How to Build a Six Figure Flower Farm - Interview with Jenny Marks

hi everyone Alex at Corum d farm we are a year three Oklahoma flower farm that sells retail Market bouquet from our roadside stand and in today's video it's going to be awesome I sat down for an interview with Jenny marks at trademarks Farm she is a profitable very successful beautiful Farm in New York and we talk all things about how she grew her Farm how she became profitable what she believes are the keys to success for a profitable farm and I hope this discussion is inspirational and entertaining and helpful in your own flower farming Journey or if you just love learning about all things [Music] flowers [Music] [Applause] [Music] w [Music] [Music] so I'm here with Jenny marks of trademarks flower farm in New York I'm going to let her intro herself because she'll do it so much better than me but the way I would intro her is like the ranunculus Queen because everything I look like look at on her Instagram and her content is so ranunculus focused I know that's not everything she grows and we'll talk about that but she's a ranunculus Pro so we'll definitely ask her some of those questions and she's also the northeast regional director for the association of specialty Cut Flower Growers and so she just has so much wisdom for us and I can't wait to go through and ask her all of these questions that I have Focus primarily on how do we run a profitable flower farm because we can talk in detail about snapdragons facing and whether you net or don't net something but It ultimately doesn't matter if you're not a profitable business so that you can keep growing year to year so that's really what I want to focus on so Jenny can you tell us about your farm as it is now so where you grow and generally what where you sell all of that kind of stuff sure so yeah I'm Jenny and I own trademarks flower farm and I'm located in Upstate New York so we're like Western New York State um between Rochester and Syracuse in the Finger Lakes Region and so we're in zone 6 aish although I guess they just updated the USDA hardiness zone so ours I think went up like to 6B or something but anyways um we grow just on about three4 to 1 acre right now and we have six hoop houses on our farm so most of that acre is taken up by hoop houses so we have four 30 by 96 High tunnels and then two about I think they're like 17 by 96 caterpillar tunnels and then we also have a 20x 40 propagation house on our farm so that's like a little bit of a lay of the land for us and we are very focused on ronculus it's my favorite flower and um we grow a lot of it because we make a lot of money off of it and that's basically how it it's not how it became my favorite flower it just so happily happened that it was one of my favorites and we also did a cross analysis with everything we were growing on our farm and that was one of the most profitable flowers we grew so we decided to just really focus on it so that's the main thing that we do we grow between nine and 10,000 ronculus on our farm every year but we also grow a few other things we grow less than 15 crops on our flower farm though so we're not crazy Diversified and every year we sort of narrow that a little bit more and more and refine our farm and our sales Outlets even more so we sell through three main sales outlets right now we've done everything there's like a whole story about it um but we mainly grow through or mainly sell through a farmers market in our city nearby that is really amazing It's a Wonderful farmers market for us and we have a flower CSA program and then we also sell Dalia tubers so that's our main kind of gig that we do right now and then I also have another business called trademark farmer where I teach flowers about having a profitable business and all kinds of business skills and tools for running a flower farm so it's very business focused we don't talk a lot about growing um I mean a little bit but it's mostly profitability and business focus that's awesome I'm sure like everyone watching like their eyes got big when you were like we grow 10,000 ranunculus incredible it's incredible but I always think so we're heading into year three so it's like on our Channel we debated like do we say year two or year three because we planted for year three but we aren't selling yet in year three and when I look on Instagram and and YouTube and all of that and you see like the year six plus Farms that are growing like you are with the amount of like structures you have and different sales Outlets it's hard to make the the jump of like well you didn't start in year one with six High tunnels and planting 10,000 rulas there obviously was a progression and so I'd love to kind of walk through like the the scaling up Journey your farm went through so like if you could tell us what does like year one look like and then maybe if if you remember a bit like how how you scaled up like how what you chose to invest in in year two or three or basically how did you get to the point that you just described to us yeah so it is really challenging I'm sure for Farmers that are just starting out and seeing people with tons of infrastructure and stuff and it is hard to make like that reach between first starting and that you know like that Gap when you get there and when I first started I was very very very small I think our first flower garden was like I don't even know probably like 25 feet wide by I don't know like 50 feet long if that so it was it was a garden it was a big garden and so I grew up working on farms I grew up working in all different facets of Agriculture so I was always really involved in agriculture of some kind so farmwork was not new to me at all but flowers were and so I really had no idea what I was doing when I started um growing flowers learning to grow them was like this huge learning curve so I started off really small with just a little garden and then for the first few years it didn't get a whole lot bigger than that and I honestly really struggled to get the business going um I didn't make hardly any sales were you selling like on Farm sales or were you like going to a smaller farmers market or what how were you trying to sell so I was trying to sell through a CSA and um and also some smaller farmers markets and then I also did some weddings so I was kind of like dabbling and I also sold to florists they were kind like how can I sell my flowers like where where can I go I literally was just like I'm gonna try everything and see what like throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks Okay and like I really wanted to do a farmers market in a CSA because I came from the vegetable farming world and that's like what I knew from Veggie farming yeah and so that was sort of my first Ventures into it but like my first year I only had one CSA member and it was a friend of mine my second year I only had two CSA members that friend and her mom so like the first few years yeah it it was really terrible because I just like couldn't sell my flowers but then probably around like I don't know year three of me growing flowers I got into a really good farmers market and that changed everything for me um it it's a really difficult Farmers Market to get into because it's very successful and that kind of launched my business and my confidence because I was