Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: Why Company Culture Matters

Leigh-Kathryn is the Founder and CEO of Bee Downtown, a 2017 Southern Living Southerner of the Year, 2018 Inc 30 Under 30 Rising Star, 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur and a 2019 Outstanding Young Alumni of North Carolina State University. As a fourth generation beekeeper she brings a wealth of knowledge of bees to the classroom, paired with a dynamic energy through her storytelling expertise and proven ability to build effective teams at such a young age. Leigh-Kathryn graduated Summa Cum Laude and is a Journeyman Beekeeper.

“We may be moving forward at the pace of a turtle moving through molasses, but we will come out of COVID ahead of where we started, and the companies that do that will be light years ahead of everyone else. I do not intend to break the promise of delivering what we said we would deliver and the joy promised we would bring to our Bee Downtown partners. And so, in the past it’s been in-person, it’s been hive tours, it’s been our leadership Institute, it’s been in-person honey tastings. That’s how we fulfilled our promise in the past, but there are other ways to fulfill the promise now.”

Owen S. Jordan: How are you doing?

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: I’m doing well. At Bee Downtown, it’s just been a lot of juggling along with trying to hire more people as Bee Downtown is growing and expanding this year. While we’re excited for multiple new teammates to join, I’ve learned a lot during the process of hiring multiple employees at once about the importance of finding people to join or a team who fit and help build our culture.

Owen S. Jordan: How do you know if somebody’s a good fit for your culture or not?

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: To me, when you have a small team, hiring people who fit your culture is more important than simply hiring the most qualified person on paper for the job. It’s all about culture. For example, we just announced, Ben Dictus, previously our Lead North Carolina Beekeeper, is now our Principal Beekeeper. So, he now oversees and manages all Bee Downtown beekeepers. He’s also been promoted to our Chief Culture Officer because he just embodies our culture so well and has been a big part of building it. He likes to say his new title is “Chief Api-CULTURE-ist.

I felt Bee Downtown was at a place where it was ready for another C-suite officer and Ben earned it. And for me, it is important for people to earn their leadership roles at Bee Downtown. They are not handed out. Because it’s a startup and I have to be able to see that somebody in leadership is going to put in the work — I honestly don’t care what somebody’s background is. If you are committed to Bee Downtown, if you put in the work, if you become a key part of our team, as you grow with us, so will your title.

So, how do we build our culture the right way? And not lose sight of very important pieces of it as we grow? It’s literally the million-dollar question.

And right now, the world’s coming back from a pandemic. We, fortunately, grew during the pandemic and have currently within Q1. It’s been our best sales year ever and we’re just in Q1. So we have to have the right people on the team.

Owen S. Jordan: Congrats on Q1. That’s awesome.

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: Thank you. Joe LeBoeuf always says leadership is hard and it’s inconvenient. And I think, especially through COVID, that rings very true. Like everything has been more difficult, everything has been inconvenient. But it is my belief that you have to step up to the plate and get it done. As much as people want to glamorize being a leader, it can be super lonely and it can be extremely exhausting to be a leader because you have to, for the good of your company, put yourself in uncomfortable and inconvenient situations.

Owen S. Jordan: You hit on some really great points there. My mentor Dan O’Connor has definitely taught me that. He taught me leadership is very lonely. It’s not fun. It’s sad. Like you have moments of depression, but it’s worth it in the end. And, through that loneliness as a founder and someone who’s building the foundation, you are creating the culture there, even though it’s just you, you are beginning and dreaming about what you want the company to be like, and you’re trying your best.

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: Culture is key. I’m learning that in a book I’m reading now called Good People. It talks about how you can have the most qualified people possible come onto your team, but if they are not good people for your team, it will fail. It will not succeed. Or it will like, putter along. When we interview people, the questions we ask them, people always are like, “I’m sorry, why are you asking me these questions?” And I don’t want the response of, “tell me a time at work where you overcame a stressful situation and thought creatively for a solution.” Because somebody might have a standard key response to that, that they’re going to use every time.

So we asked them questions like — ” If you found a goat alone in the woods what would you do?” And that’s the same question as “How would you quickly solve a problem? And do you care about nature” And some people are like, “I would leave the goat?” Well, we don’t leave in Bee Downtown culture. If my teammate Ben found a goat, he would build it a house and call animal control. Oh, and name it Philip! We ask questions that get to the core of who applicants are, and we know they’re odd, so we send the interview questions to applicants in advance to give them time to really think about it. I’m learning how much time and money it takes to hire someone and onboard them. And if it’s the wrong person, how much energy is wasted because of it. So that notion of hire slow fire fast is — I don’t want to fire people. So I just would rather get the right people.

Owen S. Jordan: How did 2020 challenge your culture?

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: Before COVID everything we did was on campus, in-person employee engagement. And I’ve literally said this so many times in pitches and like business meetings, that we’re not a tech company — we’re bee boxes and in-person experiences, and I would say that over and over — and then COVID hit. And it was like, okay, well, we’re going to be a tech company. one of the lessons we’ve learned from the bees is adaptability. Honeybees adapt immediately to even a couple of degrees of pressure change in the environment. The bees immediately adapt to it. If the spacing of their beehive all of a sudden is wrong, the bees immediately go move towards the stressor. And we learn from that.

So we moved towards the stressors of COVID. We couldn’t be in person anymore. What are we going to do? How do we now create virtual programming and find someone who has a skill set that can help us build this program and then was obsessed with honey? We worked to build a honey tasting class that was virtual. And we built webinars and we started filming virtual hive tours so that teams could send them out to everyone at their company. And what we found is that we were actually able to create an even bigger impact than we ever have before. For example, we just did a webinar with Cisco that people from seven different countries around the world were on that webinar. We figured out how to keep the magic and that made us even more successful.

Owen S. Jordan: It’s interesting. When I talk to people who work at a company or have started a company or a startup, it’s interesting to hear what industries or what companies were hit the hardest and which ones actually blossomed from it.

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: My mindset at the beginning of it was Bee Downtown is going to be one of the companies that shines from the pandemic. We may be moving forward at the pace of a turtle moving through molasses, but we will come out of COVID ahead of where we started, and the companies that do that will be light years ahead of everyone else. I do not intend to break the promise of delivering what we said we would deliver and the joy promised we would bring to our Bee Downtown partners. And so, in the past it’s been in-person, it’s been hive tours, it’s been our leadership Institute, it’s been in-person honey tastings. That’s how we fulfilled our promise in the past, but there are other ways to fulfill the promise now.

Owen S. Jordan: How have you grown personally in the past year?

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner: I think I’ve had to learn how to listen better because everyone reacted, especially on my team, to COVID in different ways. So listening to how different people on my team were reacting to COVID and what they needed, what made them feel safe on the team — required me to be empathetic to the way everyone feels on the team and working with them within the boundaries that they felt comfortable during COVID. It was a big learning year for me as a leader.

Get connected to Bee Downtown at: https://www.bee-downtown.com/