3 Lessons We've Learnt the Hard Way

We turned 18. 

Most businesses fail within the first year and out of them, 65% don’t make it to the third year, so we are feeling pretty delighted, and don’t think we could have ever anticipated that when Steve turned to Dave and asked ‘wanna start a veg shop?’ that we’d be here.

18 years ago, we started off as 2 idealistic hippies, living with our parents, with a dream of using the medium of business to start a health food revolution.  We wanted to try to build a happier and healthier world, building a community on the way, which is still at the very heart of The Happy Pear. 

Now, we live down the street from our parents (in separate houses in case you were wondering!) and the business looks a little different. We still have our original shop/cafe, but now it has a sourdough bakery that hugely excites Steve on a daily basis when he tears apart his first breakfast roll of the day. Yep, first of many. 

Down the road from that, we have a 4 acre Organic regenerative farm where we’ve started growing seasonal veg to provide our cafe with, as well as creating a local veg box scheme for people who want to celebrate and enjoy fresh and local veg!

AND DOWN THE ROAD FROM THAT, we have Pearville where the not-to-sexy operational things happen as well as our little filming studio, where we shoot our Youtube recipes from. We have over 70 products in Centra and SuperValu across Ireland with plenty more in the pipeline. One of our biggest achievement though happened quite recently, with the launch of our membership app that is the new home to all our life-changing health courses.

Our courses were birthed out of a 4 week experiment we ran above our veg shop! We put 20 people on a whole food plant based diet and had a local nurse take the participants' starting and finishing measurements, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure and weight to record the benefits that plants could bring. Would it work or not...??

Luckily, it did. Roll on 12 years and we now have 11 courses with leading medical experts such as Cardiologists, Gastroenterologists, Gynaecologists, showing the benefits of eating more veg, moving your body and prioritising your sleep can have on your health, energy levels and overall wellbeing. We wanted our membership app to be a place where we could fully support people who commit to them, by hosting live events and social accountability workshops. Basically cheerleading from their pocket and creating a community of support, that we’ve always relied on. 

It’s not just highs and success stories though… Here are 3 lessons that we’ve learnt along the way, the hard way.  

• Quality over quantity -  We recently had to close our Happy Pear Shoreline cafe that we’ve had for 10 years to focus more on original cafe. It can be easy to get caught up in growth and become a sort of magpie that gets excited by shiny new things, and you can find yourself drawn to the next project, and next project, and the next project! Because of that, you can often fall victim to not realising a business stream's full potential. Standing back, taking a breather and assessing your current position is key. Learning to say no is a powerful thing that doesn’t come always come naturally - especially not to us.  But we’re working on it. Saying no and focusing on less is our new mantra!
• Everything goes in cycles - We’ve learnt that things come in waves and we know that there is only certain things any individual can control; such as showing up, being consistent and deeply believing that your hard work will pay off. We have found this is half the battle to not get too distracted, looking off into the future and to keep taking steps forward no matter how small. Sometimes even a small step backwards is okay too. You can’t fire an arrow with pulling back the bowstring.
• You can’t please everyone - When we started, we were trying to appeal to everyone. We had this strong desire to be liked and we now realise that if you stand for something- you’re always gonna ruffle some feathers. Appealing to everyone means losing authenticity and likely losing the reason behind doing what you do. Being kind, open and accepting to each individual is important, but that doesn’t mean you have to digress from your beliefs, goals and dreams. We once heard “Integrity is the seed of achievement” - So you can’t be everything to everyone.  It’s taken quite a while to accept we can't please or be liked by everyone and quite frankly - it’s foolish to try!

Whilst we’ve faced challenges and a lot of hard times, we ultimately couldn’t be prouder to be celebrating our Happy Pear 18th birthday and can’t even begin to count all the good times and belly laughs we've had along the way. Here’s to the next 18 years!!

Thanks for joining us on this adventure,

Steve and Dave x