Jenny (00:28)
Do you ever feel like you just kind of flounder your way through your growing season without a real actionable plan or concrete numbers to shoot for in terms of your sales or profit margins? Or perhaps your crop plan goes out the window after several weeks of seed starting like a crazy person. I know I have been there. So if you can relate to that at all, or even if you can't and you just want to find a better way to plan out your season, this episode is for you.
Business planning is probably the most important thing to me in my business, aside from my customers. If you've been listening to this for any time at all, you know that I am a planner, but I really think that it has helped me so much to get the business that I've wanted. and my business planning process is what forces me to have a concrete plan of action.
to achieve my business goals. And in today's episode, I'll be walking you through my business and crop planning process so you can do the same and have an incredible 2025. And to be honest, my whole online course called Six Figure Flower Farming is based off of this whole idea of making a concrete plan to achieve your goals because I truly believe wholeheartedly
that if you do not have a solid plan, you will not get to where you want to go because I have experienced that. And I know now that I go into every year with a plan and maybe it doesn't go exactly to plan every year, but I have a little guide that I just have to follow step by step and it has never failed me. That's never ever led me astray. In fact, almost every single year I have gone above and beyond what I've planned simply by taking the time.
to sit down and make a plan. And I kind of hate to admit this, but when I first started my flower farm business, I really sucked at business and crop planning, which again is a pretty integral part to the success of your flower farm. And when I say this whole crop planning thing, I really look at crop planning and business planning on the farm to be very intertwined. And I don't mean just like a basic.
Garden plan where you pick what varieties you want to grow and count backwards from your last frost date. That's I did that for a long time. And that's really important to understand and to know how to do, but we're going to be talking about advanced crop and business planning today for a legitimate farm business. And I thought that this would be pretty easy. Like way back when I just would pick out what flowers I wanted to grow and decide when to start the seeds.
Simple enough, right? Spoiler alert. It wasn't that simple. at least I didn't know what I was doing. And so it felt really, really complicated. And this can really make or break your business. So at first, way back when I spent weeks and weeks just kind of pulling my hair out, trying to get every detail right and try not to forget things. And I often forgot about flower crops or messed up planting dates. And I didn't account for my finances and
any part of it. And I learned the hard way. It was really overwhelming and frustrating and just kind of downright stressful trying to do my business and crop planning when I first started. And my husband can attest to this. He thought I was a lunatic. I remember this one particular day when he walked into my makeshift office, which was our spare bedroom at the time and saw the floor kind of littered or okay. It was covered with sheets of paper with like scribbled.
mismatched maps and like a million sticky notes and rough, like hand-drawn spreadsheets with like random days to maturity I found on various seed websites. And there were these color coded sticky notes with highlighters stuck all over the place. And the meaning of each color had long since been forgotten since the beginning of my quest to get my crop plan and my business plan all figured out. And
I remember being like really frustrated and overwhelmed and just being like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just like picking flowers that I think I should grow and guessing at the amounts that I should grow of them. Like, I don't know how to do this and there has to be an easier way. And my husband was just like, well, Jenny, how do you eat an elephant? Like he was not very empathetic about it. and I was just like, well, one bite at a time.
So if you feel overwhelmed with this whole process and you're really not sure about it, I'm just going to give my husband's advice to you guys and say, you know, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. And I'm very happy to announce that after several years of floundering around and Excel spreadsheets and reading a bunch of like vegetable growing books, I finally figured out a step-by-step crop planning and business planning solution to my business planning woes. And so I'm going to share that process today.
and hopes that it will help you scale up your business and be able to do this process a little bit more easily and hopefully save you as many headaches as I had. This process I feel is essential if you want a successful and profitable flower farm. Without doing this, you are really working without any aims, goals, targets or directions. And just choosing...
What flowers you want to grow and deciding when to start the seeds is not a solid plan to achieve your business and financial goals. And the process I'm going to share with you today will force you to get clear on how much money you want to make, from what, and a concrete plan to make it happen. So if this sounds like a little overwhelming to you right now, just stick with me. I promise I'm going to simplify things for you. OK?
Now on a farm, have to, this is a disclaimer here. It's rare on a farm that anything goes exactly to plan, but you have to have a plan anyways. Things may go wrong or you need to, you know, shift things around due to unexpected issues or weather or new sales opportunities or failed sales opportunities. But at least you'll have a guiding principle to help lead you through any tough spots as the season goes on. The old Ben Franklin at edge reads true in this situation.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. I'm gonna say it again. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. Right. So without any further ado, the steps in my business and crop planning process are pretty simple now compared to many eons ago. The first step is to go through my financial projections. The second step, make my sales projections and marketing charts.
