We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kevin Holy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kevin below.

Kevin, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

We have been around maple syrup production our entire lives but never actually produced maple syrup ourselves, just spent time helping others. When we purchased our farm in 2008 we had no intention on making maple syrup, we were actually a livestock farm with horses, cows, and chickens. We tapped our first trees in 2013 strictly as a hobby with 10 trees and a turkey fryer. Fast forwarding 10 years we now have several thousand trees and turned it into a full time career. We were in 2016 playing with the idea of aging maple syrup in used bourbon barrels to help give an enhanced flavor. This has worked incredibly well, which has skyrocketed our business. Although we were not the first ones to do this we have developed a unique aging method that sets our bourbon barrel aged maple syrup aside from others. Our reassurance came in 2021 when we won Grand Champion for our traditional maple syrup and in 2022 when we won Grand Champion for our bourbon barrel aged maple syrup and the maple festival.

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?

We are Kevin, Morgan, Chase, and Cora Holy. We are first generation farmers that stumbled across our passion for maple syrup through curiosity. Our current business which I tell people all the time happened entirely by accident. We had zero intention to making this farm brand a full time carrier, but we did react to the local and even national market by growing as the customers desired our products. Our name “Seldom Seen Farm” actually came from one of our horses. When we purchased our farm we had a horse that was ill and going into retirement. We purchased the property so he could live out his life peacefully. His name was “Seldom Seen”. Our business is 100% family owned and operated exclusively between my wife Morgan and myself. We cover all aspects from production to bottling, marketing to bookwork. We also sell products under a second brand called “Rickhouse Reserve” which is a brand that is geared towards the bourbon industry. Rickhouses are the structures that house the barrels of bourbon during maturation. We chose this name because our line of bbq sauce, coffee and syrup are all bourbon based and wanted it to have its own recognition.
On top of the maple production we also offer maple tubing install and consultation services for other farmers weather established or just looking to get into the industry.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Yes! 2021 and Covid. It seemed like everything we knew about how we built our business changed almost overnight. We were big into traveling to shows, samples at local stores, and various markets in the area. We decided to make a strong pivot to heavy social media ads, social media posts, and e-commerce channels. That decision was a great way to reach a much larger audience and put our products in front of people who were cooking at home now instead of going out to eat.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I married her!

Morgan my wife of 15 years is the best business partner I could ask for. She helps with the day to day tasks and helps find solutions to problems that arise in the business. Couldn’t ask for more.

Contact Info:

• Website: Seldomseenmaple.com
• Instagram: @seldom_seen_farm
• Facebook: Seldom Seen Farm