able to start putting myself out there more and I also started learning about marketing and selling at this point so by then I was able to get my CSA up to um I think one year I had like 15 people and then the following year I had 50 so that was kind of a big jump so learning how to sell flowers was my biggest roadblock during that time because I could grow beautiful flowers like they were gorgeous but I had a really hard time figuring out how to sell them and how to make money and so that was my biggest like learning curve but then as far as like infrastructure and investing on the farm the first year I think I can't even barely remember but I think the first year I know I did not have a flower cooler then the second year I bought like a really cheap used beverage cooler off Craigslist and I don't even know if people use Craigslist anymore it's it was the old Facebook Marketplace um and and it froze my flowers a couple of times but most of the time it worked okay uh and then after that I bought another like a used freezer truck bed that I converted into a cooler and we put up our first greenhouse because I hated started see in the house it like didn't work okay at all for me and then you know we just bought we've always bought used cheap stuff and just made it work until we could afford to buy new things so the two caterpillar tunnels that we have on our farm I bought used from another vegetable farmer and I paid $1,000 for two of them we took them down put them up ourselves like did things like the hard way and just kind of bought cheap stuff that we could afford and then after a few years you know we had a lot more money saved up that I could invest into building a new barn and you know we just approached saving very strategically okay we've built our whole Farm debt-free like I've never taken out a loan for anything on the farm I just took everything we made and reinvested it and I did that because I also started my business as a side hustle I worked a full-time on Farm or off Farm job I worked for the government and then I had my flower farm on the side so you know I kept my income from the government to pay like our bills and then whatever I made from the farm I just like dumped it back in for the first like four years yeah what year would you say was like in your memory like a big Tipping Point like we're really serious now we're going to build a high tunnel not a caterpillar tunnel we're going to bootstrap a little bit less like I'm going in on this around what year would you say I would say year three for me okay and that yeah that was the year you got into the farmers market yes and you were selling starting to sell a lot more yeah yes and I think I had a mindset a mindset shift around that time like I had sort of been doing the flowers but I wasn't never serious about making it a full-time or like really serious thing for me and then I got to a point where I just like really needed a life change and once I made that mindset shift to I can do this full-time I know I can I'm gonna figure it out no matter what like everything just started falling into place so I think that that has a lot to do with people's success more than they would like to admit as well yeah the the perspective they bring into it with their labor and their time and like what they're trying to achieve can have had a big difference you would say like the side hustle mindset versus like I want this to be my life or a big part of my family's life yeah or just really clarifying your goals as well like I think the first few years I just was sort of wish-wash like didn't really know exactly what I wanted from this and then when I got really really clear about exactly what I wanted um everything just got so much easier and I had to do a lot of like deep introspective work to like unearth that I think um and I talk about that a lot with trademark farmer and when I teach other farmers and you know it's a small piece of what I teach but I think it's really important because you need to clarify those goals in order to take the right strategic steps to get there I was gonna say it probably brings into Clarity your decision- making process much clearer especially when you're seeking profitability if it's if it's a really joyful side hustle where there's nothing wrong with that your decision making for spending is going to be very different than like I would like to quit my job so that this can be income you might make a different spending or investment Choice when you're thinking those those different ways okay so what year are you in now ah 16 um I will be going into my ninth ninth year have was there a time like a year time where you're like okay we've we've really dialed this in like this is our capacity these are our sales Outlets this is what we like to grow and we're kind of on like not autopilot because it's still a ton of work but kind of like we're in repeat mode versus like forever scaling up mode have you pit that is that kind of where you're at now yes and this is a really great question because if you had asked me this probably two years ago I would have I was in full growth mode we're just going to keep growing and keep growing and keep growing like until we can't grow anymore like I had plans for our farm to be like 60 Acres like really seriously big let me pause real fast do you have employees or is it you and your husband primarily what's the I do have employees yeah so and my husband works an off Farm job he has like his own full-time thing not associated with our farm and he does work on our farm like with big projects so he's like a construction guy so he's super handy when we're doing infrastructure projects like building hoop houses or um like we just put in a new waterline and you know heavy equip Machinery stuff like that but he's really like not involved at all with the day-to-day stuff okay um I like manage the whole farm and involved in all the day-to-day but I also have one full-time employee during the season and then depending on year we have like two to three part-time employees as well during like so we're still really small times and stuff yeah like for Trans like in the springtime when we're really busy and in the fall um we have a couple other like PRM people that come on but actually that that was a really key deciding factor in me changing from that always growing growth mindset to like sort of settling on the business model we are in now so a quick story is I basically at one point a couple years ago hired a whole bunch of people because we were growing like crazy and we were selling through a bunch of different sales outlets and the farm was doing really well but I was not I was getting completely overwhelmed and we had some labor struggles like finding people that were reliable and would come back year after year which is like all always the struggle with any small business and at some point I just found myself getting like run really ragged and was just trying to do too much so I got really really serious about looking at our highest profitability sales Outlets the ones that brought in money for us but also ones that I really liked doing because you know the stuff that you like doing you're gonna do the best job at it the better attitude exactly and um just really honed in on that from there so I would say it was probably about two