Watch this before you start a flower farm! | Lessons from a SIDE HUSTLE flower farm

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] do [Music] hi we're rosita and laronda and we are rook design company and we've been getting a lot of questions people are wondering what our zone is what we do exactly um what are who we are what our business model is so we thought we would just use this video to kind of clarify some of that stuff and to share with you the things that we've learned along the way that we think have really helped us we've been doing this for about five years now versus six six or seven i don't know we've been doing this for a long time and um we are in zone 5b 6a she says sometimes we have a we're right on the edge of the two zones and sometimes it goes colder sometimes warmer right we're in the ohio valley so currently outside there's almost a foot of snow and we're getting another 8 to 12 inches they say so we get a lot of cold winters and then really hot summers so it's a real fun growing zone not but it is if you know how to grow in it right right and anybody can grow flowers but you just have to know what your zone can handle right and what you can handle in your zone um find out what works well work with the seasons work with your zone instead of trying to work against it right exactly like to say yeah so root design is our side hustle and by that we mean that we both work full-time jobs uh we're we have a family business and we run the office end of that so that we just do root design in the book ends early mornings late at night weekends holidays yes all of that and we are sisters and we're not married so that's why we have time to do all of this it is very time consuming it is and if we didn't i think if we didn't have this unique situation that we have we probably wouldn't be able to do all the stuff that we do right so if you're looking to get rich quick off of starting a flower farm this year you've never done it before don't watch this video this is not the channel for you this is a reality check for all those dollar signs in your eyes we hear a bubble and we're about to pop it no not truly no really not we really do want to encourage people to grow flowers we just want to encourage sort of a realistic picture of it exactly if 2020 did anything for us it was to clarify the fact that it was smart for us to start small and just sort of grow as we could um to start redesign we didn't actually borrow any money we just we had some of our own savings we invested some initial costs like we literally i think only had like two or three thousand to start with and a lot of that went for seeds for tubers for landscape fabric just real basic stuff we didn't have we don't have a greenhouse yet we don't uh we do not need one we kind of we use one but we can do it without yeah and then when we start solar plants so i think we need a greenhouse but we haven't we've made it so far without you know grow lights i think i guess we did use some of our initial startup for grow lights to heat mat things like that we just started with the basics and i think as long as you have earth as long as you have seeds as long as you have a hoe or a tiller or something to work the ground with or to make your holes a trowel you really do not need that much else um if you're gonna scale your your flower production if you're gonna you know grow big and have tons of flowers and bouquets and things it's there there are things you are probably going to need down the road but to start with you need to figure out do you actually enjoy growing flowers if you've never grown them before it is a lot of hard work are you okay with that do you enjoy that um or is it something that you're gonna invest a lot of money in they're going to be like well i don't actually really enjoy it bunny trail but basically i think what i'm saying is just start small one start with what you have and then grow as you can and i think it was about our second year or third year we just thought oh let's just grow all the flowers like we knew that starting out we you know we started real slow we just grew a few things we knew how to grow and whatever about our third year we really expanded we had greedy january eyes it happens to everybody you know you in january you kind of forget the heat of summer and all the hard work the backaches and everything you just think everything was just this you just had this dreamy picture of your garden and you're just going to add all the flowers to it and that year almost broke us like we were that was a terrible year i did not enjoy it much at all but we realized that our model is a side hustle and so we didn't have time to go to market so we had no time to even sell the flowers that we grew so it's kind of a reality check for us and we decided okay we have to get really clear on what our purpose and our mission is and then stick to that i think we've done pretty good with that we've done a lot of pivoting we have when we started root design we went in with the mindset that we're not going to have a lot of startup costs and we're probably not going to turn a profit in the first five years or so we decided to take about five years which is kind of an arbitrary number i think to kind of to see if we can learn all the things we need to learn because there are a lot of things to learn when you're starting um flowers from seed and growing them growing conditions how to start them you know make sure you don't have disease and stuff in your flowers how to sell them yeah so there's lots to learn so we decided to take five years kind of as our education um didn't neither of us have any kind of a background in horticulture or you know don't have any kind of degrees so we just decided to take five years to learn how to do that with the intent then at the end of the five years to decide do we want to keep on going or do we want to stop we gave ourselves that we actually gave ourselves that freedom every year i think yeah and just so the five years starts over again the next year that's how it's been because it's at least you're sad so we did last year make a little more of an effort though to get to become profitable right okay we basically just reinvested everything that we made with our flowers uh weddings etc into actually infrastructure and perennials and that kind of thing but along with that what i would say is it's really really important we learned this a few years in to set goals and to set smart goals you may have heard of those before specific measurable attainable relevant and timely and once you know what your goal is it's a whole lot easier to hit it versus just i'm going to grow flowers and maybe i'll sell them and maybe not so that's going to look different for everybody but we finally got a little smarter with our goals i think it is okay in the beginning just to learn how to grow flowers right and not put too much pressure on yourself to sell them right off the bat if it's a side hustle if you're doing it like we did it right but that's