Jenny (00:28)
Welcome back to another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast and the 2024 numbers are in. Today we are talking all about Flower Profitability 101. It's just about to be the new year and I am deep into analyzing all the numbers of 2024 in order to make 2025 an amazing year for our farm.
And today I'm going be sharing with you my top grossing and most profitable flower crops and tell you a little bit about how I figure that out so you can do the same on your farm too. And I'm going to be sharing some of the real numbers and percentages for my own small scale flower farm because I just think that you're going to find it really interesting. I find this process so fascinating and so eye opening. And so I'm really excited to talk about this topic today.
And this whole process we're gonna be talking about is just really, really important for I think any flower farmer or business owner if you wanna earn money from your flower farm. Now I keep really detailed records of our sales and expenses, know, overall for the farm obviously, but also for individual crops that we grow. And by doing this, I can determine which flowers on our farm
We're making us the most amount of money and we twins were making us the least amount of money. And so I'm just going to start talking about 2024 and start off talking about our sales. So in 2024, 50 % of the total revenue on my flower farm comes from just two crops, dahlias and ranunculus. Okay. And that includes sales of both dahlias flowers and tubers and just ranunculus.
That we sell as cut flowers. So we don't sell vernunculus, corns or bulbs, but this 50 % of the total revenue that comes from my farm is just from Dahlia flowers and the tubers and vernunculus cut flowers. And that number is astonishing to me. And to be fair, this is something that we've kind of worked towards, like a little bit on purpose, a little bit by accident. I'll talk more about that in the future, but it's crazy that so much of our revenue.
comes from just two crops on our farm. Now, the next 30 % of the total revenue on our farm comes from just four crops, which are snapdragons, peonies, eucalyptus, and lisianthus. The remaining 20 % of revenue comes from the remainder of the other about 12 crops that we grow on the farm. So in total, we grow roughly 18 different flower crops, but six of them
are earning 80 % of the revenue on the farm. That's crazy, you guys. So that means that 80 % of our total revenue, the total sales earned on our farm, comes from just six crops that we grow. And they are dahlias, ranunculus, snapdragons, peonies, eucalyptus, and lisianthus. And this is sort of crazy to me now, not so crazy thinking about
Pareto's Law. So if any of you have ever heard of this thing called Pareto's Law, I have a blog post on my website about it. I think I'm also going to do a podcast solely focused on Pareto's Law in the future.
And the Pareto Principle, which is also known as the 80-20 rule, is a theory that states that 80 % of outcomes are the result of 20 % of causes. And so this can be looked at in a bunch of different ways across your business and your personal life as well. But basically, 80 % of our revenue is coming from less than 20 % of our crops. And 10 years ago, know,
Back when I used to grow over 75 different kinds of flowers, this was not the case. You know, we narrowed our crop list down to just growing 18 different kinds of flowers by doing just this, looking at what we were earning the most money and just focusing on that. So I noticed years ago that we were earning the most amount of money on ranunculus and dahlias. And so we just really leaned hard into that.
And focus more on selling these flowers that we're already making a lot of money from and also quite a bit of profit from as well. And it has resulted in this huge shift in our business where we are earning a lot of money on just a very few things, which means that we are not having to put a ton of effort into a million different flower crops. Like we really just focus on one major crop per season. You know, we're still a diversified flower farm.
But instead of trying to focus on making money on 75 or 100 different kinds of flowers, we're really focusing on really pushing more on these six different flower crops that we're earning a lot of our money on. And I know all of these numbers because I have a pretty simple system for tracking my numbers and tracking my crop sales. And there's a bunch of different ways that you can do this.
I actually have a really old fashion system that works for me. So you can use your POS or point of sale system. Like if you use square to take cards at the farmer's market or your website, but we kind of use for our farm, thing that has worked best for me is just using a paper notebook. And it sounds crazy, but I have a little template of record keeping template that we keep track of our sales on and.
