Prestige Meats Fairfield opening: Twin joy for butcher Will Burgoyne

A popular butcher has had a priceless reaction to the birth of his daughter and opening of a second shop in the space of a week.

A popular Logan butcher who has just opened his second Brisbane butcher shop has spoken of his elation and exhaustion at throwing open the doors to the shop just days after the birth of his fourth child, saying it feels as though a “ten tonne truck has been lifted off my back”.

Racing the clock, Greenbank butcher Will Burgoyne put the finishing touches on Prestige Meats Fairfield, located in Fairfield Gardens Shopping Centre, on Thursday.

To say he cut it tight would be to say Mt Everest is a hill: the glue on the stone countertops dried at 6.50am, 10 minutes before the scheduled opening.

Prestige Meats Mount Ommaney and Fairfield owner Will Burgoyne. Picture: Supplied

“It was a very stressful time,” Mr Burgoyne, whose original Prestige Meats shop is at Mount Ommaney, said.

“The stonemasons sized a few pieces wrong, so they had to go back to the factory to recut them at 4am.”

For some people, the opening of a small business is one of the most important milestones in their life, but for Mr Burgoyne, it wasn’t even the most important one of his week: wife Sonja gave birth to their fourth child, a girl named Isabelle.

“She was born on Saturday (February 6) morning,” Mr Burgoyne said.

“But she’d been due four or five days earlier. There were no pre-labour signs.

“I thought, ‘Oh no, this baby is going to come out on opening day’.

“But Sonja went into labour at 3.30am, we got to the hospital at 4.10am and Isabelle was out at 4.26am.”

Isabelle Burgoyne was born at 4.26am on February 6. Picture: Supplied

When asked how he kept himself together during the craziest week of his life, Mr Burgoyne, a former manager at A&M Meats at Mount Gravatt, said if his five years in small business had taught him anything, it’s to “just keep calm and cool and keep pushing to the end”.

While his Fairfield shop is now up and running, it has cost Mr Burgoyne dearly in sleep.

“This week I’ve worked 3am – 7.30pm every day, on Thursday night I got home at 9.30pm and arrived at the shop at 3.45am,” he said.

Not only that, but Mr Burgoyne is filling in for his “absolute legend of a wife”, who typically handles the back-end of the business with book-work and payroll, as well as assisting with dad duties, as Isabelle is waking up every three hours or so.

But for this equable butcher, it’s all water off a duck’s back.

“I’m over the moon at how the shop turned out, the displays look fantastic, bub’s fit and healthy and happy, you can’t ask for anything more,” Mr Burgoyne said.

“It’s like a ten-tonne truck has been lifted off my back.”

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