The third step, my production plan and field map. The fourth step, my greenhouse plan and seed starting schedule. And finally on my marketing calendar and my launch plan. Before I really do anything though, before I even take the first step, I carefully review our past year's goals and if they were met or not. And this is my business review process. So if you want to learn about that, go back and listen to episode 21 of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
In episode 21, I go over my whole business review process. I even have a free template that you can snag that I talk about in that podcast episode. So go back and listen to that if you haven't already. But once I've reviewed things like what our most profitable crops were, what our most profitable sales outlets were, and I think about what I wanna focus on or eliminate this year and decide what direction I wanna go in, I also evaluate if there's anything I need to
delegate, which has been a really big one for me the past couple of years and moving into
But once I've done that, I can sit down and go through these five steps. And I'm gonna go through all the steps with you one by one now. And the first time you sit down to do this process, it will take a lot of time. It will take a lot of effort and it will feel kinda hard. But just like anything that we do for the first time, the first time you do it is gonna feel the hardest and after that, it's gonna get easier and easier and easier.
My crop planning process now in year 10 is really, really freaking easy. Like I just tweak stuff from last year. I don't sit down and like change everything. I literally just make tiny little tweaks. Like, you know, I'll talk about it as we go through the process, but just know as we go into this, the first time you do it, might feel really difficult, but then after you do it once, it's going to get a lot easier and you can just tweak it every single year instead of starting from scratch.
First step, going over my financial projections. The first thing I do is look at my financials and decide what do I wanna make this year as far as money goes? What kind of profit do I think I can make? What kind of revenue do I need to make to make that profit? So I'm just projecting our revenue. And of course, this is really helpful based on past year's records. And now like I'm pretty confident if there's no like crazy catastrophes, like no pandemics or.
or whatever, like I'm pretty confident that I can earn the same amount as last year plus a little bit more if that's something I wanna do. Now I'll be honest, at this point in my career, I don't really want to make that much more revenue from my business. I'm really happy with the size of my business and where we are right now. For many, many years, I was really focused on growth, earning more revenue, growing bigger and bigger and bigger, but then I got to a place where I realized that
That wasn't really what I wanted. And there was kind of a sweet spot I found for profitability with our farm. And so I really like having my farm, the size that it is, what we're growing. like our sales outlets. So I'm not really trying to grow a ton. Like we try to inch up the profits that we're making from our revenue. And we might try to do like a little bit more revenue every year. Just so we can keep up with like inflation and pay our employees better and things like that. But I'm not like.
adding a huge amount of revenue to our goals for the upcoming season. That might be really different from where you are right now. I know for me, when I sat down to project my revenue in my first like years, I don't know, like one through five, honestly, one through six, maybe even one through seven, I was really focused on growth and I would look at trends. So looking at the past couple of years, like what did I earn?
two years ago, what did I earn last year? What do I think I can earn this year? And when you're first starting out, it's really not that hard to double your sales. Like if you made $10,000 in sales, it's not that hard to double the 20,000. For me, like I went from making 30,000 to like 75,000 to like 150,000. were all a year's jump. So like in one year I made like, I think it was like 34,000. Then the next year I made like 75,000. And then the year after that I did like 150,000.
And so I don't think it's relatively that hard to do when you're first starting out because the world is your oyster. You are hustling, you're going at it. But once you start making like a significant amount of money for me personally, like it feels really hard to go from like 200,000 to 400,000. Like I don't think doubling is something in my wheelhouse or something that I can really do, but I think that it's very possible for me to increase sales by 10%.
Or maybe 20%. And so this is all going to depend on what stage of business you're in, where you're at. Like you probably listening, I'm guessing that you're probably in the beginning stages of your flower farm. so don't be afraid to shoot high for things as long as you have a plan to back it up, which I can show you how to do that, you know, and don't let people tell you that it's unrealistic to double your sales when you you made $10,000 or less this past year.
But the first step here is to really sit down and analyze what you've done in the past and what you think you can do in the future and project your revenue and make a revenue goal. And out of that, make a goal for profit. let's say you want to earn, I don't know, let's say you want to pay yourself $10,000 this year. Think about what revenue you're going to have to earn to pay yourself that money after all of your expenses and your costs. And this is all stuff that I teach in Six Figure Flower Farming, my online course.