years ago and like I am not a very smart person like I feel like I should have figured all this out like a long time ago which is why I teach it now because it it just feels like it took me such a long time to like figure out where I belong and what I really want out of this and like how to do it in a way that brings me joy and free freedom and profitability in like a healthy sustainable way so yeah it's your your sales potential could have had you in like forever growth mode but at some point you had to make like a life a lifestyle choice in the sense of like I'm happy at this level across all factors you know like emotionally physically mentally like this is kind of my sweet spot and I I want to stay here yeah okay yeah when you talk about you mentioned in your intro you only grow like 15 or less varieties was that always the case or how like how did you start yeah I was gonna assume not but like how did you start and then when did you start making like the more dialed in choices and how like how did you make those choices like when did you were like well I don't know if we should be growing however much you were 100 different times of flowers yeah well when I first started growing flowers The Flower World was completely new to me like I knew nothing about flowers when I started growing them and I saw like people on the internet like like floret for example who had like on I'm just gonna use Flor as an example because everyone knows who she is but like on her website in her blogs she has hundreds of flowers and foliages cataloged hundred and she sells hundreds of different kinds and so I was just like oh well I just need to grow all of this and you know the couple of flower Farmers that I did know grew a lot of different kinds of flowers and so I just thought that that's like what you had to do or what you were supposed to do so I grew like some I don't even know how many it was probably close to a hundred different types of flowers and I remember feeling really overwhelmed things got really overgrown they weren't being being taken care of well like I wasn't weeding as well as I should have wasn't netting stuff that should have been that was like falling over and at the end of one season it was probably like year four for me if I had yeah it's was probably like year four it was fall time and we were cleaning up the farm and I was growing over half an acre of flowers it might have been even close to an acre yeah and I remember looking out and was just saw so many flowers sitting out in the field and thinking to myself I worked so incredibly hard to start all these seeds put them in the ground take care of them all season and then I didn't even Harvest most of them for one reason or another like whether it was just like too much hassle a harvest or I didn't really need it when I was making mixed bouquet or whatever reason I was like I'm literally just throwing money away by growing all these different things and that's about the time when I figured out how to calculability of my flower crops using an Enterprise budget analysis process okay and so basically you just figure out how profitable each one of those flowers is so I cut out some stuff just because I was like I just don't want to grow things didiscus or flowering tobacco anymore just wasn't my thing but then I took an inventory of all the flowers that we sold you know significant quantities of on the farm and figured out the profitability of all of them ranked them in a list from most profitable to least profitable then I cut out the bottom half of the list and then over the years we've just been refining more and more and more and focusing more and more on things that we do really well and that our customers really like right or places that we see like opportunities for growth so we really only focus on like one to two flowers per season like in the springtime we really just just do all ranunculus which is why we grow nine or 10 thousand of them because that's like literally the only thing that we grow um you know and then in the late spring in June for us is like PE season we're really only growing like three types of annuals right now and no like two annuals and two perennials so we grow pies baptisia which are just easy perennials and then campanola and snapdragons so and that's how we kind of treat the whole season is that we really focus on just a couple of really highly profitable flowers that our customers love that are easy for us to grow it seems like observationally and I don't I don't necessarily fall into this category and I'm I'm thankful for it I think it's one of the reasons why we are reaching profitability faster on our farm than maybe would be like average but when I'm on like flower farming Facebook groups and stuff it seems like new Growers fall into one of two categories with the deciding the varieties to grow and it's either they decided to flower farm because they just absolutely love flowers and so you know they want to be in flowers they want to be around flowers it's just it's very emotional which is not a bad thing you should love what you do and so it's very hard to say no because you open like the Johnny Seed Catalog and it's like how do you emotionally not grow you know all of these things that you want to see in person you want to have in your farm and then other side is kind of what you described which is you're observing whichever Flower Farms decide you decide are influential to you and you look at maybe their grow list and think well that's just what flower farming is and so I need to cut and paste on my farm and often those Farms you know are are year in year six seven and they they're making decisions of why they grow what their grow list is and so it's not necessarily like a cut and paste capacity and so without having to go through like you said kind of like the painful slow learning process what would your advice be on like either someone who's aspiring to be a flower farmer or they're like in year one and two and they're kind of saying like they're thinking to themselves right now like yeah I'm drowning in a bit too many varieties but I'm not at a point yet in my business where I feel like I can get my arms around how to make a profitability assess because things are still so new and I don't even know how to make that calculation or I haven't sold a flower yet you know so I don't even know what my costs are yet what would be some kind of like questions they should ask themselves or things to Think Through To kind of not have that hundred long variety list of Johnny's catalog yeah so that's it's a great question I would say that observationally look at Flower Farms that really inspire you and that you think you would want to have a similar business model too because there's just endless amounts or endless kinds of business models that you can have like you could have a CSA and Farmers Market model like me or you could be farmer forest and sell you know allart wedding bouquet and so there's just so many different sales Outlets you can do and I would say find a farmer who is sort of specializing in what you want to do as terms of sales outlets and look at what they're doing you know you can't just look at someone else and you can never know their numbers you can never know what's going on behind the scenes but it might be able to help you make