Jenny (00:29)
Alex, you so much for coming on to the podcast today.
Coram Deo Farm (00:32)
Thank you.
Jenny (00:33)
I'm really excited to talk to you because we've talked a little bit before and I just would love to start talking about what your situation is, when you started your farm, and just give us like a little bit of a lay of the land of where you're at.
Coram Deo Farm (00:50)
Yeah, so we are a year three Oklahoma flower farm and we sell retail market bouquets from our roadside stand. So we started three years ago. We started on like a 30 by 60 plot. We sold from our roadside stand and it went well-ish our first year.
But I don't think we were like full on serious at that point. And then in year two, we really had, and we can talk about this, we really had a tipping point of success where we were like, oh my gosh, we can actually do this. This is going really well. And so going here into year three, we expect to hit some really exciting revenue goals from just our roadside stand. And we only sell from our roadside stand.
In the first two years, we were only open on Saturday mornings, and we sell one price point bouquet. So we are like, we joke that we're the steak and potatoes farm. We are streamlined and simple, but we are high volume. And that's what we're leaning into and really focused on finding success through very simplified efforts.
Jenny (01:59)
Yeah, and I feel like what you're doing is like my dream business a little bit because I...
Talk to so many flower farmers that just have such a seriously complex business and it can get really complex just growing like a million different varieties or a million different kinds of flowers and trying to sell through all these different sales outlets and it's honestly, like I've been there and done that and it's exhausting. And so it's so refreshing to see you guys starting out with a very simple, like easy, I don't want to say easy because none of it is easy. But um.
Yeah, simple business model and you're just selling through your roadside stand and everybody knows who you are, what you do, there's no question about it. And so that's also great for marketing. And so are you in like a really popular place? Is there a lot of people around you? Are you more rural? Give us like a little bit of an idea of like if you're on a main road or not or anything like that.
Coram Deo Farm (03:01)
Yeah, so we're in northeast Oklahoma and so the biggest metropolitan city would be Tulsa, but Tulsa is 40, 45 minutes from us. So you can picture where we are if you know where Tulsa is, but we don't really pull from the Tulsa market. So we're pretty rural. We're not like one stoplight, 400 people rural, but you know, like we have our one Walmart, you know, sort of thing. And we're on the north side of town and we're right off of a...
We're off of Route 66, so it's not like a major freeway, but it's a bigger thoroughfare. And I would say the average commute for our customers is maybe 15 minutes. We've had some 30-minute people, and I kind of hope, like you said, we're becoming known for one thing. I'm hoping that draw can kind of increase our radius of where we can pull customers from and maybe hit more 30-minute people because we're interesting and different. But I would say about 10 to 15 minutes.
more rural. We're the only show in town which does help. I know that there are markets that are very flower farm saturated and we're not. I mean one of the reasons is it's very hard to grow in Oklahoma. A lot of the stereotypes are a bit true like the wind here is OMG level and stuff. I think we're a little slower on the uptick of getting farms. I mean I anticipate more and more
Jenny (04:17)
No!
Coram Deo Farm (04:27)
But it's a much higher entry start, I think, than maybe some areas of the country where you can direct sow a bunch of summer flowers and kind of launch a small flower farm venture. Not really the case here. So that definitely helps us. We are not on a dirt road. We're on a paved road. It's a big access road for like...
work trucks because it connects to smaller freeways or highways, I guess. But we don't rely on the drive-by traffic. I think that's a big thing I like to stress with flower stands is I think some people think that you have to live in a really busy intersection to have traffic to your flower stand. But I think...
I mean, I didn't meet everyone that came to the stand, but I can think of one, maybe two instances where people said like, I was just driving by and saw you and stopped. Everyone is driven through marketing. Social media and branding and marketing is how we get people to come out to us. And so I think that's an encouraging answer for those that wanna start a flower stand that you're not completely location locked in. Now, if you live a mile down a dirt road, 30 minutes out of town, that's probably...
not the best scenario for a stand. But yeah, it's been going well.
Jenny (05:53)
I love that. I absolutely love what you just said that your business is driven through your marketing. It's not just like, oh, we're on a busy road, so by accident, we're getting business because I think a lot of people go into flower farming thinking that, I don't wanna say thinking that the business is just gonna be there waiting for them, but maybe being a little bit naive to the fact that you're gonna have to actively.
go out and find customers and get in front of their faces and get them to know about you and learn about you. And so that is a really exciting and unique approach that you're taking. So you're very proactive about your marketing and doing a really good job at it to bring people to your farm stand. Now, did you start out just knowing that you wanted to do a farm stand or did...
you try a couple other things and then come to this conclusion.
Coram Deo Farm (06:50)
I think we were kind of forced into it in the sense that we went through our checklist of your standard ways you can sell flowers. And then it ended up being like, oh, this is awesome. We're so glad we did this. But in the beginning, it was like, well, we don't want to do farmers markets because we have four young children. So Saturday mornings, that's just not an option for us.
And then there's only a couple florists in our small town and they're more like 1-800 flowers florists, which is just a whole different wholesale game. And we're not going to drive 45 minutes to Tulsa to sell wholesale flowers. So we were like, well, let's just try a flower stand. Was kind of how we stumbled into it. But then when it started going so well, I was like, this is the best way to sell flowers. We're going to lean into this.
Jenny (07:41)
Yeah, that's so cool. I love that. So what has been your overall approach to your business from the beginning? As far as what you decide you're gonna grow, how you decided to only sell through your farm stand, and how you base your marketing.
Coram Deo Farm (08:03)
Yeah, I think I don't think I was fully aware in year one, the choices I was making. And in hindsight, I'm glad I did. I just don't think I understood why it was beneficial at the time, but I'm fairly risk averse. I'm on the more conservative end. And so, you know, I didn't plant out a quarter acre of flowers my first year and try to grow 30 flowers because my personality is.
