Jenny (00:28)
If you have a flower farm or are just starting one and you want to be smart with your money and not waste it on silly things that don't matter, this episode is for you. Today, I'm talking all about how to know where to invest in your business in order to maximize your results and reach your goals faster. And I get this question a lot. What should I invest in when I'm first starting a flower farm or when you're trying to grow your flower farm business? Should you invest in a giant perennial planting like a bunch of peonies or a
expensive weed barrier or infrastructure like a barn or greenhouses or high tunnels or deli tubers or bulbs or a walk -in cooler or a studio space or hired help or a fancy logo and branding package or, or, or, or the list goes on and on.
Today, I am breaking it down and going over how you can make the best decisions on what to invest in for your farm and your unique situation. So what exactly out of that list should you invest in? The answer is, it depends. Something you'll learn about me is that I'm always keeping it real, and it's very rare that I'll ever give you a super simple one size fits all answer, because flower farming is not a one size fits all situation.
Don't worry, I'll dive into details here in a second, but like I always say, every farm is as unique as the person who runs it, which means what you invest into for your business is just as unique as you, your farm, and your situation. So of course you can just willy -nilly spend money on all these things, a cooler, perennial plantings, branding packages, whatever. However, if you're like me and you're not made of money,
and you don't want to waste your hard earned cash on things that aren't truly moving the needle for you, let's talk about it. Let's talk about how to determine exactly what you should be spending your money on, what you should be investing in, in order to move your business forward. First off, the things that will determine what you invest in for your business, no matter if you're in year one or year 10, depend on many different factors. But the top three are your stage of business,
your goals, and most importantly, your pinch points. And I'm gonna talk about all these.
So you need to get crystal clear on where you are, where you want to be, your goals, and your pinch points. And here's what I mean by this. Your stage of business will determine where you invest because although you will most likely be always reinvesting into your business, year one looks a lot different than year five, 10, 15, and so on. In year one, your pinch point is probably going to be some basics. Like you're going to need some basic growing supplies.
farm infrastructure while in year 10, you might need more labor or more specialized piece of machinery or equipment to develop leaner systems on your established farm. Your goals also obviously will impact this. So if your goal is to grow your business bigger, you're most likely going to be investing in education and how to do that through sales, marketing, and finance management. But if your goal is to keep your business at the same level,
but not work so many hours in your business. Like if you're a business owner that is just working like 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week, and your business is doing great, but you need some of your time back, you're probably gonna be looking at investing in education for hiring or a lean farming techniques, delegation and leadership. So you can replace yourself within your business and focus more on managing it rather than being in the day -to -day tasks. But it's your pinch points that really, really determine,
where you should spend your money on your farm to move you forward and move you towards your goals. Your pinch points are areas that you determine are holding you back from moving forward. These pain points need to be carefully pinpointed and considered so you can most effectively make a decision to get you out of whatever rut you're in and keep you moving forward. To determine your specific pinch points, sit down, I mean this for real,
sit down and write down exactly what your goals are, what is holding you back from them. So what are your goals and what right now is holding you back from achieving them? These are your pinch points. Then you're going to write out solutions for them. So no matter what that looks like, these solutions are what you're going to spend money on and invest in in your business. So this is going to prevent you from spending money on things that you just like willy -nilly might think.
will make a return in the future. Like that's not a way to manage your business. Like sure, you can just go and spend money on whatever you want if you have money, but that's not being a smart entrepreneur. So here is just a personal example. And it's kind of a silly example, but this was a really big one for me. So when I first started my flower farm for the first few years, I did not have a greenhouse. So I was starting.
hundreds of trays of flowers in my basement of my house. And my husband and I had just refinished our basement. When we had bought our house, it's a long story, but it was total piece of crap. And we just had to renovate basically the whole thing. So we had spent a bunch of time and money refinishing that basement and making it nice and livable. And we had built this handmade seed starting station to put down there as well. So I had tiers like shelves and lights and everything, but watering.
Those dang seedlings in my house made such a mess. Like honestly don't know how people do this for more than like a year. There was water everywhere, like no matter how careful I was. and even with fans, there was just never enough airflow. So everything got like fungacy. Our basement smelled like wet soil. I got dirt stains everywhere. And you know, like.
Don't get me wrong, I love the smell of soil in my greenhouse, but not in my own house. That's just like, not for me. The quality of the plants were suffering, and so I wasn't able to have decent flower starts. But more importantly, my relationship with my family, with my husband was suffering because my husband was just like, what the hell are you doing to our house? And also because I felt like I had absolutely no work -life separation.
I had Dalia tubers in the basement, taking up half the basement, dirt everywhere. Like even though we wash our Dalia tubers, like they're still dirty. and everywhere I looked, there was work staring me in the face, like different issues, just nagging me because it was all inside of my house. And so for me, I was having a lot of anxiety and a lot of like really bad feelings around overwhelm and just having work being all consuming.
And that was truly preventing me from wanting to work in my business and move it forward.
