Top 10 Business Mistakes That Mushroom Growers Make | GroCycle

13 years ago I started a mushroom growing business and I had really no idea if it was going to work I didn't really know how to run a business at all but fast forward 13 years and today along with Eric I run a thriving company making and selling thousands of mushroom kits every single year and we also teach a lot of people all around the world how to set up and run a small scale mushroom farm we've worked on a range of different projects including an urban mushroom farm setting up a farm in a prison and also in London's v a museum but that process of going from complete novice to experienced business owner is not an easy one and we've made our fair share of mistakes along the way so in this video we want to share with you our top 10 business mistakes that we see small scale mushroom Growers make [Music] so we might normally make a video like this about beginner mushroom growing mistakes but this topic is about more than that if you are a beginner you're going to find almost all of this useful but even if you already run a mushroom grown business there's going to be at least two or three tips in this video which are going to be useful for you A lot of these things we're still learning ourselves and we've made a lot of these mistakes even just in the last 12 months and just to be absolutely clear these mistakes are really for you to learn from so don't let it put you off getting started and by the way if you're thinking of getting started doing that this year we currently have an offer running for our online course in the community to the end of January but we'll come back and talk about that a little bit more later let's get started so do you remember that saying keep it simple stupid I know it's a bit of a cliche but from experience I see it happen time and time again people over complicate things so an example for you then somebody wants to set up to grow fresh mushrooms in their local area and go out and Supply that to restaurants that's their main aim but instead of staying focused on that goal they can get sidetracked people can easily get sidetracked and start to read and read and take in lots of information completely geek out on stuff like setting up a spawn Lab look at laminar flow hoods look into liquid culture cultivation for instance and then you can also decide of course to grow 10 different mushroom varieties on 10 different substrate recipes and you can decide to scale up 10 times in the first month now of course I'm exaggerating a little bit here and I'm also aware that it's really fun to experiment and Learn by doing but you get the point over complicating is a huge mistake simply by spinning too many plates at the same time you will suffer for it so just want to remind you of the question what would it look like if this was done in a simple way and then do everything you can to align yourself and reach that Aim so for example if your main aim is to grow some high quality mushrooms locally and sell them to Local customers then you might make the right choice by just buying in ready to root substrate first find your feet build on some success and get comfortable with all of the process and at that stage of course you can decide to go deeper into the process and choose a substrate recipe that might work well in your area or you might want to expand your offerings and offer three different types of mushrooms but take it a step at a time and make sure you've got everything running smoothly before you scale up farming or growing mushrooms might well be your passion but if you want to run this as a business then you have to treat it well like a business and running your own business comes with the desire to call your own shots and Be Your Own Boss and I completely get that I really like that too but if you want to make this work you probably want to go about it in a bit more of a strategic way you see there are different departments in any business in the book e-myth Revisited which I highly recommend you read it teaches that there are three main roles within any business you've got the entrepreneur who provides the vision creativity and energy that drives the business you've got the manager that translates that Vision into reality through planning and systems and you've got the technician who carries out the work that produces the product or service most mushroom Growers operate primarily as technicians you know they weigh out their substrate they sterilize and inoculate it they incubate it and they nurture a fine crop of mushrooms that they can sell at the end of it and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in fact there's a lot right with it now the thing is if you only do that then you're gonna come unstuck as you try to grow your business if you run the business yourself then all three of these roles are going to have to be done by you so unless you acquire some managerial and entrepreneurial skills along the way then your business is going to struggle you'll be working for a lunatic and if you're not careful that lunatic will be you so if you want your business to succeed long term you're going to need to take some time out from working in your business to work on your business so it's really important to set clear targets and goals not having them means you're Flying Blind setting goals helps you to plan prioritize measure progress and it also motivates you to help get through those days when The Daily Grind hits you so create a goal for where you want to be one month from now one year from now five years from now and try to be specific so it's not good enough to just sort of say I want to be selling lots of mushrooms and also run the successful business Instead try this one year from now I want to sell 50 more mushrooms than I'm doing now and I want to reduce my costs by 20 so setting a Target I find is a bit of an art really so you don't want it to be unachievable