If I want to do something, I want to be the best at it, or I want to be excellent at it. And so doing all of that felt like, well, that seems like way more ways to fail. So I don't want to do that. I want to do what I think I can do well, which our first year was summer annuals. Because I was like, well, I can grow a sunflower, I can grow zinnias. Let's start small and learn fail on a smaller scale, if that ends up being the case. And again, the farm stand felt very safe. Because it...
It didn't feel as public as a farmer's market. It was a little more like it was on our property and you could kind of like dip our toe in the water. And I think that ended up being really beneficial long term because we scaled up slowly and we didn't get ourselves burned out and frustrated by over committing in the beginning or having a lot of loss in the beginning, whether it's financial or just mental load or stress.
It was very small baby steps. And then come second year when things were going really well and we were still growing a small number of varieties, but we increased the amount, I started to realize, it's better for me to grow less flowers, but have more of them consistently so that I can always have volume in the stand. And we become known for the consistency and quality of the product.
and I'm not overwhelmed with varieties, you know, on the growing end of things, I think that I started to realize, oh yeah, this is why I think so many new growers are just getting completely burned out or frustrated or overwhelmed because it's simply not possible to do all the things as a new grower with marketing and building your business and getting people to buy your flowers while also learning how to grow.
30 different flowers and 30 different flowers in post-process handling and making the bouquets and all of that. So I kind of stumbled into it with my conservativeness, but then realized I was onto something. And then I've just doubled down even harder on our simplicity.
Jenny (10:42)
Yeah, you are like, I feel like you should be my spokesperson because that's like all of my soap boxes. Like anybody who, like we were talking about this right now in my online course and anybody who's like read through my blog posts or heard me talk about stuff, I'm always telling people to simplify, like you don't need to grow all of these different varieties. Like, I think in...
very few instances does that really work for your customer. Like the majority of people who are selling like retail bouquets in a non-super wealthy area don't need to grow all of this variety. Like it just adds so much to your mental stress and it's overwhelming to plan. It's overwhelming to take care of everything. And I...
I'm sort of jealous of you, Alex, because I feel like I really had to learn that the hard way. Like out, I was growing a bajillion different varieties, trying to sell through all the sales outlets. I got burned out, and then I had the insight to be like, wait a second, I can rein this back and still like...
do fewer things but do them really, really well. And that's what I ended up doing. And I was like, I wish I had done this from the beginning. Which is why you are just so intriguing to me because you seem to be doing like all the right things from the very beginning. And it's just so cool to watch you do it. And I wanna come back to what you said with, you said if I'm gonna do something, I wanna be the best at it or be really, really good at it.
And I think that's the true entrepreneurial spirit. If you are going to be, like if you're someone listening and you're starting a flower farm or you have a flower farm, think about what you could do in your unique area, your unique market, and what could you really be the best at? Like what could you be known for? And that's how you build a really great and sustainable business. So I am just so amazed by...
your approach to all of that, pretty much just because it took me so long to figure all of that out. So I...
Coram Deo Farm (13:00)
Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it with doing something with excellence because it's in the same way that if you grow too many varieties, you're going to struggle with consistency and quality. If you sell too many different ways, it's hard. Yes, some of the bigger farms that are in year six, seven that have five employees and the owner is more of an operator at that point, it's like, okay, yes, you're in a different conversation about...
where you can sell and what your outlets look like. So if you're looking at like a Sunny Meadows farm and saying like, well, look, they sell to, you know, they sell five different ways. It's like, yeah, but do you know what that business looks like in order for them to do it? That's not one mom in the field, you know? So yeah, yeah. And I think going back to what we were talking about before too, I think one mistake that new growers make.
Jenny (13:47)
Hahaha
Coram Deo Farm (13:56)
or maybe flower farmers in general, maybe older ones still struggle with this, is I think we can get so much in our niche community, following a bunch of flower farmers on Instagram. That's all the content you're consuming constantly, your heads down up in the ground trying to grow. You begin to think that your customers think like you do and all your flower farming friends do, and they do not.
Jenny (14:20)
Yeah.
Coram Deo Farm (14:22)
Almost every person that comes to buy flowers from you has probably never even heard of a flower farm or this is the first flower farm they've ever been in. And I joke and I say like, I've never once had a customer come by and be like, ew, these bouquets don't have Nigella in it.
Jenny (14:38)
Ha ha ha!
Coram Deo Farm (14:38)
Like, what are you even doing? You know, like, they just, they don't know. And I think that's where we forget because we're just surrounding ourselves with other flower farmers that know that that's a voyage lisianthus, not an ABC lisianthus, you know? And it's like, but your customer has never even seen a lisianthus in person before. And so this lie that, or this myth, maybe, would be the better word, is like, so we only grow 15 varieties of flowers, March through October.
The myth is, well, don't your customers get bored? Like, don't they need all this variety? No. My customers will buy sunflowers from me for five months straight with zero complaint. You know, the reason they're buying the flowers is so different than maybe how we think of the flowers sometimes, or how much thought we've put into the flowers. That's not how the customer is experiencing their purchase. And I think one of the...
biggest things I would love to see new growers accept is the myth of variety. Because I think that's where the spending spirals, that's where the variety list spirals, that's where you have to offer the flower, you have to offer it in a CSA and a stand and a Yupick. And it's like, no, I've never lost a sale because my customers were bored. Because I can still make the bouquets look different every week.
A different color zinnia row might be in flush this week, and then next week it's a different color. And they're excited that it's purple zinnias this week, not pink zinnias. They're completely happy. They don't need a completely different formula every week. They don't need five different spring fillers to go with their ranunculus. They're coming because they want a lot of ranunculus because they've never seen one in person outside of maybe their wedding bouquet before. So...
I think maybe if we stopped believing that myth, it would be easier to make our grow list smaller.