decisions up front as to what you should be growing or you know if you have a similar customer base to somebody else maybe what their customers are liking so I I feel like I sorted did that when I started like I saw other Farms that I really wanted to kind of model my Farm off of like certainly not copy but I liked their business model and so I tried to grow things that they grew and I think that's really helpful when you're first starting out like I said you can't know what everyone's books look like um I would bet money that some of these like very influential famous Instagram you know armloads of flower picture people like their profits might not be what you would think yeah and so it's just something to be careful about that and then on the other hand I don't think it's ever too early to do a profitability assessment in fact if I was to start another business right now of any kind I would sit down and try to figure out the numbers like how much profit do I need to make what kind of profit margin should I be working off of how much gross revenue do I need to bring in and like what do I need to do to make that so like for a flower farm let's just say well you sell um at a roadside stand right yeah so let's say you wanted to make like I don't know $10,000 and you sell I gotta get my calculator out for this because I'm that bad at math but like if you let's say said it wrong I wouldn't have corrected you because I wouldn't be able to do it either I yeah got my handy dandy calculator so let's say you want to make $10,000 and you sell all your bouquet for 25 bucks that means you got to sell 400 bouquet over your season and if your season is 30 weeks long that means you have to sell 13 and a half bouquet so 14 working backwards from a big goal yeah and at least just get started with that and I think you can always sort of guesstimate your expenses or you can take a course like I teach a course called sixf Figure farming and we go over all of this stuff in here like what you could expect your profit margins to be and of course that is W varies widely depending depending on your business model but you know we go into detail about how to guesstimate your expenses up front and then tracking your expenses over the course of a season and really dialing in to see like what kind of money are you actually making and if nothing else if you just keep track of your income and your expenses which you have to do anyways for the IRS if you're gonna have a real business um it can be really eye openening so and what and what you're saying too is that like you don't have to wait until you're like in the hole and like panicking and you also don't have to wait until you have a couple years under your belt to start making these choices or at the very least be aware of the type of information you're going to need to collect and track in order to make the smartest decisions moving forward like you can really start from the beginning with seeking profitability for your business it doesn't have to be drowning in a hundred varieties and losing money to then start exactly and anyone who's just starting if you haven't started yet or maybe you're like a year or two in like I highly suggest that you do that from the very beginning like make a plan to be profitable from the beginning or very early on and just figure out your finances from there because no one can operate a flower farm whether hobby or business on zero dollars it just doesn't work I I know it like you said depending on your business model and like what you're seeking after this answer is going to be different but what would you say on average is a very realistic goal towards profitability now of course like if you have a $100 extra you know like in the black you're technically profitable but I you know so like the polls being like you had an extra $100 and you can live on this income profitability like obviously both ends of the spectrum but like General profitability like I I have a good enough amount of money remaining after all of my expenses are paid off what do you think is a realistic goal for that to happen like does this have to wait until year five can this be achieved like more of the year three time frame because you hear a lot especially like on the Instagram space and stuff like a big spectrum of like I'm seeking to be profitable by year X and you know I always wonder like but can you be profitable sooner like what what's realistic in the flower farming world when we're talking about profitability yeah so for one I think it depends a lot on your experience but just assuming that someone starting out has zero experience I would say you can be technically profitable from year one just meaning that you make more money than you spend so you can technically make $100 in profit your first year you can even make more than that right however in order to make the kind of profit where you're paying yourself a livable wage I would say it's different for everyone and it depends on your business model it's super subjective but it is super super subjective but I would say realistically for most people I would say year three to four is when you're going to be hitting that six figure Mark in gross revenue which is like what everybody wants to do right yeah but your exp are not figures right well that sixf figure Revenue number is going to allow you to earn and pay yourself a realistic like living wage that you can live off of and I think it is going to take a very beginner with zero experience probably three years to get there and like I said you could maybe do it on year one but chances are it's probably going to take you a couple years to figure this out and get there that like comfortable margin between your gross revenue and your expenses will should start happening like your three year four I yeah that's encouraging because like sometimes you hear profitability numbers in years like five six and I think in one sense it can feel defeating or discouraging because you're like well how long do you operate a business at a loss you know because everyone's bringing different income to the equation like the side income you know like your full-time job that like what's a realistic perspective of like no this Farm can actually not be losing money or a drain you know it can start heading in the other direction well I think that this all really depends on your goals for one and your financial management skills because if your goal on year five and six is to keep growing bigger and bigger you're gonna have to keep reinvesting your profits back into the farm and so you know you're we can get into so many like little technicalities here because like I was I commented on some Instagram post the other day because there was a woman who said she puts every dollar that she makes back into her Farm she still hasn't made a profit and she's on year 10 and I was like why on Earth unless you're like wanting to grow your business like huge like why would you do that and she's like oh but I just think that somebody like that is either has crazy goals where they just want their Farm to be like massive or they're not managing their finances appropriately I got it because yeah the profit that comes from your farm in most people's cases like if you're a sole proprietor or an LLC like we don't need to get into like business structure stuff