Daily Inspiration: Meet Leigh-Kathryn Bonner

Today we’d like to introduce you to Leigh-kathryn Bonner

Hi Leigh-Kathryn, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started Bee Downtown when I was a Junior at NC State University. I am a 4th generation beekeeper and was interning for American Tobacco Campus in Durham, NC. I asked the owners of the campus if they would let me put a beehive on their rooftop because studies show honeybees thrive in urban environments. They said, “yes!” and introduced me to Burt’s Bees. When Burt’s Bees world headquarters installed bees at their front door, media picked up on the story and other companies like SAS, Capitol Broadcasting Company, RTP Foundation, and Bandwidth in the Triangle asked about bringing the bees and a sustainability program to their campuses too. Over the last 9 years since starting Bee Downtown we have grown from 3 hives with 2 companies to over 500 hives for more than 140 of America’s leading corporations in 11 different cities including companies like Delta, Chick-fil-A, Porsche, Dominion Energy, MetLife, Cox Enterprises, NYSE, Choice Hotels, Microsoft, Wellstar Health Systems, NetApp, Monin and many more.

At Bee Downtown we install and maintain beehives on corporate campuses to help rebuild sustainable agriculture while simultaneously providing year-round employee engagement and leadership development programming to our corporate partners. It is our goal to help cultivate great place to work rooted in agricultural education.

Bee Downtown is a Forbes and INC Magazine 30 under 30 Company, and was most recently named to the INC 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America. You can learn more about Bee Downtown and how to bring beehives and employee engagement experiences to your corporate campuses by visiting our website: bee-downtown.com or following us on Instagram: @beedowntown.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think anything about entrepreneurship is ever truly a smooth road. You will have your highs –they’re what sustain you, but you will also inevitably have your lows. You as the leader and your company are learning and growing every day and the business is constantly changing, especially in those first years when you’re still figuring out what your business model truly is. It’s exhausting, but it’s also the most amazing adventure as well. It’s what I love about the world of entrepreneurship. For me and for Bee Downtown the additional element of agriculture is involved and no matter how hard anyone tries, you can’t control Mother Nature so at the end of the day, you’ll never truly have smooth sailing from that standpoint either.

There are too many struggles along the way for me to count if I’m being honest. People like to paint entrepreneurship as such a beautiful and freeing way to choose to live your life and make your income, but in reality entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart because you’re constantly dealing with murpy’s law–if it can go wrong, it probably will. It’s your job though to figure out how to navigate those hard times in order to come out stronger than before. I love solving puzzles and crafting creative solutions to problems though which is why I love the world of entrepreneurship so much.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I love that I get to live out each and every day of my life intentionally trying to leave the world in a better place than how I found it. I love that I get to work a sustainable job in agriculture honoring my family’s history in North Carolina agriculture. I love seeing the impact we make on corporate campuses when the most powerful companies in the world fall deeply and truly in love with the bees that now call their campus home.

I have found over the years that as much as I love our Bee Downtown Corporate Hive Program, I equally love the journey I have been on the last 9 years in learning how to become the best leader for my company I can become. Leadership is hard and inconvenient. It’s also utterly exhausting, but when the hard work and intentionality pays off and you get to see your employees develop and grow into great leaders themselves, this the most rewarding feeling.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up I was quite the tomboy. While I’d spend the day playing in the mud or out on the soccer field, my southern mother would always make sure I at least had a bow in my hair :).

I have ADD so traditional school was always hard for me until I got to college and l learned that learning could be fun when you had the opportunity to learn about things you deeply cared about. I like to say while oftentimes people look at ADD as a disadvantage, I like to think of it as my superpower. While focusing on the not-so-fun tasks can be hard for me at times, and learning as an entrepreneur that chasing shiny objects all the time can be bad for your business, having ADD is also what helped me build Bee Downtown into what it is today because my ADD manifests through creativity, situational and emotional intelligence, and a love for problem solving in the moment. Learning how to not only live with, but thrive with my ADD is a journey I’m going to be on my whole life, but it’s a big piece of who I am!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bee-downtown.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beedowntown/