Jenny (16:39)
Yes, yes, one million percent, yes. I can attest to this that I am like a convert because when I first started my farm, I was like following up like Floret of course, and all these like really high-end floral designers that were using all this variety in their high-end wedding bouquets, and I was trying to emulate that, but like my customer.
A, could not afford that. B, I should have been charging way more than I was. But when you put yourself in your customer's shoes, they really don't care that much about the variety because they don't even know any better. And so I went from growing all those different varieties to like what you're just saying, we only sell straight bunches of vernunculus during the month of May.
we don't sell anything else really. I mean the exception of like a few tulips, which I'm pretty sure we're cutting from our list this year, and we have our customers that come and they're like, oh my god, I can't decide what color to get. I'm gonna get yellow this week, and I'm like, you should come back next week and get the orange. And they do because they're, they've never seen them before, they're amazing. They are buying from us because they just love
business model is different and your customer is unique to your business. So like if you're somebody who is selling to, I don't know, if you're selling to like a wedding florist, if you're just selling flowers to florists, you might want to consider what kind of flowers do your florists want. Like they probably want white blush, salmon, they probably don't want like...
orange and yellow all the time, but everybody's customer is different. And so I think that's so smart. Just putting yourself in your customer's shoes and understanding where they're coming from and approaching all of your marketing with your customer at the forefront of your mind. Would you agree with that?
Coram Deo Farm (18:44)
I would agree with that. And I think going back to what I said about like we surround ourselves with flower farmers. And so we think we almost make our customers into other flower farmers and they're not. And we have to if you want to be a profitable business, so like not a hobby where you grow what makes you emotionally fulfilled, but you want to be a profitable farm, you have to grow what your customers want. And for example, on my farm, my customers are obsessed with sunflowers.
And I know this might shock some people in different parts of the country, but if I put a dahlia and a sunflower in front of my customers, nine out of 10 times the sunflower is chosen. And in the flower farming world, it's almost like your legitimacy is measured by your dahlia production. You know, and I don't grow dahlias on my farm because I can't make them profitable in our conditions. And honestly, my customers just don't.
Jenny (19:31)
Hahaha!
Coram Deo Farm (19:40)
value them at the price I would need to charge for them to be profitable. And they're telling me, like Alex, we love bold, bright, saturated colors and sunflowers as long as you can give them to us. You know, in the flower farming world tends to be like dahlias and pastels and soft and airy and whimsy and magical. And my customers are like, give me the brightest, boldest combo you can give.
to say, well, who am I growing for? Am I growing for the Instagram reel to other flower farmers or am I growing for the customer that's getting in their car and driving to me and giving me $20? You know, and so that's what you have to resist when making choices is are you growing for your customers and by extension, are you listening to them or are you approaching this with more of a hobby mindset, which tends to be a bit more like self-indulgent or kind of.
you know, a little bit harder to adjust with, you know, with a business mindset when it's, well, I want to grow this or I want to grow this color. And if that's what your customers are not wanting, then you shouldn't be doing it.
Jenny (20:54)
Right, and you can always have a little hobby cut flower garden for yourself. I tell people that all the time. If you just adore scabiosa and nigella, but your customer doesn't care about it and it's not making you money, you can always grow a few plants for yourself to cut and bring into your house or tuck into those extra special bouquets that you're making once in a while, but it should not be the main focus of it.
Coram Deo Farm (21:00)
Yes.
Jenny (21:22)
So I think that type of mindset that you have that's very customer oriented and marketing focused is what has set you guys up for success from the beginning. I'm curious to know what other like what other skills or other decisions that you've made do you think have set you up for the success that you've seen so far?
Coram Deo Farm (21:46)
Yeah, so I farm with my husband and we have very different skill sets and I think that helps we kind of, you know, I would say if you added up our hours, like the two of us together are like one full-time employee and we're doing very different things. And I'm in charge of harvesting and making the bouquets almost exclusively. He does a lot of other things that I don't want to do or I'm not good at, but he jokes with me and he calls me a robot.
because I'm hyper efficient and I move very quickly and I'm also competitive, so I want to get better when I see that I'm not being as efficient as I can be. And I remember on our YouTube channel, I made a video about how to make market bouquets super fast or something I think it's called. And I was making a bouquet in like, I want to say like two minutes and 15 seconds. And we filmed that in I think June sometime.
And by the end of the year last year, I was down to like 90 seconds and I was like, yes, I've shaved off time. And I think that's a skill set that has been really helpful to us because time is money, you know, in a certain sense and time is finite. And so the faster I can get, the more efficient I can get in our process. It makes it less likely that we're going to burn out. It gives us more room for growth.
Jenny (22:51)
Hahahaha
Coram Deo Farm (23:15)
We do have hard boundaries on what I'm capable of because we homeschool our kids and I'm a stay at home mom and so I don't just have all day to complete a task. You know, I got an hour to harvest. I have to be really efficient and really focused. I can't have kind of like that hobby mindset where it's more of a self-indulgent time to enjoy the flowers.
Of course, there's time for that. We take Sundays off and we try hard not to talk about business on Sundays. We walk through the farm and we sit at the farm and we enjoy it. I'm not a robot all the time, but I'm very efficiency-minded and I'm constantly trying to look on where are we wasting time? Where can I get faster? That's just going to make it more possible for us this year as we're trying to almost double our sales this year than last year and not need...
Jenny (23:50)
I'm sorry.
Coram Deo Farm (24:08)
double the time to do it. And I see when I talk to other growers and they tell me how long it's taking them to do a task, I'm a little bit horrified because it's so much time wasted. And there's various reasons you can be wasting time. But I think maybe we need to de-romanticize things sometimes and be a bit more business
of revenue sales. It can't be an hour to harvest three buckets. It can't be an hour to make 15 bouquets. If you want to get to certain revenue goals, it has to be much more robotic. It has to be much more streamlined and processes that you put in place, whether it's how you set up your space or how the actual logistics of making the bouquet needs to be thought through and adjusted.