I actually have this for free on my website. You can go download it and use it as inspiration. And you can snag that at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash free guides. But I just made my own little template. I printed out a bunch of copies for basically every week that we have sales on the farm. I put it in a sales record book and then every week throughout the season, we just update it. And this is great because my employees do.
pretty much all of the sales tracking for me. So I'm not really doing any of the tracking. It's something that I've delegated to my employees. for example, when we go to the farmers market, we simply count all the bouquets, all the different bunches that we're bringing, and we just write it down in this sales template. And we go to the farmers market, sell all of our flowers, and then when we come home, we count how many come home with us. And then we know exactly how much of each.
different flower bunch or bouquet that we sold. And it's just like really, really simple and easy. It really only adds five minutes to our whole day preparing to the farmer's market. mean, if that, I would say it takes less than five minutes to like count what we're bringing and jot it down. And then as we're cleaning up the farmer's market, jot down whatever's leftover. So it can be really super simple. Now you obviously can do this electronically.
like I said, through your website or your POS system. But because we don't process cash through our POS system, this is a good way for us to keep track of everything. Really simple. Plus another advantage is our employees get a really good idea of what our sales are like every single week. And so they can make decisions if we are not bringing as many bouquets.
one week to kind of reevaluate that plan and just based on history and all that kind of stuff. So they are really, you know, empowered with this information to help them make decisions on the farm to take a little bit of the stress and decision making off of me as a business owner. So anyhow, if you want to see what that looks like for our farm, you can go take a look at that template. Like I said, it's at Trademark Farmer.
dot com forward slash free guides and just scroll down all the way to the bottom of that webpage and you'll see like a couple of little links for you to download those sales templates. So hope they are useful for you. But you know, it's really easy for us to track our sales by crop. Now that we have the system in place, however, it doesn't tell us the whole picture. Revenue is just the total amount of money that we get from our sales, but it doesn't tell us how profitable that crop is.
after what it costs us to produce it. So to figure that out, we have to look at our expenses. And I don't track crop expenses, like the expenses it takes to grow one specific crop, like delias or zinnias. I don't track that super closely for every crop on the farm now. I used to, many years ago, when I first started trying to figure out like, okay, what was I really making money on? And what wasn't? What did I want to focus on? What didn't I want to?
And so after many, many years of tracking all kinds of different crops on my farm, I have a pretty good idea now of what is going to be profitable for the farm and what's not. now, you know, remember I'm 10 years into this. I just focus on tracking our like top three to four crops on the farm each season. Or if we are trying something new, I'll track that obviously, but you know, early on.
When I was trying to figure out what was best for the farm, I tracked a lot of different crops really closely to get an idea of how much it costs me to produce them. So I have a pretty good idea of how much it costs me to grow a bed of Rhinoculus and Delias and peonies and eucalyptus and snapdragons and so on. And it's not that difficult to track. Like, yes, it takes a little bit of extra time and intention to track expenses per crop.
But again, I have a free record keeping template that you can snag. It's at the same link I mentioned before, trademarkfarmer.com forward slash free guides. Scroll all the way to the bottom if you want to find it and use it. But essentially we just have a sheet of paper. It's a template that I made myself that I print out for each crop you want to track. So I'd have one sheet of paper, this template for zinnias and one for delias and one for ranunculus as an example. And I keep those sheets of
in my crop journal, along with my crop plan and any other notes or anything I keep. And as we do anything with a certain crop, we just jot down the labor and the supplies and the materials that we use to grow that particular crop. So with Ranunculus, for example, I just have this one sheet of paper, this template that I created for myself. It's nothing fancy. And when I go to start the quorums, I just jot down what time I start.
And then when I stop, when I finish starting the corums, I write down when I stopped and then I just see like, okay, it took me, you know, an hour to do this or two hours or whatever it is. And so I know the labor time, it took me to do that task. And so I repeat this every time I, you know, sort them, soak them, start them, then transplant them. I spraying them preventatively, or if I'm treating something when I wire weed, anytime I do anything associated with that one crop, I just jot it down in this piece of paper. And this
crop journal that we have with these expense tracking records are always close to the farm. We keep them on the desk in the barn, like in our studio, close to where all of our flowers are. And I try really hard not to accidentally bring it up to the house with me because when that happens, inevitably I'll forget to write it down. But you can keep these records just in a note in your phone. You don't have to have a paper record.