I really needed to separate my personal life from my work life a little bit to feel more at ease and be able to focus on what really mattered both in the business and at home and in my personal life and with my relationships. So that was a major, major pain point for me that was truly preventing me from moving my business forward. Like I couldn't even produce the amount of seedlings that I needed to earn the revenue I needed in my basement. I needed a greenhouse. So the first.
piece of infrastructure on the farm I invested in was a propagation greenhouse to start seeds. It was not a fancy one or a new one. It was not expensive at all. We bought the frame used off Craigslist, which for all you kids out there, Craigslist is like Facebook marketplace. I don't even know if it exists anymore. but it probably does. So we went to somebody's house. We took down the greenhouse frame ourselves. It was used.
we transported it a few hours home and we rebuilt it at home and we actually had to fabricate some pieces to make it work because it was like an old greenhouse frame. It wasn't very nice. I just didn't have the money to buy a new one. but I invested just a couple thousand dollars into a used one. We did buy new plastic for it, and a new heater. And you know what? It's been probably like eight.
or nine years since then and it's still doing such a great job. So I've never had to replace it. It's been amazing. Once we got that greenhouse, it was just like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was producing, and still am producing amazing looking flower starts and flowers from the greenhouse. The quality is so much better. I have a way better handle on my work life separation and my basement is clean again, which is like...
A huge thing. So that greenhouse was also a really important symbol of me taking my business very seriously. So it actually spurred a lot of other actions and investments into infrastructure that really helped me to grow my business. So like I said, that is a pretty simple example, but you know, that might not be the case for you. A greenhouse might not be what's holding you back right now. You might have plenty of space and room.
in your house to start seeds or maybe you buy plugs in and that's not an issue and it's not preventing you from growing your revenue on your business. For me, that was an issue. So I needed to invest money into it to move the business forward. Like I said, might not be the case for you, might be, but let's talk about some other examples that I've had just in my experience moving through the years of me being an entrepreneur and a flower farm business owner. So if we look back to like zero, year zero to one,
I didn't have any knowledge of flowers. When I started my flower farm, I literally knew nothing about flowers. So I invested money in basically learning how to grow. I bought flower seed and plants and just invested time into figuring out how these different flowers grew. And that learning curve was kind of steep. And this is a really obvious pinch point. You know, I couldn't make money selling flowers if I didn't know how to grow them. And I say this,
because I grew up farming. So I knew all the basics of growing things and I knew all the basics of farm work, but I literally knew nothing about flowers. So that was a huge learning curve for me. So I learned. Then in year two, like I talked about with my greenhouse, I just had zero infrastructure and it was such a mess. The workspaces here were a major pain point in my business just besides the greenhouse.
I was working out of my home and garage and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think most of us start out that way and that's okay. But I was sharing spaces with my family where we really didn't have the space and it was making the flower farm work majorly majorly inefficient and frustrating. I didn't have any organized space for supplies and tools. And I would spend so much time just looking for things because.
my tools and supplies didn't have proper homes, or I was sharing shelving with my hubby and he would like put his oil cans on there and they would spill all over my flower sleeves, or, you know, my husband would pick up a tool to use and didn't put it back, or I would use his tools and not put them back because we didn't have an organized space because we just really, I don't know, we just didn't. We just didn't have space for things. I was working out of my garage. That was also a shop for my husband.
And I used it as my flower studio, even when I had employees. And so they couldn't find anything. They didn't have a space to work in. And it just caused so much pain and frustration and so many different areas of the business that it was literally preventing my business from growing. So I invested in a cooler and at first I just bought a cheap beverage cooler. it was another purchase from Craigslist, go Craigslist. And then eventually we did invest more into a bigger walk -in cooler.
But then we also built a barn and a studio space to work in, plus a tool shed to organize all of our field tools and equipment. And this was such a game changer. It literally helped me make my business feel so much more at ease, organized, at peace. We ran things so much more efficiently. We got systems in place once we had the space to do it in. Things were organized.
And quite honestly, it was life -changing. So also around the same time in my business, I knew I needed to earn more revenue. I needed to make more money in order to quit my off -farm job and farm full -time. But how do I do that? Well, one of the easiest solutions for me was to just extend my season. So before I had hoop houses and greenhouses and all that stuff, my growing season here in Zone 5 in central New York state was about...