and at the same time it needs to be aspirational and of course you don't want to be demotivated by it either and it falls within the role of the entrepreneur in your business and here's a point I want to add since you've got your entrepreneurial hat on please remind yourself that change and growth of are just never gradual they're never this sort of steady line going up I remember seeing this graph years ago which made me laugh as it's so so true like the rest of Life running a business can be such a roller coaster but having goals and targets will help you get through the lows and in case you hadn't spotted it that up and down graph you see that's just one day in the life of an entrepreneur systems are the work of the manager in your business and it's how you translate the goals into reality and it's how you stay organized now designer systems may not be why you got into running your own business and I totally understand that it's not the most interesting part however without any systems in place you won't have the freedom that you crave you'll have a load of chaos instead now this doesn't need to be complicated a system is simply just a documented procedure for how you do something in your organization you know that might just be a list of where you buy all your supplies from it might be a description of the process of how you hydrate your substrate it might well be just your process for harvesting or your cleaning protocol whatever it is that you're documenting a system simply enables you to work to a set method every single time now this can be really helpful even if you're just working on your own just to stay organ nice and to have some consistency in what you're doing but it's even more important if you start to work with others so that someone else can just come along and replicate what you want them to do and get it right and that will then enable you to free your time up to work on other things on your business now not having any systems in place is an absolute recipe for chaos and we've seen and done this ourselves many many times for example you have a new employee that comes along and you show them briefly what you want them to do and then you walk off and get on with something else and you just expect that they know exactly what you want to do for that task or that they might intuitively know that it's not a good idea to go and compost some contaminated bags directly before inoculating the next batch yes we've seen that exact same thing happen so having procedures in place enables you to hand that over to someone with all the details there for them to go back and refer to and look at many times and just so they know exactly what you want them to do and get it right the first time so I hope at this point you can see that having systems in place will help you to avoid costly mistakes from happening and just help everything to run more smoothly it's not just that not measuring stuff will make it really hard for you to have consistency and to get an accurate picture of your costs of course if you want to make consistent changes that will stack up to make a real difference at your farm you'll also find that you need some of this information to base your decisions on and don't be too selective when you choose what to measure so we see a lot of Growers who focus on their yields and it makes complete sense because yield is a really really important factor when it comes to being profitable but it's not the only one often people don't track nearly as carefully their full set of production costs which can also massively impact your profitability a lot of Growers don't know what the energy cost per kilogram of mushroom is or their total cost per ton of substrate produced and yet these are key figures that every grower should know recording and tracking this sort of data is super super important if for example one of your main goals is to increase your income by 50 percent or reduce your production costs by 20 10 poor time management is an issue that most small business owners struggle with not just mushroom Growers and it's a really big one because it can be the difference between you thriving and just getting completely burnt out and I know this from my own personal experience for example when I first started growing mushrooms we live in quite a rural area here and so I was driving around for maybe four or five hours a week dropping off just small quantities of mushrooms at multiple different places and I wasn't really accounting for the time that I was spending delivering that produce in the prices that I was charging to my customers and often people would just reduce their orders sometimes to just half a kilo or a kilo and I'd be spending an hour driving out there to deliver it to them and so this kind of thing is just completely crazy and it's a really clear sign that you're not using your time very well now of course I wasn't just driving around and delivering the mushrooms I was also producing them and taking care of all the other aspects of the business juggling all sorts of different things and taking on too many different tasks like this just leads to spreading yourself too thin it's easy to underestimate all the extra tasks that you've got like compost and substrate cleaning sending invoices communicating with customers all of this is work that you have to do as well and especially if you start to grow and scale up your production all of these tasks get multiplied and it's really really easy to underestimate that now one way to deal with this as well as still have some joy in the work that you want to do is to switch out of the technician roll for a little bit and put your manager hat on and if you do that you'll realize pretty quickly that it makes sense to have some other people help you in what you're trying to do and not try to do it all on your own anything that's time consuming and easy to learn can easily be handed over to an employee