Maybe you need to time yourself and figure out where you are wasting time. I think that we do a really good job of that. And so we get things done, I think, way faster than people think because it's taking them a lot longer on their farm.
Jenny (25:21)
Yes, I think that a lot of people kind of come into flower farming because they enjoy like arranging flowers and things like that. And one of the reasons I think that I have been...
sort of in the same mindset as you is that I never really enjoyed enranging flowers. I actually hate making mixed bouquets. And so from the very beginning, I was like, I just need to get this.
done with, I need to make as many as possible and be done with it, because I got all these other things to do, and I didn't enjoy it. And so I think that this is a great reminder of what you're saying, Alex, to people that if they enjoy making those mixed bouquets or flower arranging, you can always have your own personal time for that, but when you're working on the business or in the business, that's business time, that's go time.
And the less time you spend working in your business, the more time you'll have for play, the more time you'll have to be extra creative in your own personal way with your flowers. And so keeping track of your time is super important. And...
You said time is a finite resource and it is our number one limiting factor when we're growing our farms and when we're in our businesses, you know, you can almost always find a way to like eke out a little bit more money or like find some capital somewhere. You can always find a way to like get some other projects or tools or borrow things but...
Time is the number one limiting factor because you can't just buy it, you can't get it from anywhere. So maximizing that as much as possible and having that mindset is really important from the start. So obviously you have that mindset and it sounds like a lot of parts of starting your flower farm have come to you quite easily. You have like the driven entrepreneurial.
like gusto inside you, but I'm curious if you expected flower farming to be different from how it actually is, or if everything is kind of as you expected.
Coram Deo Farm (27:39)
No, short answer. I think so when we started, I don't think we thought that this would happen. So that's the exciting part. But we were consuming a lot of like flower farming YouTube and flower farming Instagram. And I think going into it, we had the, these are going to seem like polar opposite answers, but I think they they'd come together. I think we had the incorrect view that flower farming
very, very low to almost non-existent profit margins from what we were watching. It was basically like, you have to spend $50,000 a year for five years to maybe be in the black. My husband's looking at me like, I'm not super interested in that sort of business model. That doesn't seem very smart.
Jenny (28:26)
No thank you.
Coram Deo Farm (28:28)
Right. He was like, not super into that. And the size that you needed to grow on, you know, what we were watching and how much you had to spend to maybe, you know, you spend 50, maybe you sell 60. And it was like, that's not great. So we just didn't think that it was possible to really be profitable. So we went into it, I think, a little bit more with a hobby mindset in that like this wasn't going to be anything truly financial for us.
And then in year two, when the stand, you know, when we were selling 50 bouquets in 90 minutes and sold out, we were like, wait a minute, you know, and our spending wasn't out of control, you know, and we were starting to ask ourselves questions like, well, where is this disconnect? Because what we're experiencing on our farm is not what we were, the content that we were consuming. You know, we weren't spending.
Jenny (29:11)
Hahaha
Coram Deo Farm (29:28)
to control numbers. We weren't, we were selling big numbers, you know, and so we were like, hmm. And then we started to connect it and we were like, okay, yeah, we were just consuming bad content, that it's actually possible to be profitable, you know, under the stipulations of your spending's under control, and you're making wise investments and you're scaling up accordingly. You're not growing too fast, too quickly. You're not...
Jenny (29:44)
Yeah
Coram Deo Farm (29:56)
outrageously investing on capital expenses too fast, that's not growing with your market and your sales. You're not over planting. So it's like, congrats on planting a quarter acre, but you sold like a 16th of an acre. Totally unimpressed by that, cause that's just all loss. So when you started to connect those things, I think we started to realize like, okay, no, this is possible. We're just observing it being done really poorly.
Jenny (30:16)
Yes.
Coram Deo Farm (30:25)
But then on the other hand, I don't think I quite understood until I actually was moving 50 plus bouquets, the volume that is needed to be a profitable farm. It depends on how you define profitable. If you're in the black $1,000, it's like, well, then you're profitable and you paid for all your expenses and that's a great thing. You're not in debt going into the next year. But if we wanted to be banking five figures, our sales.
have to be pretty sizable and then really realizing like, okay, to hit 30,000, to hit 40,000, like this is really what it looks like. So in the sense it was like, I didn't understand the volume needed, but also I didn't understand that you could actually make it profitable.
Jenny (30:57)
Mm-hmm.
Yes. So I was actually just talking to someone not that long ago about how when you're first starting out, you can sort of make a decision as to whether you're going to forfeit paying yourself for a few years while you like get your investments and get your farm set up or start paying yourself right from the beginning. And I think for so many of us flower farmers,
we almost felt like you had to forfeit paying yourself at first. And maybe that's just like, because we care so much about our businesses and we really, really wanna see them exceed, succeed. So maybe that is like a prerequisite for some people to make that decision. But to say that you...
will always be in a loss for your first few years is a little bit silly to say. You can absolutely make more money than you spend for the first hour of many years and beyond that. And then you can take that money that you have as profit and either pay yourself or make more investments into the farm. And so in the position I am now, which I'm like...
You know, I've been farming my whole life, but I've had this current business for about nine years. I think I could have done it so much differently like you are now and really honing in, reigning in that spending.
being very, very careful about the investments that I was making and where I was spending the money. So I'm curious that you clearly have your spending and all that under control. What investments have you made into your farm that you think have been helpful in you getting established? And I don't think you need to talk about specific numbers, but I don't know if you've purchased cooler or landscape fabric or infrastructure or tools or anything like that. What have you purchased that's helped?