but you know if you're just starting out and you're a soulle proprietor all the profit that you make from your farm goes to pay you plus any Investments that go back into your farm so your operating expenses they should always yield you a profit and then any of that profit you can reinvest back into the farm so we're getting kind of like technical all this here but I just really think that if I were to start over again I would make a plan to pay myself from the very very beginning like year one even if it was only like $100 a month just to get into that practice of paying yourself and then upping that number whenever you can or whenever you see fit and I'm a big proponent of planning for your profit first before anything else like paying yourself first before you make investments back into the business and I it took me years to learn that I didn't do that with my business but um I think that that's a really important piece of being an entrepreneur right I think no I think that's helpful because like you said you we can get get into like we can get into the weeds or it can be very subjective Farm to farm but you know in the YouTube space or in the Instagram space and stuff like you said you can't know people's books you can just know what you hear and you can hear a lot of kind of the equivalent of like the flower Bunch shot you can hear a lot of like I'm seeking to be profitable in X year down the road and all you're seeing is just like endless expenses and expansion but they're not profitable yet and that can give you the kind of like the Seed Catalog that can give you the impression that like well this is just how you build a flower firm you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for years and years and years and then eventually down the road you'll be profitable but really what you're saying is like no back it up from the very beginning in how you're planning towards profitability and managing your expenses and managing your expansion and you can actually hit that a lot sooner that doesn't mean you're you're going to hit your your ultimate goal you know maybe you're not yet at that six figures but you know you grossed 40,000 and you only spent 20,000 it's like well that is a huge win that could happen in three instead of the Endless expansion model I think which is often what is seen on social media and can give a an impression that it's not maybe the reality and the reality is actually more positive so like that's a good thing yeah exactly yeah so like you said going back to what you said about in year one and two where you're like I could grow beautiful flowers I got confident I learned how to grow them but I needed to sell them and you got into the farmers market and stuff but can you talk a little bit about how you found customers how you grew your CSA like what did the social media and the marketing and the actually selling the flowers look like for you as your farm expanded because you didn't just plant 10,000 ronculus and people were breaking down your doors you you clearly built a customer base that then matched with your you're scaling up in the amount of flowers you grow yeah well and that's the hard part is trying to get like guess how money you need to grow in order to U meet your sales goals which I actually um side note but I do have a profit planning free course on my website right now that actually talks just about that like we'll link to it in the description okay yeah it it's all about um doing your crop planning based on your sales goals and your sales projections but anyways that's that's another thing but um so I got really interested in marketing and sales and because I really stunk at it and I was like I need to figure out how to sell things and so I read a bunch of books and um I took an online marketing course and just really started thinking about who my customer was like who my ideal customer was and seeking that person out like going to go find them so for example I really wanted to grow my CSA and the people who are in my CSA already I just I sort of interviewed them and like I any chance I got to talk to them I tried to get to know them and what they were like and most of these people were a little bit um I don't want to say wealthier but they were like better off they had some extra uh indisposable income they all loved supporting the local businesses around especially like we have a lot of Wineries and breweries is where we live like there's all these little like micro Brews and stuff and they loved going there and Lov going to the little wine bars and stuff and I just would talk to them and see what they like doing in their spare time so I started going to the places that they mentioned they like to hang out at so I started advertising and partnering with other local businesses like wine bars micro breweries like little coffee shops and asking if we could do a CSA pickup there I would give them flow flowers and get people in the door for them on slower days of the week in exchange for us having a flower pickup there and then things like really took off when I started doing that um it was super helpful to basically just trying to go find them and of course like I started posting on Instagram which I think was way more effective back then when I started and they we're talking about like 2017 18 era algorith was back then like yeah it was very different space yeah exactly but just trying to go out and find my customer and then as I got you know more experienced I started learning more about email marketing and I made optins and Lead magnets to attract people to my website I started focusing on SEO which is search engine optimization so when people searched for flowers in Rochester New York my website came up and then when they clicked on my website I had something that was really enticing to get them on my email list and then once I got them on my email list I would send them fun emails or give them a deal or educational stuff and form a relationship that way and hopefully get them to sign up for our CSA so that's how I ended up getting more customers is just really thinking about who my ideal customer was and where they're hanging out and where I can go find them so I went out and just like kept trying to them kept trying to reach them that's great I like I like that proactive view because often you'll see or hear like again on the Facebook groups and stuff where you just hear flower Farmers talking and stuff it's like I grew all these flowers and I posted a picture about them on Facebook and no one came and bought them from me you know did you read my story what you did in the beginning yes I mean it's definitely the like again it it makes sense because like you got into it most people get into it because they love flowers and so they want to grow flowers they want to share flowers so then sometimes you can think like well everyone loves flowers as much as I do so if I grow them people will be like breaking down my door to buy them and then once the flowers are there and you're looking around and you're like wait I you know I had there's more steps and so I really like that idea of thinking about what you're ideal customer looks like and then thinking like them and going to find them instead of overly obviously we have you have to have a good product like if you have a really ugly sunflower