There's lots of technology out there that can help you with this. There is an app called toggle that I've used before that I've really liked. And you just kind of, when you start a task, you hit start. And when you stop, you hit stop and write in the app and it will tell you how long it took you. then you can make notes in there, like what kind of supplies and materials you used. So I I've been starting a lot of rununculus lately. And so I would also track how many trays I use to start those rununculus, how much soil I use. And.
And this, getting into the weeds with tracking some of this stuff, we can get into a lot of detail here. But I want to keep this conversation focused on really looking at the whole process overhead of figuring out what you're making as far as overall revenue from your flowers, and then thinking about the profit you're making from them as well. And just looking at your numbers over the course of a season.
to see what's really making you money on your farm and what's not. And so, you know, it's really not that hard to just jot it all down in one place, whether that's a sheet of paper or a note in your phone, or you can download an app. But then at the end of the season, you can just add up all of your expenses in one place so you know how much it costs to produce that one crop. And now in my online course, which is called Six Figure Flower Farming, we get really into depth with calculating the cost of production.
including a little of hidden costs that might not be that obvious, like your overhead, for example. And this whole process is, it's not complicated, but there are a lot of steps to it that you just kind of have to follow step by step. But let's take your overhead, for example. Your overhead costs are all of the expenses that it takes to run your farm that aren't directly associated with the production of flowers. So this would include things like your mortgage or your rent, your property taxes.
general liability insurance, your labor insurances, your website and marketing, stuff like that. So if you're interested in diving deeper into how to really calculate in detail your costs of production, so you can really understand what profit you're really making on your flowers registration for six figure flower farming will be open January 1st through January 9th in 2025. So again, if you want to sign up for my online course,
Six-figure flower farming to dive deep into that registration is only open from January 1st through January 29th in 2025. But back to talking about sales and revenue and expenses and all that good stuff. Once I calculate my expenses and I know my sales, I can then calculate my profit from each flower. so, Renunculus make up about 25 % of our farm's overall sales. But.
Ranunculus make up about 30 % of our farm's overall profit. So they are earning the farm more profit than other flowers that we have in the farm. And as far as cut flowers go, Ranunculus are our top grossing cut flowers, so we earn the most amount of revenue from Ranunculus, but they're not the most profitable per square foot.
So when we look at the profitability of flowers, I think it's important to look at it from both a profitability standpoint from the volume that you're selling, but also by the square foot. Like when you're planting ranunculus in a bed on your farm, is a bed of ranunculus gonna make more or less money than a bed of snapdragons, for example? Now, technically, snapdragons are more profitable per bed, per square foot, than ranunculus are.
But because we sell so much volume of Ranunculus, like they're by far our most popular flowers that we sell, we are earning more revenue overall and therefore more overall profit for them. So by yields by square foot, like I said, Ranunculus are not our highest yielding or most profitable flowers. And we earn a really good profit margin on them, which is about 63%. So they're not our most profitable, but they're still pretty good.
And anemones and snapdragons are probably our most profitable flowers by the square foot, probably somewhere around 70%. So that's a really, really, really good profit margin for cut flowers or like anything farming related. And however, you know, I can't sell hundreds of straight punches of anemones or snapdragons in the spring. Like I can with ranunculus that ranunculus are just so easy to sell for me personally. It might not be the same for you, but
For me, they just kind of sell themselves. People rave over them. They bloom first thing in the spring when the demand for flowers here is totally insatiable. And so we're just able to sell like hundreds and hundreds of straight bunches of them. So they are our most profitable crop. We grow by volume, which is way higher than any other flower crop that we grow. But then.
