We all know how hard life can get for kids who are bad at school, especially because they often end up carrying this reputation of being stupid throughout their entire lives. And of course, they are usually told that they shouldn’t expect to be successful in life. Fifth suggesting that the best they could do was get a job as a janitor.
No one can tell for sure if that’s true, but the story I’m about to tell you proves that you should never laugh at these kids because one day they may end up hiring you to work for them. Scott Davis was born in a small village and spent most of his childhood being raised by parents who owned a sheep farm.
From their early years the boy differed from his peers. He was weak and shy, and to pile on, he was doing poorly in school. For years, Scott was forced to travel into the city to a dense school where he was noticeably different from everyone else and where he was often insulted and suffered from ridicule.
And maybe he could have kept tolerating at all if it wasn’t for one incident which became the breaking point that changed his life. So when Scott failed the high school exam in 2011, his teacher told him, Remember, you will never achieve anything in this life.
You might not even need to finish high school. Needless to say, these words discourage the boy so much that he did eventually drop out of school. He got a job as a construction worker just to earn a living. Somehow it may seem that this was a perfect turn of events for the young man, but then the economic crisis intervened and Scott got fired.
For several years the man was ready to take on any job, and just like his teacher once said, he did sweep the streets of his town one day and loaded coal at night, thus working for wear and tear.
Scott damaged his incontrovertible disk, which prevented him from continuing to take on jobs requiring hard physical work. Soon the desperate man ended up in the care of his parents. It would seem that this was the end. All that was left to do was give up and stop hoping for things to change. But Scott wasn’t about to do that.
For the next few weeks, he just wandered around. He was also forced to attend free courses for the unemployed and jump ahead. I’ll say that it was these courses that changed his whole life. Scott was assigned to come up with a business plan which he was later supposed to present to the other course participants. After thinking for a few days, the man wrote up a business plan for selling honey.
The thing was that as he was choosing the topic for his business plan, he remembered about the Beehive in his yard which he was taking care of. So the idea was quickly born on paper and a few days later Scott went to the bank to get his first loan. Of course, not having any collateral, no bank was willing to give a loan to the unemployed student.
Scott quickly lost any hope of getting lucky, but he was eventually offered to take out a loan of $5,000 at one of the banks. Even though it wasn’t enough, Scott decided to take it and start small.
Two weeks later, the man had already made logos, bought several hundreds of empty jars, and already purchased several cans of honey from his neighbours on the farm. As you might have guessed, Scott was planning to repackage the honey into individual cans, making money on the difference between the wholesale and the retail price.
And no matter how strange it may seem, it was a feasible idea. So the man wandered the streets of Newport every day, offering his honey to its residents. He also sold it at local fairs and other events.
His turnover slowly increased and in the end, he earned $31,000 in his first year. But he simply had no time to spend the money. So he reinvested all his earnings into his business. Scott increased the production volume every year. His earnings increased by several times, and three years later he became the most famous supplier of honey in his region.
Of course, he couldn’t handle the increased volume of sales on his own. Therefore, his whole family was soon engaged in sticking labels on cans and helping deliver the product. However, that was just the beginning. During the fourth year, Scott went to London for an exhibition where he presented his honey. Surprisingly, large honey sellers in Britain noticed his product and ordered 250 cans.
Thus, instead of spending the Christmas holiday resting, he devoted all of his time to sticking labels on cans. He was working from dusk till dawn, realizing that he needed to expand. Having completed the large order, Scott was able to move to an actual production facility where he hired more and more people over time, and soon another rush order awaited. The map. Scott decided to get in touch with the largest retail chain in the UK, Tesco.
As one would expect, the man was initially turned away. However, talking to the company representatives, he showed unprecedented persistence. Scott expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that being the largest chain in Britain, Tesco sold honey from foreign producers. In response to this, the representatives put forward a proposal for Scott to launch a line of his product in more than 500 stores in the chain.
It came as a real shock for Scott at the time, but jumping ahead, I’ll just say that today he takes such news for granted since, by the end of 2020, the Hilltop Honey factory was ranked 20th in the list of fastest-growing companies in Britain with revenues of $15 million.
In an interview with the reporters, Scott said that there was nothing left of the insecure man he once was. He now leads a huge team and a huge enterprise spending all his time thinking about ways to grow his business and making tough decisions. Moreover, Scott hired many of the people who made fun of him because he was not the kind of person who holds a grudge.
Ten years after Scott sold his first can of honey, Hilltop became the second-largest honey supplier in Britain and is expanding to include several types of honey and even organic cosmetics. Sometimes it’s hard not to forget that all of this was achieved by a poor student who didn’t even graduate high school and who was once unemployed and living off his parents.
Well, Scott’s example proves that everyone who wants to achieve success is capable of doing it despite their shortcomings and the opinions of others. Friends, how do you feel about Scott’s success story and how he changed from a rejected unemployed person into a successful businessman?