or a trainee or a volunteer to do to free you up to work on other things now we've seen many other mushroom Growers really benefit from doing this and what comes to mind straight away at the top of my head is Terry Vaz from hearty growers in Belfast who we interviewed not long ago here on the channel after 15 months running his mushroom business he now employs someone three and a half days a week he has a couple of part time I was working fewer hours and on top of that he also now has five or six part-time volunteers that come for a few hours a week as well all of this is free Terry up to work on other areas of his business and he's started to run a Cafe Restaurant from his premises as well as he's conducted 1 200 farm tours in the last six months which has really helped to put his farm on the map in the city there he is based now if you want to check out Terry's interview I'll put a link to it in the description in the video here but if you're wondering you know how do I get volunteers to come and help out well just bear this in mind you know mushroom growing is a really interesting topic and for people that aren't already into it you know they're interested to come along and see so just put the word out in your community and I think you'll find a lot of people are interested in coming just to learn alongside you and it can be a really useful way to get to know people that maybe end up becoming employees for you further down the line you can pick people that you work particularly well with and that show a lot of promise and they may well end up becoming staff for you in the future in fact that's actually how I met Eric just over a decade ago gosh that does seem a long time ago that I am I joined Adam to see if I could help out and we didn't know so much about marketing back then as well and that's a point I want to point out here because that can be a mistake that people make so for instance you can focus have a passion for growing food and grow a lot of lovely food but it still needs to be sold especially if you want to make it into a sideline income or a business of course so one common mistake that comes to mind is just targeting the wrong customer so about a decade or so ago I was really excited having cultivated the beautiful crops of Lions made you drive around you try and Supply to restaurants for instance and you just tell them all about the beautiful medicinal properties and health benefits of this type of mushrooms and all they care about is how much it costs and you're clearly talking to the wrong audience there so instead of selling these Lions mate I ended up just wasting countless hours dropping off samples here and there and obviously following up with phone calls as well and I just want you to avoid this mistake so another mistake that comes to mind is providing a poor customer experience so what you want to be focusing on is consistent Supply to an existing customer and the reason is simple it's so much easier to sell to an existing customer than to gain a new customer there's a lot more work involved in that one and if you keep a healthy relationship and also consistent Supply going you'll find that the orders will keep coming in so another point I want to make is that before you start selling any other mushroom related products make sure there's a market out there and we felt foul of this we back in 2016 got really excited about inspiring the next generation of food Growers the children to recycle coffee waste into mushrooms and we developed this new product called The Grow kids we thought it was a nice idea but that was the problem just because we thought it was a nice idea we also assumed that thousands of people would order schools would order in Vogue families would order to get their children learning and that was a mistake we've made turns out that schools have very limited budgets and of course lots of families have to even especially since we were so unsuccessful in bringing across the benefits of this product so it's fair to say we needlessly complicated things and we should have done more market research before launching a product that no one wanted to buy and it reminds me of what we said earlier on in this video keep it simple stupid being overly optimistic is a problem that a lot of people struggle with and we definitely do as well and we almost certainly will continue to be like that in the future I'm sure and it's something I see in a lot of new growers in particular so quite often I see people who just join our course and they have got pretty big aims and Ambitions what often happens is people leave maybe their existing work or career and they sort of try and reverse engineer how much they're used to earning in terms of how much they want to earn from growing mushrooms and they just sort of multiply the numbers and say well I'm going to grow 500 kilograms of mushroom per week now of course that is possible to grow that many kilos at most of the week but not on your own you're going to need some people to help you to do that and so being overly optimistic can be a huge problem for people especially at the start before you really get a feel for what's involved I remember one particular case of a course member who in February of that year started growing 25 kilograms of mushrooms per week in June they up that to 250 kilos a week so that's 10 times more and then just a month later they increased it 400 kilos a week last time I checked that person is unfortunately no longer growing and this is a common issue that people face because as you try to scale up what you're doing any inefficiencies or issues you have in your production get Scaled up as well and you can really become a Cropper so my tip for you really is just to try and be honest with yourself and also track everything that you're doing you know write down how much time it takes you to do absolutely everything in your day and track that across the week and at the end