Let's look at snapdragons for example, snapdragons are also in the top six for our most profitable crops on our farm, but they're also probably our most profitable by the square foot. And we can harvest them pretty much our entire growing season, May through November. And so we grow a ton of snapdragons to sell both in straight bunches and in mixed bouquets. And because I know how much profit they bring in by the square foot of growing space,
I choose to grow snapdragons more than other crops. And I really try to push our snapdragon sales more than others, but because they're not a big focal flower crop and that's what my cross customers really want. Like they love unique showy focal flowers because we saw through a farmer's market and our CSA. And that's just really what our customers want. And which is also why you don't see me growing a ton of filler flowers and foliage is so
Because I know that they are making us a lot of money per square foot, part of that is because we get a lot of cuts from one type, from one plant. We pinch them, so we probably get like three flowers per plant, but then we also get multiple flushes from them. So we'll get our first harvest from them and cut them back really hard, and then weeks later, we'll get another harvest from them. And so,
We are getting a lot of stems that we're selling for like a decent amount of money retail off of just one bed of Snapdragon's. And so that's why per square foot, they are more profitable than Ranunculus, but our overall sales of Ranunculus are so much higher that by volume, we're earning a lot more money on those than Snapdragon's. So I hope this makes sense. We're looking at profitability by volume of how much, how many bunches you actually sell, but also,
how profitable crops are by the square foot. So another important thing to consider here when analyzing your numbers and looking at your numbers is what your customers want. Like if you calculate all the profitability of the crops on your farm and adgeratum comes out as the most profitable flower on paper, cool. But will your customers buy hundreds of bunches of adgeratum? Will they buy volume amounts of adgeratum?
Like, I don't know, maybe if you sell to a florist that really, really likes it or you're really good at marketing it, perhaps. But my customer base would not grow or would not buy, rather, would not buy hundreds of bunches of edger edum. And so another example of this, just to really drive this point home, is I had this conversation with one of my veggie farmers that also goes to my farmer's market.
On paper, their most profitable crop is parsley. So they get tons and tons of volume per square foot. They get tons of bunches of parsley from a bed on the farm. And for the price they sell it for, now if they could sell beds and beds of parsley, they would be rich farmers on paper. However, at the farmer's market, you can only sell so many bunches of parsley, right?
Like if you showed up with nothing but parsley to your farmer's market, you probably wouldn't sell the volume that you needed to earn the revenue and the profits that you want. So this is why it's important to look at both the profitability by the square foot, but also what is literally bringing in the most amount of money and profit. Okay.
So earlier I mentioned that we earn 50 % of the revenue on our farm from just two flower crops, Ranunculus and Dahlia. So let's look at Dahlia on the other side of things. We've been talking a lot about Ranunculus and let's look at Dahlia's. And this is again for my farm specifically, your farm might be totally different, but 25 % of our farm's overall sales are from Dahlia's from both the flowers and the tubers. And that's a pretty significant number.
But even though we earn a lot of revenue from dahlias, they are far from being our most profitable crop by the square foot. And in fact, they are not super profitable at all when you look at the numbers when we're talking about the cut flowers. They require a ton of labor. They are so much effort and headache to grow sometimes between.
The storage and the splitting and the planting and the digging and pests love them and they hate working for you if the weather isn't perfect. Like for me, they are the divas of my flower world in my opinion. And technically by the square foot, they are some of the least profitable flowers that we grow. But by volume, because we sell a ton of the flowers, they still contribute a significant amount of profit to the farm's bottom line.
This is why we also sell our Dalia tubers. If we did not sell our Dalia tubers, the cut flowers probably wouldn't be profitable enough for us to really put that much of an effort into growing them. And now I haven't like specifically run the numbers on this recently, so I don't know them off the top of my head, but the Dalia tubers let us get a second product out of this flower crop.
