Lessons from Scott Davies (Hilltop Honey)

I had a great chat with Scott Davies from Hilltop Honey the other day, and some of Scott's words of wisdom or reflections from the school of hard knocks were worth sharing. You can listen the whole Podcast here and I have edited a few of my favourite quotes below.

Company Overview:

Hilltop Honey has 136 employees in Newtown, Wales, working in a 55,000-square-foot honey factory. It is selling around ￡43 million (2024). The business was built off a ￡5K loan from the bank and some good support from the Welsh Government. It now sells a wide range of honey, which is available in most big supermarkets.

Importance of getting to know your customer

“At the very beginning, I went to consumer shows all the time to try and understand my consumers…and they were all looking for raw honey. So we launched out into supermarkets with raw honey. So that added a completely different spin to the usual honey. It was a consumer demand for it. And then I suppose what really grew from there.

Getting the pricing right

There's a taboo about price. Don't you dare be cheaper than somebody, right? And that's what all Aldi, Lidl, Tesco, and every other retailer is trying to do. They are cheaper than the next person, right? Because that's ultimately what the consumer cares about.?

Everybody's only got so much to spend on food, right? So we positioned ourselves to be cheaper. To cut a long story short, I was more affordable than the market leader. How many challenger brands do that? Not many, right? And that was our marketing.

Delivering quality

Value means the quality of things I'm getting for my price. You need a kind of laser focus on having a product that people will buy more than once. Now, you can buy short-term success, but I think the staying power is what matters,

Focused Range

Some people bring out so many products, they have one success…and then suddenly, you've got another product, and another product.?

We just powerhouse our main core lines and keep focusing on them. Of course, you bring out some halo effect products that make your brand feel like you're doing new things, but truly, deep down, three or four products are kicking ass for you.

B-Corp and the importance of doing things right

Community is at the heart of everything we do. Best believe you'll know if you're a bad employer in my neck of the woods, right? So, and I don't just do it for that, mate. I'm a genuine guy who likes to make sure people get to go home and have food on the table. I hate the idea of people going home and they can't afford a house or they can't afford food. It kills me.

So it (B-Corp) was just a great thing to validate what we're already doing, right? And at least the world knows what we're trying to do. We're trying to be good for people and the planet. So it was just nice to have something recognisable that, well, people that recognised it could say, okay, Hilltop are doing right things.