When Ryan Brook was nine, he opened a Christmas present that changed his life.
I’m standing next to Ryan, now 25, in late October. We’re surrounded by Christmas trees of all shapes and sizes – 4,000 in this one field alone. In total, there are 25,000 on Ryan’s Christmas Tree Farm, just off the A361 in Somerset between Shepton Mallet and Frome.
None of this would be here if Ryan’s dad, Andy, hadn’t tried to make his nine-year-old son laugh with a stocking gift – which Ryan explains when I ask him about the best Christmas gift he’s ever received.
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“It might be cheesy but it’s got to be that first sapling from my dad,” he replies. “If he hadn’t given me that as a joke, I would never have started all of this.”
Ryan laughs as he adds: “My mum was the fussiest ever for buying a Christmas tree. I came home crying one day after one of these times.
“So Dad got me a sapling in my stocking, and one for my sister too. He said ‘if you don’t want to go shopping with your mum again, in six years time she’ll have to buy this one off you’.
“Every year we planted more and here we are.”
Ryan and I first spoke in 2016. He was studying for his GCSEs at Whitstone School in Shepton Mallet and I interviewed him for the local paper. I wasn’t the only journalist interested in how he started selling Christmas trees and that December, Ryan was everywhere – including on Sky News.
“I soon realised they take a long time to grow and maybe I could turn this into some sort of business in the future,” Ryan told our correspondent Frazer Maude at the time.
Back then, Ryan said the long-term plan was to go to university and pay for his studies with proceeds from his Christmas tree sales.
Nine years on, I’m back to find out if he pulled it off.
“I originally thought it was going to be a bit of pocket money but I fell in love with it,” he tells me. “You don’t get many unhappy customers at Christmas. It’s a time to bring joy, when everyone’s in a good mood.”
In the end, Ryan explains, he decided against university. After investigating engineering or architecture courses, he took an electrical apprenticeship.
Now, he’s a self-employed electrician for 10 months of the year and a full-time Christmas tree farmer for two. He just couldn’t give it up, even though it takes many of his weekends all year round to keep the farm going.
This year, Ryan’s had 6,000 new trees planted, a task he hired a subcontractor for. But in the past, he’s planted up to 2,000 trees himself, on his hands and knees with his friends and family.
“It’s a family business, we all work together,” he says. His parents, Andy and Gail, are still involved, too.
The Brooks are certainly not afraid of committing to a project. It takes eight years, or sometimes 10, to grow a tree, Ryan says, so planning for future festive periods is a constant job and an “impossible” guessing game. “Better to have more than you need,” Ryan says simply as a guiding principle.
Knowing when to stop selling each year – whether it be his Nordmann Firs or Norway Spruces – is the hardest part of his business. One eye always has to be on ensuring his supply in the years to come.
“We’re trying to scale up and get more popular,” he says. “We sell more and more, and most of the trees we want to sell, every year.”
In terms of learning the ropes of running a business, Ryan says he just picked things up by doing them along the way.
“Every year it gets better,” he says, “as you solve problems along the way. I started off only selling a few, which gets you into customer service nicely.”
His advice for young people looking to follow in his youthful footsteps into entrepreneurism is similarly straightforward but has clearly worked for him: “You’ve got to believe in yourself. You get stressed but people will believe in you if you believe in yourself. Stay positive. It’s easy to think the worst is going to happen but there are solutions for everything and we learn more every year.”
Ryan has needed that belief to cope with challenges from much bigger firms. “You’ve got to keep the prices competitive and we do, but it’s hard,” he admits. “We know supermarkets sell them at a loss to get people in the door. But we try to sell high-quality trees at a reasonable price.”
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When I visited, Ryan had yet to decide on the price for his pre-cut trees this year, given the increasing expenses facing his business and others. Last year, he typically sold cut and ready trees for £29.99, charging more by the foot for the experience of picking one out and cutting it down from the field itself.
Given that Ryan once hoped the farm would fund his education, I ask him if he’s managed to benefit in other ways despite its running costs.
“I do own a home but that’s primarily from my electrician work, not from this, and my partner works hard,” he says. “I’ve never taken money out of the farm for myself, really – it’s all gone back in to help it grow.
“At some point, it would be lovely to take some money out, but for the foreseeable future our focus is on growing the business.”
As I leave, Ryan talks about the families who come every year and how he’s seen their children grow up. Some choose to reserve a tree as a sapling and watch it grow. He describes seeing the visiting children change thanks to a growth spurt, and how they compete in height with the trees.
Selling Christmas trees is clearly about more than money for Ryan.
One line about his staff sums it up: “Everyone who works here loves the job.”