Coram Deo Farm (33:17)
Yeah, so this is where numbers always get tricky in our investments because when we started, some of the investments we made, we weren't in full flower farming mode. So perhaps we would have maybe made choices differently or it's just hard to look at them as completely flower farming expenses. So for example, we bought a tractor. We use the tractor on our property all the time for things that are not flower farm.
related, whether it's like the mower deck and other stuff. So we bought that. We didn't go into debt. We bought it and we use it in a bunch of different ways. It's pivotal for our flower farm now, but it was kind of like a mixed use purchase at the time. So that was a big capital expense we had. And then our other big one is we call it our flower cottage, but it's basically our workspace.
So it's where I start seeds, I make the bouquets, we have our fridges in there, and it's just my climate controlled space to work in. When we bought it and built it and Eric finished it inside and stuff, you know, it was mixed use. Like I homeschool in there sometimes and we have like picnic lunches and parties out there. And so we made choices, you know, to finish it and design it in a way that wasn't like the most lean farming.
principle. So it's a bit tricky when we think about it. If we launched year one with full-on lean farm separating things out, maybe we would have made slightly different finishing choices and stuff. But what's done is done and we plan, if we hit our projections, to have everything paid off by the end of year three so we don't have anything amortized or whatnot. So I think that's really exciting. Like you said, you don't have to run into debt.
forever as you're scaling up, you can still be profitable. So because those were our two big investments, I'm pretty excited that they'll be paid off by the farm. We bought a tunnel, so we'll have a tunnel this year, but that's gonna be paid off easily. We went the Caterpillar tunnel route, we didn't the big high tunnel route. So like we know with an investment like that, we can pay that off and I'm super excited about that. We...
Once we shifted into real flower farmer mode, if you will, this year, in year two, I should say, we did start making choices very differently from an expense standpoint. Because when you have that mindset shift and you actually, everything you spend, you have to put on your books, and so you have to pay off or account for, you do start thinking differently. And so going here into year three, we have one Facebook marketplace fridge.
And we're thinking like, well, would it be awesome to have a walk-in cooler? Yeah. Would I fill it up really easily? Yeah. Do I want to put four figures of expenses to pay off? Not really. I'd really love to be profitable at this year. So how can we get by? And the answer is we're going to get another Facebook Market fridge for a couple hundred dollars instead of a couple thousand dollars. And then...
look at our profit margins at the end of year three and see, you know, what does our growth look like? How are we going to, what are we going to do with the farm on year four? Does it make sense to have that bigger investment expense? So we go much slower. We don't, we don't spend a ton. We also waited until this year to do a bigger peony field. And when I say bigger, I only did like 400. I didn't do like.
Like I'm seeing on social media and stuff and I'm like, that's so much money. It is, you start doing that math and it's like, yeah, I know that you think they need a couple years to mature, but I'm more conservative and say like, well, I know that I can move 400 peonies worth of stems with the way my market's growing in a couple years. I don't think I can.
Jenny (37:12)
It's a lot of flowers, so you gotta move too. Yeah.
Coram Deo Farm (37:32)
could guarantee that at two, three thousand peonies. So yeah, I think I answered your question. We don't spend a lot of money and we're going to have it all paid off, which is exciting because again, like I said, the content I was consuming, everything was like five figure expenses always in debt, barely eking by. And that's just not what we're experiencing. And I think it's because we're not spending big.
Jenny (37:59)
Yeah, and that was not my experience when I started either. And I don't think it is for many of my friends who started around the same time as me. You know, I don't, I mean, everyone has different like risk averseness. Some people are okay with taking on a lot of debt. Some people aren't. I am very risk averse, which is funny because I'm a flower farmer, which is basically just like one big risky game, but.
I hate that I have been completely...
out of debt from the beginning. We've never taken out a loan for the farm. We've never gotten outside financial help. And just doing it exactly the way you're saying is by growing slowly, looking at how the business is doing. And then if we have the profits, deciding to take that and utilize it, and then just doing whatever you got to do to get by. Like you don't need a brand new cooler. Like the cooler that we're using now in year nine is still a used cooler we bought off of Craigslist
ago and it works great. It works great. And I probably won't buy another one until like we really, really need it. And so there's absolutely nothing wrong with what Alex is saying is that growing slowly and making really, really smart financial decisions. And so this financial management piece of growing your farm is just so important and can really set you up for a success. So, you know, would you say
that is like the one of the hard parts of owning a flower farm that nobody talks about.
Coram Deo Farm (39:41)
The spending restraint.
Jenny (39:44)
Yeah, and financially managing things appropriately and being responsible for that.
Coram Deo Farm (39:52)
Yeah, I think for my personality, I don't struggle with it as much because I try to farm not through my emotions, I guess. It's much more like you said of an entrepreneurial business thing. I love flowers. That's why I didn't choose to be a potato farmer. I wanted to be a flower farmer, but I'm not looking at it with... When I open a seed catalog, I'm not looking at it with my heart. I'm looking at it as whatever I spend needs to go.
on the books and so I don't struggle with the like, well you didn't make the cut, you know, X off the like, I'm free now, not growing you again, see you later, you know, I don't struggle with those sorts of decisions, but when I do hear flower farmers talk, I think on the main that is a big struggle. I think, you know, there's a big joke, you know, you see it on Instagram and stuff, it's like, I'm a seed shopping addict, or you know, it's like POV, over buying, doll YouTubers and
to be a joke, but a little bit of me cringes because I'm like, it's actually really embarrassing because what you're saying is that you can't manage impulse control and you can't manage your spending and you're just making it harder on yourself to be profitable. And I think being a profitable farm is, that's the clout I want more than the I grow all the things and buy all the things clout.
So I think it would be nice if there was more decisions made strategically or financially or accounting-wise, rather than with your eyes and your heart and the emotions behind it. I think you'll get to profitability faster that way.