you're not going to get a customer but to be you know sometimes our heads can be so downward focused on the actual growing that we don't lift our head up until the sunflower is blooming and then you're like but that time is over now to find that customer to sell that flower to and so that's encouraging that you can you can go out and seek seek them and put that put that work in you had mentioned like throwing spaghetti at the wall in the beginning of like where to sell your flowers is it largely because of your veggie background that you're like I really want to do farmers market and CSA and so I'm going to be really proactive in making those work or did that end up being where how your customers wanted to buy from you because what I also see is you know just like you grow every variety of flower you then try to grow sell your flowers in every possible way a flower farmer can and you have hundreds of varieties and you have six different sales outlets and no one can do that with excellence and so how would you recommend or how did you kind of narrow down like this is what we talked about how you decided what to grow and then you're like and this is how I sell what I grow yeah so it was sort of like a they happened sort of simultaneously like I started out with my CSA and the farmers market and very early on was selling to event florists as well and then I was like well if I'm selling these flowers to event florist why don't I just do the weddings myself so then I added that on as well so and then I was like oh well I could have people come to the farm and we could do workshops shs and you know do retail things like that so we just sort of kept tacking on sales outlets for a while until I got to a point where I looked at what we were doing and for one some of the sales Outlets were extremely time consuming and didn't bring in that much profit so for me it was actually selling to Flores because um the communication required with with a lot of the My Florist customers was just like absurd and they were only I mean sometimes they'd put in big orders but it just wasn't worth the time for me so I did that cost analysis with each of my sales Outlets but I also looked at which ones I really liked to do which was kind of always the CSA in the Farmers Market that's just like my Avenue that I was comfortable with and that I wanted to do and then I looked at the customer that were already purchasing from us and spending a lot of money from us and it was through the CSA and the farmers market so that's why we decided to sort of finally settle on that and so I would say and I teach this in my six figure farming online course as well that if you're just starting out and you're really not sure what sales Outlet you want to do like I of course you can test everything but I think the smarter way to go about it is to put pen to paper and actually write out which which of the sales Outlets you're interested in pursuing are the most profitable because that is important but then also taking into consideration where your strengths lie and opportunities in your area and sort of combining all that information to make a decision and also I want to include your ideal customer in there as well because there are certain types of people you do want to work with and other people you don't um you mean if your ideal customer is not like the mother of a bride [Laughter] Yeahs yeah exactly yeah if you're not like for me I don't love like high like high ticket price items like wedding packages require a lot of like oneon-one time and a lot of communication with one person or two people and that is really well suited to some people's personalities but for me I just don't have the patience to be like commun communicating with people that much and so with the CSA and my Farmers Market I show up and it's just like hey hi how you doing and back and forth with like a bunch of different people it's not that like highly um I don't what's the word I'm looking for um I don't know you're not just like spending all this time catering super personalized yeah personalized thank you yeah so I think it depends on like your personality and what you like to do and then you know sometimes the thing that you love like I call this the magic middle like there's the thing that you love to do and then there's the thing that people want like you sometimes need to just do what falls in the middle because it depends on the area that you're in like for me I have a wonderful farmers market that is really profitable for us and it's just great but in a lot of areas there are not good farmers markets to go to they're not established they're little Rinky Dink things that like 10 people come to so you know maybe there's another example that I live in an area in the fingerlakes region in New York where there's a lot of weddings it's like a wedding destination area for people from New York City and we're like seven hours from the city but like it's still a destination area for them and um so there's a lot of opportunity there for either doing weddings yourself or selling to wedding and event florist so looking at like the opportunities and any gaps in the market in your area can also help you decide what you want to focus on so there's a lot of different facets that go into this decision making like it's never going to be cut and dry it's never going to be like super easy um if you like know what you want to do like if you know you want to have a roadside stand and that's the only thing that you want to do you can go out there and make it work like just decide you want to do it and go do it but you know a lot of people aren't really sure what they want to do so yeah that makes sense yeah and I like what you said about like you can you can try things but you don't have to to like throw everything at once and think that like one is just going to magically appear as the winner because you're already stressed and spread so thin growing a million things selling a million different ways that if you like do it maybe in even almost like smaller pieces like I tried farmers markets and I realized like I'm an introvert and I was just so exhausted at the end of the day that was such a drain that's not for me you know then maybe try like maybe going the whole Sale Route is like better suited to you instead of like I'm going to go to Farmer Market and I'm going to sell to Flores and I'm going to do event like all in the same thing that can be I think I would feel really defeating but I only sell one way so I'm very straight lined I I don't recommend just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks um if anything just pick one or two things and just give it your all and then if it doesn't work you just make adjustments you know right yeah right like patient that patient like longer game view of things that like I don't have to be a sixf figure farm that grows everything and sells it in all ways in year two like there's time to get to get to your goals and figure out yes yes and I would even argue that the more simplified and streamlined you are from the beginning the more easier it's or the easier it's going to be to reach profitability because you're able focus and do that one or two things really really well like you and your roadside sand like that's all you do you are doing an amazing job at it and people will