your goal your goal is to learn how to grow flowers that's your smart measurable attainable yes so yeah eventually you're going to have to probably turn a profit or what's the point of doing this but yeah it becomes a very expensive hobby if you're not going to turn a profit right so if you decide you're going to do this as a job that you want to make money on it um it's very important to establish your brand and this is something i don't feel like we know a lot about but we did a lot of digging into that and figuring out okay what is a brand how do we become a brand took a lot of podcasts blog posts bogus youtube videos to figure out that we are our brand and that's just something i would like to say to every beginning flower farmer you don't have to try to be something or somebody you're not you're not floret you're never going to be floret you are you and the world needs you so along with that i would say if you want a compelling brand or a brand that people relate to be authentic be honest tell stories make what you love and the people will find you and then you don't really even have to work on your brand unless you want to work on yourself you know but if you are authentic and if you are your brand then just do the things that make you comfortable pivot in the directions that you want to go with your business do the things you want do the things you love do more of that and out of that i think kind of develops a brand that's sort of what we found for ourselves right it might be different for you i don't know but just just don't stress about it we'd also like to say that you get to be the hero in your own story if you decide to start a flower farm and by that i mean nobody's coming to save you you're gonna plant these flowers and then you have to you have to harvest them you have to sell them all that i don't know if somebody might come and save you but be prepared for a lot of hard work um you might cry yourself to sleep at night if you know that going in maybe you won't give up uh when you get there but it's hard work so if you're not willing if you're wanting to get rich quick and not work hard this is not for you try a different side hustle yeah right okay the next thing we like to say is that location does matter when you're starting a flower farm up for two reasons um so if you're in the desert in arizona maybe don't try a flower farm that might be kind of hard but also we're in rural ohio if i can say that word um we're not close to any big cities so our customers are the dear rednecks around not all of them are ready no there's a very classy people here too we're rednecks but um okay so somebody in next to columbus ohio is going to have a whole lot easier time selling 300 csa bouquets than we are in cambridge um that's just the hard reality so i think you need to take that into consideration you know you can work through that you can drive to columbus to sell your flowers but location does matter when you're starting a flower farm and i think that should determine the model that you build your flower farm on so there are a bunch of ways to sell your flowers besides going to farmers markets and we might touch on that later so we started growing flowers because we love flowers i mean that probably makes sense but i think i think there is there's such a need for beauty and i think i think for me keeping that in front of my my mind just just remembering that when i'm working especially when it's really hard work i have a backache it's february and we're planting ranunculus and freezing weather just knowing that the the end result is going to be worth it it's going gonna be beautiful keep that in front of my mind and i like to think of it that even as a flower farmer your product isn't actually flowers you know this might be a little poetic and idealistic but your your product is hope and it's beauty and it's courage and flowers are just your medium um because flowers are not really essential you don't need them to live except i think you do right i really think you do we all need hope we need beauty right we need that sort of pause in the middle of everyday life and to see things that make us think about better things right and if 2020 taught me anything that was another lesson i learned flowers are essential i feel like a preacher and our final point would be that you're going to be better served by learning how to adapt and pivot than just sticking to your original goal like it's the end-all be-all we have pivoted probably 20 times every year we pivot a little bit more right we take time to at the end of every year to kind of reevaluate and see okay do we still want to do this is this worth the years it's taking out of our life so far we've said yeah um but then we we also then take that time to kind of refine redefine um we don't get too attached to our our ideas i would say we try to talk about what worked and what didn't work and then find a new plan for what we would like to do right to cut out stuff that doesn't work we have part of the reason we pivoted away from doing weddings was because it just doesn't really jive with a full-time job yeah outside of this side hustle so that was part of the reason why we decided to try to sell more of our own flowers instead of doing weddings they are high stress um no i feel like you handle the stress well i don't i don't enjoy that level of stress or the challenge quite as much actually that wasn't our last point my last point is that we didn't make any money you know what i want to say is that rosita's pay last year was a chick-fil-a [Music] actually that wasn't my last point my last point is um i i think i've made this point three times before but um we have friends that come up to us sort of sort of worried like hesitating you guys making money [Laughter] i think she paid herself with the chick-fil-a meal last year and that was pretty much all she took but i think i like to say that that's the business model we consciously chose five years ago so we're okay with it um it does get a little disheartening when you're out there working in the blazing sun and you're like uh for nothing but it's not we all we also say that gardening is its own reward um so far it pretty much has to be pretty much has to be you're right so there it is whether you wanted it or not there's the lessons i would say a few of the lessons we've learned as a side hustle um it's easy to get tunnel vision and just you know i have to learn how to grow flowers and whatever but know what motivates you um i think if you get really clear on why you're doing this because you're gonna need that to sustain you through the hard times [Music] do you

Channel: Root Design Company

Views: 51,675

Keywords: side hustle, flower farm, how to start a flower farm, pivot your business, zone 5b gardening, zone 6a gardening, zone 6a permaculture, cut flower garden, cut flower farm, cut flowers, root design company, mennonite, should i start a flower farm

Id: OsPa_gxJ080

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021