Jenny (41:34)
yes, just removing some of that emotion from those decisions that you have to make. And I love what you said about impulse control. I think that impulse control is a, I don't think it's a trait, I think it's a skill that can be learned by people. Same with delayed gratification. Those are both two very important skills necessary for growing a really successful business of any kind, not just a flower farm. And,
So I think, you know, you're saying that you don't find that financial management piece of it to be difficult. It sounds like you got that under control and you come at it from a very like fact-paced point of view. But what are some parts of flower farming that are hard for you that you think that nobody else talks about?
Coram Deo Farm (42:29)
think that the excellence in the product needs to be higher amongst new growers. And that's what I work really hard on with growing is that, you know, it's not acceptable to sell like an open pollinated zinnia or like a blown out sunflower. You know, the standard of excellence.
We need to raise the bar if we're going to make any sort of dent in the local flower movement and we're going to have less imports and people are going to want local product more. I think we kind of just almost assume if you get to the bloom stage, like you've won, you've done it, you're a flower farmer, you can sell that flower. I think the threshold is actually so much higher and we should all be striving for that.
So on the growing side, while that's not my 100% focus, because you have to market and you have to sell your flowers too, is even though it's a $20 bouquet, it is a premium, excellent product that the customer will know and feel why local flowers are better. And I think that...
bar is kind of lowered so that people can feel like they're doing it or maybe that they've been successful and you see pictures and you're like, no, that bouquet is going to last like four days, no bueno. I think that's not talked about enough and I try really hard. Sometimes Eric even has to like push me and be like, Alex, this is sufficient. This flower is fine. And I'm like, no, it's not.
Jenny (44:04)
Hahaha
Coram Deo Farm (44:19)
It's missing a pedal, you know. So of course there's margin there. But I think that as a collective movement seeking excellence and if that means, and this is hard for some people to hear, if that means you need to spend a year growing before you sell the product, you should grow for a year. You should, you know, I kind of joke with Eric, it's like you've never met a plumber that's like,
Jenny (44:21)
I'm sorry.
Coram Deo Farm (44:47)
starting a plumbing business and I've never seen a toilet before, you know? Or they're like, they're learning about plungers at the same time they're selling their services and you're like, uh, like shouldn't we already know how to do this a bit before we're asking people money for it, if that makes sense. And I think our quality, I think tries to be excellent and I think we should talk about it more.
Jenny (44:52)
was
Coram Deo Farm (45:14)
And then maybe that means, like you said, delayed gratification is just such a good phrase because you get the bug, you get the heart for it. You're like, I want to do this so badly. And it's hard for people to be like, and now I need to take a year to learn how to do it well so that I can charge for it. It's like they just launch and then the quality sometimes is lacking. And that doesn't raise all boats. That doesn't help.
Jenny (45:41)
Yeah, I have this phrase that I use, which actually, quite often tell people the same thing that you did. But instead of saying a plumber, I usually say a baker. You can't open a bakery if you've never baked a cake before. I say that all the time, but I have this phrase of putting it or paying your tuition when you start anything new, even a flower farm. But if you were going to change careers,
with most things you'd be going back to college or going back to school in some way and spending anywhere from two to six years learning about this new industry and learning how to do all the things associated with it before you even start a business and begin to work on all the businessy things like marketing and selling and numbers and all that stuff. And so when you start a flower farm business,
It's the same thing, you gotta put in your tuition. The first few years are going to be a huge learning curve and you really have to know how to grow flowers before you can, you know, have the quality and be able to build a good name for yourself. So, gotta learn how to grow first before you can dive into, you know, trying to build a really successful business. So...
Coram Deo Farm (46:58)
Yeah, I was just able to interview Ellen Frost on our channel and she is a florist who only buys local flowers. That's her brand. She was just talking about the excellent quality that is necessary for floristry and wholesale and she was lamenting. She was just like, if you're in your first couple years of growing, please don't. Please.
sit on it with the wholesale. She's like the standard of excellence is so much higher than she's seeing. You know, when she gets new farms trying to sell to her, she has long standing relationships with older farms, but she's like, we need to raise the bar. And it's just, yes, there are exceptions, but exceptions don't make good rules. And it's very rare that a year one or two farm can reach that threshold.
I think the patience to learn the skill to pay the tuition is better than launching with a subpar product.
Jenny (47:58)
Yeah, I think that's a really great point that I'm glad that you're making. What are some other things that you think don't get talked about enough when you're starting a flower farm?
Coram Deo Farm (48:11)
think that again with the head in the sand kind of like surrounding yourselves with beautiful flowers and social media is that we're under the myth that if you grow it they will come. You know you spend all the time growing beautiful flowers, you're obsessed with them, you know what went into them, you're so excited, why is everyone else not as excited as me? And then you know you put ten bouquets out in your flower stand and you sell two and you're confused because you think that they should just
Jenny (48:21)
Yes.
Coram Deo Farm (48:38)
sell themselves because hello, they're beautiful local flowers. And that's just not the case. There needs to be a much higher investment of your time into branding and marketing. And I'm talking like 30 plus percent of your time spent on this. And especially in the beginning, you know, maybe when you get to a certain point, you can just...
You can ride the bump a bit more because you've accumulated all of those followers and they know about you and they have their habits of buying from you and some of that eases up a bit, probably not a ton, but a bit. In the beginning, that's not the case. And so it's actually of no use if you spend all your time growing beautiful flowers if you didn't spend time finding followers to buy them. And
A lot of people, I think, like you said, get into flower farming because they want to be like a farmer florist or they want to be in beautiful flowers. They begrudgingly don't want to do marketing and social media. Unfortunately, the hard truth is then you're not going to be successful. It's kind of not an opt-out option to not do marketing and social media and branding. I think, unfortunately, you need to be on board with that.
Jenny (49:49)
Ha ha ha!