of that you'll have a much clearer picture of exactly what you're spending your time on which areas maybe you could make more efficient or perhaps could hand over to someone else to do and really this is the process that will enable you to make sure you manage your time much more carefully and that you're working on the right things and that if you do start to work with other people that you can kind of pick the areas which are taking up the most time but maybe a sort of easier tasks for someone else to do and you can sort of allot those for somebody else to do and free up large chunks of your week so another mistake I see people make is giving up too soon so what happens here is that you come some way with mushroom cultivation you learn you've got some success and then suddenly you face a little bit of adversity and maybe people just give up as a result and that can be such a shame because you might be giving up too soon in fact it reminds me of a story of a member of our online community called Glenn Glenn and his wife had run a successful business growing carnations in Australia and at 65 they were looking for another adventure they had this idea of growing mushrooms not putting just themselves but also for the local community now this interest in mushrooms in part came from a health scare that blended-faced and they were looking to grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms so off they went and Glenn started to do a ton of research and he got stuck in with all the growing and having mixed success but he didn't give up he doubled down he decided to join our course back in 2017 and through our lessons was able to work through the design and build stage to running his own mushroom farm ever since now his company is still running five years later which is awesome to see and I'm completely aware that this one is really hard to judge what he's giving up too soon so if you're facing some general adversity I just want to remind you of that chart we showed you earlier of the day in the life of an entrepreneur it's part and parcel of it and similarly if you face problems with mushroom cultivation it could be that the problems are just so enormous that they're really hard to overcome but on the other hand perhaps with just a couple of tweaks from expert you just write back on track mistake number 10 is simply not investing in yourself most of us are only really good at a few different areas and yet when you run your own business you're expected to do a whole bunch of stuff you've never done before and probably aren't naturally gifted at investing in yourself by learning from others who've got more knowledge and experience in those areas is a really great idea it really is an investment that will pay back more than it will cost over the last decade we've spent thousands of dollars on online courses and business mentoring programs and we really haven't regretted any of it in each case it's come along at just the right time and provided us with knowledge and insights and Frameworks that we didn't already have which has just made it much more enjoyable place to come to work every day and also between Eric and I it's helped us to develop you know sort of a shared framework that we are both on the same page for in how we want to run our business now of course you don't need to do this and you can go about it in different ways it really just depends on which areas of knowledge you're wanting to learn at that particular point in time but what I would say is there's almost always short cuts to be had by learning from other people who have got experience in areas that you don't have and when it comes to learning about how to grow mushrooms I highly recommend learning from more experienced Growers whether that's someone in your local area that's been doing it for a while already or perhaps an in-person course somewhere in your country or an online course and Community like the low-tech mushroom farming course and community that we run so I really hope you benefited from those 10 business mistakes that we just ran past you and if you feel you like you can do with some shortcuts and some help when it comes to mushroom growing then this might be a good time to let us help you there's a special offer on isn't it yeah up until the end of this month end of January we have a special offer for you to join our low-tech mushroom farming online course and Community which basically enables you to invest in lifetime access to more than 100 step-by-step lessons walking you through really everything you need to know from how to plan build and operate your own small scale mushroom farm comes with a bunch of downloadable files as well things like substrate mix calculators equipment lists spreadsheets that you'll find really useful as well and on top of that there is the course Community which people take part in on a regular basis and a lot of the learning actually happens there on top of what we cover in the course lessons so if you're excited to join you want to check out this offer go to growcycle.com forward slash offer and I really hope to welcome you soon soon to this growing Community yep absolutely we'd love to see you in there and in the meantime thanks a lot for joining us here today in this video and we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 79,439

Keywords: mushroom farm, grocycle, commercial mushroom farm, grow mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, mushroom business, gourmet mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, growing mushrooms in a bottle, growing mushrooms in, growing mushrooms in bags, mushroom bales, mushroom production costs, cost of mushroom farming, mushroom yields, biological efficiency, mushroom production method, substrate, mushroom substrate, mushroom products, mushroom fruiting, shiitake mushrooms, business tips, top ten tips

Id: nNmLTPBen2s

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023