know you for that whereas like people who try to sell through like seven different sales Outlets like you're not known for anything and like you don't come to mind for specific needs so yeah it's not a specialized thing so you kind of answered this in in peace meal format to but to kind of like bring it together like if you were to start like go back to where you were in your flower knowledge where it's like you can kind of competently grow and you wanted to start a flower farm in 2024 walk me through kind of like what would you do not necessarily like I would grow this and sell this way but like what would your thought process be like you mentioned the profit analysis that you would do upfront and like maybe like what steps would you take to to start a flower farm that would kind of avoid the pitfalls that you said you know you fell into the first couple years with the experience that I have now I know like exactly how I would start over exactly what I would do you know back when I first started I didn't know any better and so if I were to start over at the very beginning like with none of the knowledge I have now other than I should be more focused and um you know try to hone in on what I'm doing I think I would sit down and get really really clear on exactly what I wanted from this project like let's say for example that I wanted to have a full-time flower farm and that's how I wanted to earn my living and then I would get really clear on what I wanted my life to look like so do I want to work weekends do I not want to work weekends do I want to um work with you know high-end customers or do I want to work with a different type of customer and thinking about how you can structure your life around your business and this is an exercise we do in my online course where you just get really really clear on exactly what you need from this business and then make decisions from there so keeping things really simple at first I think can be a lifesaver because most people just like we've been talking about throw spaghetti at the ball try to grow everything try to sell everywhere and see what sticks whereas if you're much more intentional about it you know just deciding that you're going to do one thing and everything you grow is catered to that one thing like I don't know I'm trying to think of an a good example like if I were to start over and I wanted to sell to wedding and event forests only I would go go ask them what flowers do you want what flowers do you need what colors do you want what colors do you need or at least really think about what they want and then only grow those things like probably only growing flowers and like the blush to salmon and coral range and I know there's some florist out there who use color but like most of their clients don't so you know I don't know if that answers your question but just getting really really clear on it does because observationally and some of this is just stubbornness like at some point you can't force people to listen if they want to do something different but the thing I'm hearing from you veteran Growers you like more OG's is constantly saying like do less and scale back but do it with excellence and the trend of the aspiring grower or the newer Growers is I want to grow everything and sell it in all ways and that it's like you know we're passing each other and that's one of the focus on our channel is to talk a lot about and it's almost like sometimes I say like giving permission which of course I have no authority to do so but I think sometimes there can be that emotional hangup of like well but maybe I'm not as legit of a flower farmer if I only grow 10 flowers like that's not as interesting or it's boring or like I like in Oklahoma it's super hard to grow doas like it's very hard for dollas to pass the profitability test but I go on Instagram and everyone in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest you know are just like drowning in doas in September and so it's like you know being strong enough to be like but no like I live in Oklahoma and I've done my Farm's profit analysis and it's not for me and I have to let it go you know and that's that's just how it is and my farm can be profitable because of that decision and I'm not getting into that like more emotional trap of like comparison and and wanting to feel like you know you're part of the flower farming Club because your farm looks like the farms you want it to look like does that Mak does that make sense yeah yeah it does and I think it's really hard because you're so excited when you're starting out and you do want to grow everything um but you're honestly probably going to be so much better off if you just choose a few key things like you said do less but with excellence and it's I think it's just so important and it's like one of my things that I'm always preaching to people as well and I think that all flower Farmers eventually when you're starting out growing all those different flowers and trying to do everything at some point you are going to reach a point when you are just so burnt out and overwhelmed that you're going to be like screw this and then you're going to be forced to simplify and like I did yeah it's like you can you can launch with that direction or you can kind of like be forced in that direction but like eventually you're GNA pair down your list and you're gonna pair down your your sales streams and stuff but do you want to do it in like tears in your hoop house or plan for it to be that way yeah exactly exactly well so to end here I want to talk about in a little more detail all of the teaching stuff you're doing so you have your farm like we've talked about but you also launch trademark farmer with different social media and you have your courses and stuff so tell us a little more about what the courses are we'll link all the ways for people to find you in the description but kind of like what you have to offer who it's for how it can how it can help people avoid the spaghetti and burn out I think I need to make that a tagline avoid spaghetti but it's so true yeah so um with trademark farmer it's on our website we have a bunch I say we it's me I have a bunch of information about growing a profitable farm and it's all business skills so business stuff like marketing and selling and analyzing profitability and planning your numbers like crop planning for profit and then also like clear ity and gaining getting really clear on what your uh goals are so I just have a bunch of free information up on that website it's www.radar.com we also have some free uh mini courses on there we have one on profit planning which is I mentioned earlier but it's basically an advanced crop planning system that's based on your financial goals we also have one that includes five tactics for starting a profitable farm and then just some other free guides and like recordkeeping stuff and whatever but then the big thing that I do is I teach both an on farm and an online course called six figure flower farming and it encompasses a lot actually a lot of the stuff that we talked about today um in the first module we get really really clear on your goals and what you want out of this business so you can kind of stay simplified right from the beginning and go in with like some hard and fast goals that you can accomplish not