Coram Deo Farm (49:56)
No, it doesn't mean it has to be like your biggest passion, but I don't think you get to say like, well, I don't want to do that. You're just not going to hit the numbers you want to. And I know definitively I don't sell 50 bouquets for my flower stand because I have objectively the best flowers in the world. It's because I spent 30, 40% of my time that week getting people to come out and buy flowers on social media. And
I think that part is left off. And you see that a lot in flower, if you were to canvas, like one of the biggest flower farming groups on Facebook and you were to canvas the posts, I guarantee you 95% of the posts are about niche growing advice tips. And only 5% are about the marketing and business side of flower farming. And that's exactly the problem. If we're just gonna endlessly talk about
Snapdragon spacing, but we're never going to talk about how do you sell the Snapdragon. You don't get anywhere. So I'm tired of talking about Snapdragon spacing. Let's sell the flowers.
Jenny (50:59)
This is why I love you, Alex.
Yes. Yes, 100%. I think that it's so important. I'm gonna toot our own horns for a second right here, Alex, but you with your YouTube channel and me with my stuff, I feel like we get sort of forgotten about sometimes because it's not like the sexy part of growing flowers, but it is the...
most important thing if you're going to have a business. And so somebody once told me way a long time ago, I don't even remember who it was in my flower farming journey, that for every hour you spend in the field, you should be spending an hour in the office doing that marketing piece, doing sales. And when you're the business owner, you're responsible for doing that. And so it really is so important. Since you brought up marketing,
and social media and all that stuff, how do you primarily market your business and what tips do you have for people on marketing?
Coram Deo Farm (52:15)
Yeah, so year one and two was entirely Facebook. We have an Instagram, but I kind of say, and I know people have said this before, is like Facebook is my customers, Instagram is my fans. So everyone that follows me on Instagram is pretty much a flower farmer. And I say to people, stop making content for flower farmers. Until I'm blue in the face, unless you're monetized on Instagram, you know, with 20,000.
Jenny (52:34)
Mm-hmm.
Coram Deo Farm (52:42)
subscribers and you're a year five farm and you've built that clout, you know, there are farms like that, you know, that are selling courses and stuff like that where you've ended up, you know, that's a different discussion. If you are a sub five year farm, you're not monetized on Instagram, stop making content for flower farmers because they're not giving you money. Your customers are giving you money and we need to change. I'll answer your question because I'm ranting here a bit, but we need to change, I think.
we're creating content because I will go on Instagram and I will see like a year to farm with 500 followers and they'll make some super niche down real about soaking their quorms for three hours and then pre-sprouting at 60 degrees and then planting out at four inch spacing. And you're like, Donna from the block could care less. That doesn't resonate with her at all.
But you could still say, like, okay, this is the task I'm doing today, so I can still create content from this, but I need to have my audience fixed in my mind. And so, like, maybe you make a reel with a joke about, like, the corms in a little bubble bath and, like, you're cold and you wish you were in a bubble bath too. And, you know, fast forward 90 days and these will be in your home. And, you know, you shared something that you're doing because you are soaking the corms.
Jenny (53:55)
Ha ha
Coram Deo Farm (54:04)
but you presented it in such a way that the person who actually has the ability to give you money can go on that journey with you or feel attached to the process or get excited about the flowers to come. And instead, I feel like we're all on Instagram talking to each other and our customers are not being spoken to. So I take that super seriously. So I don't create a ton of content on Instagram or if I do, it's for my customers and I do it to keep my Instagram, you know,
alive, so to speak, but I don't really do much flower farmer talk. I drove all of our traffic through Facebook. Everything was Facebook until this year we didn't have a website or an email list. I would probably say it's beneficial if you launch with a very basic website and start collecting emails because then it just, you can, it takes a while to build an email list and so the sooner you can start, it's just beneficial.
But we didn't, and I drove all the traffic through Facebook. And with the Facebook algorithm, you have to remember that Facebook and Instagram, they're a business, and they're a business that exists to keep people on the platform. So you need to create content that the Facebook algorithm understands, like people like this. So you guys feed the algorithm. And so to do that, you need to post frequently.
You need to post consistently, so I recommend pick a time every day. You can pre-schedule your posts. I do 7 a.m. seven days a week. Sometimes the night before I schedule it because I know I'm not going to get up at 7 a.m. or something that next day. You can pre-schedule it. You want to drive engagement, so you want to encourage likes and shares and comments. Whether you're asking your customers questions or...
You're saying something funny and relatable that leads them to comment like, been there, you know, totally understand, that sort of thing. But it's all about consistency. And what I see is new growers, either they get in their head too much and they think like I don't have anything interesting to share, so they just don't. Or they think that like one post every five days is sufficient.
And really the algorithm doesn't see it. You know, we have, I can look at my analytics. We have like 5,000 followers on Facebook, I want to say. And any given post of mine, and I have pretty high engagement. Like maybe if I'm lucky, 2,000 people see that. So this, so you have to remember that when you post, like not everyone's seeing it. And so it just, this repetition.
and getting out of your head. You know, not every post needs to be a floret styled content creation, especially on Facebook. I mean, I understand Instagram has a different aesthetic in your main feed for stories and whatever. But Facebook is still very organic. It's very much the picture of the seed tray, the pictures of your feet in mud because you got a lot of rain that week. You know, that's still totally acceptable on Facebook.
And I think getting into that rhythm, and right now is a great chance to get into that rhythm before you're super busy in the field and it becomes harder. Getting into that rhythm now of the consistent posting will make it easier. I mean, you'll have flowers soon, which that makes it easier for content. But getting into that rhythm of marketing is really going to help, really help your business.
Jenny (57:41)
Yeah, and it doesn't have to be that difficult, like what you're saying. I mean, you can just, every day when you're harvesting, just snap a picture of what you're harvesting and tell your audience a little bit about that. And then just to piggyback a little bit off of what you're saying with Facebook is that I am certainly no expert when it comes to social media. I am not at all, but.
