We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dan Honig a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your business and how did you resolve those issues?

One of the biggest challenges that we faced in starting Happy Valley Meat Company was partner alignment. A year into starting our business, there were four partners, each one of us had a different vision of what success at company should look like, what our responsibilities were going to be and what was expected from each of us.

We had an operating agreement, but it was just a boiler plate with nothing specific to our situation, this meant we had nothing real in writing and no agreed way to solve problems. The next two years were miserable, while all four had previously been friends, that became untenable. We went to mediation and still couldn’t figure out what to do.

At the end of the day, one partner decided to but the others out.

Not having sat down and done any partner alignment, responsibility recording or having problem solving systems was hugely costly, time consuming and deeply damaging to our relationships and mental health. It’s a wonder our business survived!

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?

I founded Happy Valley Meat Company, a wholesale purveyor who makes local beef possible. We buy whole animals from small local farms and allow our customers (fine dining restaurants, colleges, butchers, caterers) to buy just the cuts they need of local, high quality beef!

Growing up, I didn’t know anything about meat. I didn’t even think about it until I studied philosophy and the environment in college and took a course on animals, ethics and the environment. I learned that the conventional meat system was hurting the people and animals that feed us and wanted to spend my whole career reversing that negative tide. That’s where Happy Valley came into existence!

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

We sell meat to high end restaurants in cities in the Northeast (NYC, Philly, DC). On March 15th of 2020, every restaurant was closed down to the coronavirus pandemic. We were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, had tens of thousands of meat in inventory and had dozens of farmers depending on us.

The next few months (honestly, it’s still going on!) were a rollercoaster. We stood up an ecommerce platform, we convinced our farmers to keep working with us (though they didn’t really have any other options) and started selling to anyone who needed meat. At one point, we had a press article that caused such an influx of orders that it overwhelmed our warehouse and we had to take our site down.

In the end, we only lost $5000 of bad debt, met all of our farmer commitments and are still in business!

Any advice for managing a team?

Putting people in the right role to achieve their own personal goals and matches their skills is the key to success. Without alignment on where we all want to go, it’s like pushing a bolder up a hill. We do three interviews to make sure each candidate is a good match and has the skills required to succeed in their job.

We do once quarterly vision meetings to track goals and keep our eyes on the big picture and we do reviews once every 6 months to ensure everyone is still aligned.

Contact Info:

• Website: happyvalleymeat.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happyvalleymeat/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HappyValleyMeats/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/happy-valley-meat-company/