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

Dru , appreciate you joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Our journey has been a wild one for sure and our scaling has been a challenge all in itself. From day one we knew that the best way to grow our business was organically. Slow and steady was always the plan to make sure that we were not trying to expand too quickly. Our process of making mead is unique and comes with a whole list of challenges. These challenges along with educating the public on what mead is and what it is capable of has always been on our mind when it comes to how fast can we grow our little shop.

All of our production is done in our small tasting room in East Nashville. With a small space we can only make so much product so it is always a balancing act to ensure we have enough product to supply both the tasting room and our distribution. Over the years we have upgraded our tanks multiple times and are constantly retooling our methods of production to make the best product possible, as fast as possible.

Not to mention we are only using real TN honey from beekeepers we know so sourcing the honey itself is always a challenge! Our facility goes through over 100 gallons of pure TN honey every month now so these beekeeper connections are crucial for the longevity of our business.

With all these in mind, looking back we are so thankful for the path we chose, slow and steady. Not taking on a ton of investors and giving away the company but rather to do the work ourselves, grow our brands organically and make sure we are focusing on mastering our craft as well as maintaining our local connections as our highest priority.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I have been personally been in the service industry for over 15 years with that background being primarily bartending. I have also been a beekeeper for the past 10 years here in Tennessee learning the ropes on how to tend to hives in both the city as well as rural areas. My partner and I were always hooked on brewing beer at home and that eventually led to us making mead recipes with our own honey. We worked on our Honeytree recipes for over three years before landing on product we loved and the rest is history!

Our product is very unique in the mead world. As far as we know we are the first meadery in the country (potentially the world) to make our mead with beer yeast rather than wine yeast. This makes a totally new flavor profile that we love and hope you will too! Most mead is super sweet and almost syrupy in texture while ours is more on the dry to semi-sweet and long gone is the syrupy texture. This gives us a much more accessible product that we think will convert everyone to mead drinkers!

All of this hard work is to fuel our main mission, Save Bees with Booze. As beekeepers we saw how hard it was to make a living keeping bees and over 10 years we saw more people quit than people pick up the trade. It is exceptionally hard to keep bees as climate change and pests continue to take over as well as the challenges of selling your honey once you have a successful harvest. Enter Honeytree! We use only TN honey and work directly with the beekeepers. We go through hundreds of gallons of honey a year and make sure to pay a premium for their product. This keeps beekeepers working on their hives and producing honey rather than focusing on small packaging and selling at markets. Our goal is to be the highest source of revenue for beekeepers in whatever state we operate in through the production of mead. Making booze and saving bees, something everyone can get behind!

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

Hands down the biggest close call for our business was the tornado / covid shutdown of 2020. In March of 2020 Nashville had a massive tornado walk right down the street our shop is on. Completely destroyed the businesses across the street, put 13 holes in our roof, destroyed our HVAC system, took out our back patio and destroyed the towns power infrastructure. Within a week of this we also started going into Covid shutdowns all over the country. All of this within our first year of opening. Safe to say it took everything we had to keep the shop from closing permanently but we were fully dedicated to keep going and double down on our dream of saving bees with tasty alcohol.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

One big pivot we realized early on was how we needed to operate our Tasting Room. Most all breweries focus primarily on distribution of their product and use the tasting room sales as secondary income. With so few people knowing what mead is or having a bad experience with a mead that is too sweet and being turned off by it that we were up against some serious challenges. We decided to flip the normal brewery system on its head and focus primarily on our tasting room and have distribution be our secondary source of revenue. Focusing on in house guests gives us the ability to educate and inspire folks on what we are doing here and give them the opportunity to try a ton of different meads to find out what they like. We always say here at the shop that we have a flavor for everyone.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.honeytreemeadery.com
• Instagram: @honeytreemeadery
• Facebook: Honeytree Meadery
• Twitter: @honeytreemead
• Youtube: Honeytree Meadery
• Yelp: Honeytree Meadery