July through early October, if we got a late frost. And with a high tunnel and a few perennials, I knew I could grow April through November. So I made that decision to invest in high tunnels and hoop houses to extend my season and make more money. So this is a big pinch point for a lot of people. If you're finding that you have sales outlets and you're bringing in a little cash from them, but it's not enough and you have a shorter growing season, a really easy way,
to make more revenue is to just extend your season and sell to those same outlets for a longer period of time. So this way you are trying to make a full -time salary in like eight or nine months instead of four or five months out of the season. It's just so much easier. And so the solution to that is to find season extension methods to just have a longer growing season. So also around years two -ish, three -ish, I was in
full business growth mode, I was still working an off farm job. I was determined to quit that and to farm full time. And I just needed to start marketing better and selling better. I didn't really know a lot about marketing and selling. Like I had some basics down, but I wanted to dive deeper into that so I could get really good at it and be able to sell every stem that I had on the farm. So I heavily invested in education for myself in the form of
books and online courses and heavily invested time for learning by listening to podcasts like this one. I mean, obviously not this one because I'm recording it right now. But I listened to business podcasts and I learned how to actually run a business. I learned how to look at the numbers, do bookkeeping the right way and about marketing and sales. So investing in education.
in myself has been the single biggest contributing factor to my success on my flower farm. And this is about the time when my business exploded in growth. And I mean, really like exploded. I was doubling my revenue every year. I went from like $2 ,000 in revenue and like year two to probably like $75 ,000 in revenue. And then I doubled that the next year after that. So anytime there is an issue where knowledge is the problem,
Man, just invest in learning that new skill and it will nearly always pay off. I am a firm believer that almost any problem can be solved with a skill and you can always learn those skills. And I'm super passionate about that, always. I'm so thankful for the money and time that I invested into my own education and it has paid back tenfold and always well. It has paid back more than any infrastructure, any greenhouse, high tunnel.
barn or whatever that I have invested in. So now I even have a set amount of money in my budget each season for continuing education. And every winter I look at where I'm lacking in my business, what's holding me back, whether that be marketing, sales, numbers, management, whatever. And I buy books, online courses, classes, memberships or mentorship whenever I can to learn as fast as possible to get me past that particular roadblock in moving forward.
So one last example is around year four, I was spread way too thin. The business was really successful. It was doing great. I was working full time on the farm, but I was just working so, so, so many hours. I was working incredibly hard and I was really burnt out. I knew that I couldn't keep going at that pace. So I invested in labor and hired help.
I learned how to hire people, I learned how to manage people, and that's always a learning process for me, but this was about the time that I had already quit my off -farm job, and so hiring help plus investing in the education to learn about business truly propelled me forward to be able to farm full -time comfortably and have work -life balance, which has always been my dream. My dream has always been just to work for myself, doing something that I liked.
And of course I worked insanely hard, it's not even funny, to get there, but I really believe I was able to do it because I was strategic about what I invested my money in. Like in year one, I saw a bunch of people just dumping money into these giant perennial plantings like peonies and other perennials, which I think is a great investment. Of course, I think it's great that you'll make your money back in most situations, and of course it depends on your business and your sales outlets and all that stuff.
But for me, that was not the right decision because it wasn't what was holding me back. I had flowers to sell, I just needed to be able to sell them. And so I carefully analyzed exactly what was holding me back in my business and invested money into solutions around that.
So again, I could have invested in like 5 ,000 P &E plants in year one or two, but that was not the thing that was holding my business back from succeeding. I could have invested in a super fancy logo and branding package from a marketing agency. And sure, my branding would have looked more professional, but that was not something that prevented me from growing my business. People bought my flowers despite my super professional or unprofessional branding in the beginning.
I also could have invested money into someone building a website for me, but I don't even know what that goes for these days, like $5 ,000, $10 ,000, I have no idea. But instead, I invested time into learning how to do it myself, and then I spent that five or $10 ,000 I would have spent on a website on a real solution for my problems that moved my business forward. And I think that it's great to ask other flower farmers what they invested in when they were first starting their flower farm,
But I don't think you should base your actions off of other people's. I know that it seems like it might be the right answer to ask other people what they've done and then just copy them. And it's great to get that insight. But if you're always asking everyone else what you should be doing, it might be some time to do some really serious self -reflection and ask yourself, what is holding you back and what you really need to move yourself and your business forward?
for me in the beginning that looked like infrastructure and education, for you that might look like something totally different. But you should really take an inventory of exactly what is holding you back and find solutions for it and then invest money into that. And no matter what, always choose to invest in your education.
Here at Trademark Farmer, we have our blog, this podcast, our online business school for flower farmers, which is called Six Figure Flower Farming, which doesn't open until January, but it's just an amazing resource.
And I feel so passionate about flower farm education that I put together a free book list for you with all of my favorite flower farming and business books You can find the link and get them in the show notes of this episode. In this guide, I list all of the books that I feel really helped me move my business forward, really changed the game for me in flower farming. And I know that if you take a peek at it, you'll find some great books to invest your time into learning new things. And it will 100%.
be worth it. So go ahead and sign up for that now. Link is in the show notes of this episode. So thanks for joining me for this episode of Six Figure Flower Farming and I hope this helps you to be able to sit down, figure out exactly what is holding you back from your business goals right now and then finding solutions for them and then investing your time into money into those solutions instead of just willy -nilly.
investing in things that you're not even sure you should be spending your money on.
And then I'll see you in the next episode where we are actually sitting down with a very special flower farmer named Nikki Irving of Flourish Flower Farm. You won't want to miss this episode. Nikki is going to tell us all about her flower farm journey. And it is just such a fun and really insightful conversation. So I can't wait to see you then.