So we get both the flowers and the tubers, which makes it a lot more profitable for us. And this is something that I've sort of really struggled with mentally over the years. Like I haven't, I never quite figured out how to drop dahlias with my business model. And I don't think that I can because they bloom at a time that is like pretty critical for sales. Like our sales dip over the summer and they...
pick up again in the fall when our delias are blooming and they're really popular with our customers. And so I don't think I can ever eliminate them from our business model. And so that's why I've just sort of leaned into growing them and saying like, I know that we're doing a lot of volume, so let's just try to make this crop as profitable as possible for us. And so I've been working really hard every single year to find ways to really streamline the process of growing them, get really efficient at growing delias.
and get them to be a lot more profitable. And so far I've really succeeded at that, which is something I'm really proud of. So looking at the numbers here, seeing that delias and ranunculus are my two most profitable crops by volume. So they bring in the most amount of profit to the farm. Those are the two crops that we are going to continue to lean into as we move forward in 2025. And my most profitable crop dragon by the square foot, snapdragons,
I'm going to continue growing those and pushing sales for those, really marketing them hard and trying to use and sell them whenever possible because I know by growing those specific flowers, I'm going to earn a really good profit margin. So ways that I'm doing that is I am opening up new sales outlets in the spring to push more vernacular and spring flowers. because like I said, that is our most popular season, I guess by far.
And I opened a spring flower stand at our farm here last year for the first time. And we're going to keep on doing that just to sell more vernacular because people go cray over them. And we're also using the opportunity to push sales of other spring flowers. So we're actually kind of trying something new in 2025. And I'm adding in more varieties that we stopped growing a long time ago, but we're going to grow new varieties in the spring, like delphinium.
We've always grown butterfly, ranunculus, and anemones, and tulips, but kind of changing up the volumes that we're growing with those so we can sell more flowers alongside the ranunculus. So I'll report back on that to see how it goes because previously in the past, we've sort of not grown as many other flowers that bloom at the same time as ranunculus because they just take over sales.
But I'm going to try this year to see if we can sell Ranunculus and sort of upsell some other flowers as well. Like if you buy Ranunculus, you can also buy a bunch of poppies to go with it or a bunch of Delfinium to go with it. Because we mainly just sell straight bunches of Ranunculus in the spring. And so that's what I'm doing to kind of move forward with this. And we're still growing dahlias mainly to sell the tubers now because we actually make more money selling the tubers than we do the flowers.
Which is crazy to me, but you know anyhow And then also like I said just trying to use snapdragons in mixed bouquets anytime we use mixed bouquets And surprisingly we actually do sell a lot of straight bunches of snapdragons at the market as well Which I'm always shocked at but for whatever reason people really like them and we grow really nice ones So I think that makes a difference as well So in summary here you guys It's really important
to look at both the profitability of your flower crops by the square foot. So you can increase the profitability of them like I am doing with our dahlias, but also by the volume. So you can focus on the flowers that really sell the best for you and bring in the most amount of revenue and hopefully most amount of profit in the future. So if this is a process that you wanna get better at and really learn how to track your inputs,
calculate your cost of production, calculate your overhead expenses and how that factors into your production costs. I teach all this in depth in my online course called Six Figure Flower Farming. There's an entire module on this and it's so fun for me to teach because it's been so cool to see my students discover things within their own farm that they never would have figured out before. And a big one, will tell you, spoiler, it's Dahlia's. lot of...
people in my class last year, the six-figure flower farming class last winter, thought that dahlias were their most profitable crop. And then after crunching the numbers and really looking at what their cost of production are, they realized that they were actually losing money on them. So don't let this be you. I mean, some people were making money on them, and that's great. But every farm is different. And that's why it's important that you understand and learn this skill so you can make the best decisions for your business.
I teach all of it in six-figure flower farming and registration for the course opens up January 1st and it's open through January 9th and 2025. And the whole course starts to shortly after registration closes. And I only offer this course once a year. We also dive deep into making the numbers work for your farm, like really looking at your numbers, your financials, marketing and sales during the course.
So if you're ready to up-level your farm in 2025, this is the course for you. But don't forget that registration is only open for one week, January 1st through the 9th in 2025. So thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I really hope that this was helpful and you getting to see what a flower farm business owner of 10 years does with their data and how they look at it and how they make decisions moving forward.
So I'll see you next week for the next episode. Same day, same time.
