garage like the lone soldier building an empire from nothing. It’s less romantic hearing about the winemaker and the professor. But that doesn’t mean that we lack passion for the impact we want to have on local agriculture…… We are both Maritimers and we both feel strongly about it. We thought ‘we get this’ and we could probably do a good job of putting one of these oper- ations together. We almost felt obliged, to be honest, to contribute to the cry-out for rural economic sustainability in Nova Scotia. Have sales met your expectations? The initial reaction was far greater than anything we could have possibly imagined. And our naive ideas about us coming in and helping out on the weekends have gone by the wayside. Our new motto is ‘no need to push, just satisfy to pull.’. Over three times the amount we were planning on making. In our first year of operation, we purchased over a million Annapolis Valley apples! What about growth within the company? Obviously it started with the two of you in late 2015. Where are you now? We started with two full-time employees and one part-time. And that lasted about two weeks and we realized that we needed to step it up. This past summer we had 15 people on payroll. We designed the business so it could grow. And because of that, we haven’t run into any huge produc- tion bottlenecks or anything. But we didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. We put out a Facebook post the day we opened that said “at 5 o’clock today, we are going to open the back door”… at 5 o’clock there were 25 people waiting to get in. So we There’s enough people coming in the door, we just need to keep them happy. Our original goal was to make 18,000 litres in our first year, and we made 60,000.
right over the railing into the cellar, and you can see them making the cider.
“Connecting the customer to the product, that’s what people want these days.” Connecting the customer to the product, that’s what people want these days. They want to feel connected. They want to hear your story. So we do tastings (we don’t serve pints! If you like the tasting, you can buy a bottle and take it with you.)). And we also serve directly from the tanks down- stairs into growlers or refillable bottles.
The experience is what connects our community to our brand.
Often these family businesses start as an idea, and they become a 24/7 burden. How do you keep that from occurring?
We were always told most importantly, ‘work on the
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2017
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