AITE business courses kept beekeeper grad buzzing.
AITE business courses sweetened his honey business
STAMFORD — As you pull up to Dylan Martin’s home, you are greeted by a mailbox painted like a bee.
The bee is a sneak preview into what lies in Martin’s yard: The 17-year-old senior at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering keeps 10 bee hives, which supply him with the honey that fuels his own business he started, Mill Brook Honey.
Martin said he has AITE to thank for his business. A beekeeper for the past four years, Martin took an entrepreneurship class during his sophomore year. Martin and his father, a North Dakota native, had been at the time keeping the bees for fun.
“I loved the idea of business,” he said. “My dad and mom are in business. They love it and we talked about how it was awesome.”
But when Martin’s teacher suggested he turn his love of bees into a business, he took her seriously. After surveying AITE teachers and finding 96 percent would buy local honey, he assembled a business plan for Mill Brook Honey. In 2016, he and his dad filed for a company LLC. “It taught me how to present and tell my ideas clearly without stuttering and tripping up on my own words, which is a huge skill that I use.”
Martin took more business classes, including entrepreneurship and marketing, which helped prepare him to enter Virginia Tech in the fall as a business major. “They taught me skills I had no idea about,” Martin said. “It’s been a lot of fun and I mean that in the most real way possible. It’s one of those things where I can always be doing something...It’s not something where I ever feel it’s wasted time. I always feel I’ve learned something new.”
Martin, whose older sister graduated from AITE two years ago, said he was drawn to the school for its small classes, but credits its range of courses in helping him hone down his interests.
“I attribute everything I have now to AITE,” Martin said. “Going in there, I had no idea what I wanted to do, but because it allowed me to take such a vast amount of classes, I could narrow out what I liked and didn’t like.”
Martin has supplemented his education by taking online classes on beekeeping with his dad through the University of Montana. He’s also a member of the Connecticut Beekeeping Association. Mill Brook Honey now produces 800 jars a year. This summer’s batch is already sold out.