We recently connected with Arica Sutherland and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Arica, thanks for joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

Prior to starting our maple syrup company, I was a Dental Assistant for about 5 years and soon after getting married and having a baby. We realized that it would be best if I stayed home with the kids. We have a total of 3 kids! That was my job being an at home parent. We started out making maple syrup as a family, which soon turned into a business. I love having a job that I can walk right out my front door! No commute time. So, yes I would say I am happier being a business owner. I can set my own schedule, take vacation when I want and be home when I want.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My family and I started to make our maple syrup as a fun family activity and it was a great excuse to be outside after a very long Minnesota winter. After three years of gathering sap from buckets and boiling it ouside on a open fire with small pans, we started thinking about using our maple trees and making it into a family business. In our first year, we started with 800 taps, a tubing system, a vacuum pump, a large collection of tanks, and a wood fired 10 foot long evaporator. We added more efficient equipment and a reverse osmosis machine as time passed. Now, we have approximately 2,700 taps with 15 miles of tubing. Where we are located in Minnesota where there is only a few larger maple syrup producers, so we help provide a local product to all the people that visit the beautiful North Shore of Minnesota. We bottle about half of our syrup that we produce into decorative glass bottles for gift shops and other stores all across Minnesota, all the rest of our syrup goes into bottles for grocery stores and local resturants. We pride ourselves on producing a high quality syrup and offering the local stores a large variety of decorative bottles and a variety of infused maple syrup. We currently make 4 kinds of infused syrup bourbon barrel aged, cinnamon , madagascar vanilla and habanero infused maple syrup. Over the years we have heard so many compliments on how unique and delicious our maple syrup is.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

The funding for our maple syrup operation primarily came from a second business that we own, a drywall and painting company. After we got our maple syrup company started we did apply for a grant from the Department of Agriculture and we were lucky enough to get accepted. With the help of the grant we were able to upgrade some of our maple equipment to make it more efficent and improve the speed that we can process the maple sap.
For anyone starting out with a new business I would definitely recommend that they check with there state for low interest loans or grants, it helped us so much with building our business.

We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.

We have never sold a business before, but currently we have our maple syrup company and home listed for sale and are looking forwrd to starting a new adventure!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mnsyrup.com