just like trying to do everything and see what sticks and then in the second module we really kind of go over redoing your business like a business makeover refining those sales Outlets that you have and picking sales Outlets that you can focus on and do really well at and there's a bunch of different steps in there like looking at the opportunities in your area but also balancing that on or balancing it with what makes you money and makes you happy because you just have to love what you're doing like we talked about before we talk a lot about um the actual money stuff like what you can expect from a flower farm as far as profit margins go like whole farm profit margins and actually planning out your profits and then budgeting for your expenses making a sales plan for your Revenue we also talk about that Enterprise budget analysis stuff that I talked to you about earlier um basically basically looking at all the flowers that you grow or will grow and looking at what they're costing you what's profiting you the most and then making decisions on what to focus on based on that and your customer base and then we also talk a lot about marketing like really specific marketing stuff like finding your ideal customers email marketing content marketing we have like a whole system that we teach in there and then like sales tactics um so basically these Core Business skills that you need to run a successful farming business because of course you need to grow beautiful flowers but quite honestly I have found that the growing the flowers part is such a small piece of it you can grow the most beautiful flowers in the world but if you don't know how to sell them and how to Market them it's not going to do you any good and I learned that the hard way and on that same side of the coin if you are trying to grow a million different flowers really well chances are you're probably spending a lot of money to do that and your profits are just not as high as they're supposed to be or should be or could be and so that's all these things that we teach um through sixf figure flower farming and actually the um online course the registration is launching on January 3 so we're getting really close to taking um for that class to go live so registration is on January 3rd and then the class starts it's all online the end of January and goes through the first week March it's a six- week online course and then we also do an in-person workshop on the farm over the summer where that is much more focused on like profitable growing techniques so like lean farming lean um efficient weed management type stuff and like on the like in hands in the dirt type of stuff on the farm but that's pretty much what I'm all about and I would love for any beginning flower farmer who wants to start off on the right foot and actually be profitable as soon as possible I I recommend them taking the course because I really think it's helped so many people and has the potential to help so many more people avoid the absolute mess that I went through trying to figure all this stuff out and that's why I started it because it was such a a struggle for me to get through those early years and figure all this out and I just wish so badly there was somebody out there who could have taught me this all um and now that's why I'm doing it so I hope I could help somebody yeah and I'm glad you said that too because like as you're going through the modules I can I can see a lot of like viewers that I know watch our Channel thinking like yeah that sounds great for this thus existing sixf figure flower farmer that sounds great for the farm that has employees and staff and experience and it's like no no no like this can be done even before you start your first seed it can like you said you can do a rehab like you're entering into year three and you're not profitable yet and you're feeling discouraged it's like okay well we can back up here with with these these techniques these tactics this analysis that you go through in the course it's like you you can do this even though it sounds like big business sounding it can apply to the side hustle whose goal is 20,000 Revenue you can be profitable with that sales goal going through this it does doesn't have to be like full-time farming Mega dream as the goal at at any size Farm or lifestyle choice that you're making here for your farm you can apply these principles so like for our viewers and stuff that I know watch our Channel because they like watching our farm work towards profitability and build up in the way that we are that this is what we talk about but it's coming from you Jenny who whove who's thrown the spaghetti who's walked the walk who's actually achieved what these goals are and we can kind of have that handholding that like you said you wish you had so like I'm really thankful I was telling my husband the other day it's like we're thankful for the floret bubble of flower farming and she's done so much work and there's been so much other people that have come and like really taught us how to grow flowers like you talked about like it's a lot of great content out there now to learn how to grow a Snapdragon beautifully and now in the industry it seems like okay like we've gotten our arms around creating helpful content on how to grow with Excellence but we really need to speak on profitability so that these Farms can continue to exist and local flowers can be a much bigger domestic product and stuff and you can't do that if you never make money because then you're no longer a business so I'm really thankful that you're putting all this effort into this kind of content creation that's clearly really needed so that we can say like for my husband and I we can say like we're a year eight Oklahoma flower farm because we've been profitable you know and we haven't gotten burned out and discouraged with poor choices and stuff like that so thank you for sharing I will link is that everything let me back up real fast do you have is there anything else you're launching and stuff so I didn't miss anything NOP no that that was everything thank you so much yeah so thank you Jenny for your time I will link everything she mentioned I'll I'll put all of her socials all of the links to her courses an email sign up in the description and comment share like do all the fun algorithm stuff we always talk about and thank you for being here thank you guys so much for having me we'll talk to you later awesome hey we're not supposed to touch anything yeah don't touch anything make sure it all goes through Eric sometimes we put bloopers at the end of our video so we seem like real people in our videos and stuff so it's not just like all highly edited and so this might make it help

Channel: Coram Deo Flower Farm

Views: 31,285

Keywords: Flower farm, Flower farm interview, Oklahoma flower farm, Profitable flower farm, Six figure farming, cut flower farm, cut flower farming, cut flower flower farm, first year flower farm, first year flower farming, flower farm review, flower farm tour, flower farmer, flower farming, how to flower farm, how to start a flower farm, new flower farm, oklahoma flower farm, profitable flower farming, start a flower farm, starting a flower farm, tour a flower farm

Id: xfis-oHoXUg

Length: 65min 6sec (3906 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2023