I have noticed that it is, it has been easier for me, and I've heard other growers say this as well, that it is a lot easier to market to your local, like physically local community through Facebook, because Instagram seems to be like this huge global audience, which obviously Facebook is too, but like people send up.
tend to find like people more on Instagram, whereas you can reach your ideal local audience a little bit better using Facebook. So it sounds like you found that to be true as well.
Coram Deo Farm (58:37)
Yeah, and the algorithm, when it sees, like if you're ever on Facebook and you see like suggested for you and then there's like a bunch of content that just shows up in your feed, the algorithm is pulling data from the people that have related to your content and then putting it in the feed of people with similar metrics. So if like Donna from Claremore likes and comments my stuff and she's 65 years old in Claremore.
and likes flowers, it's like, well, Facebook algorithm is going to find other 60-year-olds in Claremore and suggest that content to them. Instagram doesn't work the same way with how the algorithm responds.
Jenny (59:19)
Yes. So Facebook is still not done.
Coram Deo Farm (59:24)
There's a lot of boomers on Facebook, but they're the ones that give me the most money.
Jenny (59:28)
Yeah, so you are catering exactly to your customer, which is great. And then you did mention an email list, and I have to say that I am a huge proponent of email lists. So I didn't start one my first couple years either. And then I don't know when I actually started mine. I was probably like year three for me or something. But that email list has been so...
Coram Deo Farm (59:33)
Exactly.
Jenny (59:57)
amazing to have because when the algorithms change, if Facebook decides to go down someday, you will still own your email list and you'll have a way to reach your customer. So even if your main marketing is through social media, I always just like have to give a plug for email lists and that's probably a discussion for another time. But if you haven't started one yet, start your email list in addition to social media and
The one thing I love about email lists is that you can get people on your email list by providing them with value. So you're providing your Facebook and your Instagram followers with things that they want. You can share stuff with them that would really help them as far as like ordering flowers from you or arranging flowers or whatever. So gosh, we could just talk about that forever probably.
Coram Deo Farm (1:00:51)
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, I mean, yeah, I wish, like you said, I wish I started the slow accumulation process earlier. But I'm excited to put a lot of my effort into building the email list this year, because even though it's a bit annoying because it's like, hello, personal responsibility, but I would get comments from people of like, oh, your post about the stand being open didn't show up on my feed until the next day.
Yeah, but my page is always there. So you could have looked it up. But that's my problem to solve, not the customers. And so I'm looking forward to building an email list where Friday night, I can send a reminder, like, hey, flower stands open tomorrow at 9 AM. Here's a preview picture of the flowers, that sort of thing. And I'm not algorithm dependent on whether they get that information or not. And it's going to take time, because 5,000 followers on Facebook, I have 500 emails.
A long ways to go, but you just kind of have to do the slow plod on getting those emails.
Jenny (1:01:55)
Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, you're off to an amazing start, Alex. And I, I'm so glad that you've come on the show today because I really am so blown away at your entrepreneurial mindset and your approach to everything. And like I said before, I'm so jealous of like your knowledge and your approach to business, cause I'm like such a dummy and it's taken me 10 years to figure a lot of this stuff out. And so...
Coram Deo Farm (1:01:58)
Thank you.
Jenny (1:02:21)
I'm just so impressed by you and I wanna end this conversation today by asking you one last question. And that question is, what do you think is the biggest skill or skill set or tool that you have that's contributed to your success so far?
Coram Deo Farm (1:02:41)
I think this sounds super specific, but it's really where I felt like things really shifted for us in year two. I figured out the most efficient way for me to make bouquets the fastest amount of time. And that just really felt like we can really crank out a lot of flowers through this flower stand where I'm not working five, six hours.
that day getting Friday night, I'm not with a headlamp, I'm not staying up till three in the morning. I'm making 50 bouquets in two hours and that feels super manageable, but it took time and true thought of looking through that process and saying like, where am I wasting steps? Where am I wasting time? Where am I wasting movement? Where am I getting at? Even down to how I wrap the rubber band around the bouquet.
save some muscle strength because I've thought about how to wrap it easier. I think that really felt like we can really increase our production when I took the time to think through that process and that was a big game changer for us.
Jenny (1:03:50)
Oh, that's so cool. Well, you clearly have a very analytical mindset, which has been, I'm sure, rewarding you really well. So that's really cool. Well, Alex, thank you so much for being here and for sharing all of these amazing insights with us. If there's anything else that you'd like to share, please do, and then also tell us where people can find you and follow you on your amazing YouTube channel as well.
Coram Deo Farm (1:04:14)
Yeah, so you can follow me on Facebook if you wanna see how I run our marketing. But if you ask me a flower farming question, I'm not gonna answer you because that's for my customers, not for flower farmers. So you can follow, but I won't talk to you there. But we also have our Instagram and our YouTube channel. They're all the same name, so Cormdale Farm. And our YouTube channel focuses on really all the topics that we talked about today.
Jenny (1:04:20)
Yes.
I'm going to go.
I'm sorry.
Coram Deo Farm (1:04:42)
You know, don't come to our channel for Snapdragon spacing. Come to our channel for talks about business and efficiency and all those sides of flower farming that's not super growing specific. But also I hope it's inspirational to see what a younger farm can look like. Because I know for me it felt like I couldn't make that leap in my mind from what a year two farm looks like.
to some of the year five plus farms I was seeing. I didn't understand how they got there. And so we hope that our channel is kind of like that bridge point of how do you get to that six figure farm because there's a process that occurs, you know, between year one and year five. And so we hope that our channel shows you how to get there by implementing a lot of, I think, the skills and processes that you teach.
you know, in your workshop and on your blog and stuff that we hope to show it like in real life, like you said. So give us a follow there.
Jenny (1:05:43)
Yeah, you guys should definitely go give them a follow. They have some really amazing videos and great content that they're putting out. So everyone go follow Alex and we will see you guys next time on the podcast. Thanks Alex for being here. We'll see everyone next time.
Coram Deo Farm (1:05:58)
Thank you.
