CHARLOTTE — Steve Forrest likes to say his company is a marketer’s nightmare. It depends on convincing customers that they should keep little stinging insects. But Forrest and his wife, Sandy, have been so successful at it that their Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Inc. in Moravian Falls projects sales this year of $6.7 million, up 24% from last year.
That kind of performance has propelled the company, which makes and sells beekeeping equipment and supplies, Business North Carolina’s 2009 Small Business of the Year. More than 24,000 customers have shopped there in person and by mail and online the last two years. It has increased sales every year but one since it opened in 1977, and the company’s only major hiccup in that time was a surge in orders a couple of years ago that nearly gave it more business than it could handle.
Judging the competition, sponsored by Winston-Salem-based BB&T Corp., were Gail McDonald, N.C. Department of Commerce small-business ombudsman; Peter Mitchell, whose Stoneville-based TigerTek Inc. won last year; and Ben Kinney, the magazine’s publisher.
Runners-up were: Art & Décor Kingdom Inc., an Asheville-based home-furnishings retailer doing business as Rug & Home; Storm Technologies Inc., an Albemarle-based consultant to the power industry and maker of boiler parts; and W.P. Hickman Co., an Asheville-based maker of commercial-roof edging.
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