But after we do all of our projections for our revenue, we're then going to project our expenses, which is basically we're just going to make a budget. So we're going to budget all of our overheads. So all of our things like our marketing fees, if you have farmers market fees, insurance mortgage, all that fun stuff that it takes to run a business. And then of course your supplies and materials and your seeds and all of that. And something that's really helpful for me again, is to look at past records to see what I've spent money on.
And then also like raining in your spending, like I think a lot of problem for flower farmers is we all have that shiny object syndrome and we see like the new pastel elegance peonies or like the new romance hydra vernunculus or whatever. And we really want to grow that variety, but sometimes if we want to make a good profit and pay ourselves well, we really need to weigh the options here and say like, okay,
Maybe I can do without that. My customers probably don't care about that. I can use that money to then spend on something like marketing. That's going to make me more money in the end, or maybe that new variety really will make you some more money if your customers are really excited about it. And then you spend money on it, but just sitting down and making a budget. Now these, this first step, just making your financial projections is like so many people, I'm shocked at how many people don't do this. It's like a basic tenant.
to get you where you wanna be. So that's the first step. Just sit down, look at your numbers. If you don't have any previous numbers, just think about what your goals are for the upcoming season and try to make a rough budget. And it's not gonna be perfect at first. If you've never done it before, it's probably gonna be messy. Go do some research. Google how much things cost when you make your budget, but just do it for the first time and then it'll get easier every time you do it in the future.
Moving on to the second step, we're gonna be looking at our sales projections or creating our sales projections, I should say, and making our marketing charts. So the way that I do this is I look at all my sales outlets and project the revenue from each of them. So this is sort of an extension from step number one. So let's say historically, for example, if you made $75,000 from your farmers markets, but you think that you can make $80,000,
what would your weekly sales targets be for this season? So again, if your projected revenue from your farmers markets this year is $80,000, you can look at your overall season and break that down to make a weekly sales projection or weekly sales target. So let's say your whole growing season is 32 weeks long. That would mean that your sales targets would be $2,500 a week. So on average,
you're going to try to sell $2,500 worth of flowers through your farmers markets each week over your 32 week growing season. Now of course, sales ebb and flow, they're not always the same, but overall this is the average that you're gonna be shooting for every week of the season. And then if you're not meeting that goal, you can look, sit down every week and be like, all right, for the past couple weeks, I haven't been meeting this $2,500 goal that I know I need to make that $80,000.
what can I do to get to that goal? You can change your marketing, you can put more effort into something, whatever. And then if you're exceeding that goal, you can just be like, woohoo, I'm freaking awesome, yay, great. So once you've done that for all of your sales outlets, if you do a farmers market and a CSA or a farm stand or you do weddings, do this for each one of those sales outlets. And now you essentially have a goal, a target every single week, and if you work towards that,
Those numbers every single week, you will probably hit your goal. Pretty simple. So next we're going to make a marketing chart from each of these, which is basically a listing of how much of each crop I plan to sell through each sales outlet. So an example of this is if you plan to sell a hundred bunches of dahlias a week at the farmer's market over an eight week harvest period, that's 800 bunches. And if I sell them for $20 a bunch, that's $16,000.
So I'll do this for all of our crops and sales outlets. And this process, I'll be honest, if you grow a ton of different flowers, this can get really complicated and not really complicated, but really time consuming and sort of frustrating, which is why I'm a really big fan of keeping things simple. I just love simplicity for everything. And so maybe that's just my personality, but just keeping things simple.
and following a simple structured plan, like I have found that to just be the best. What's that saying? Kiss, keep it simple, stupid or something like that. it simple, stupid, keep it. Okay, I don't know. I'm gonna Google it. Let's pause this episode
Okay, I'm back and I Googled it and I was right. KISS is an acronym for keep it simple, stupid. So, okay, that's my mantra now. Anyways, back to creating marketing charts. So, you're gonna do this for each of your sales outlets. So, let's say for your farmers market, I talked about the dahlias. Now, for every crop that you plan to sell through your farmers market,
you'll just sit down and guess. Another example here would be tulips. Our sales period, like harvest window for tulips is probably about four weeks for field tulips, because you can store them or whatever. So if you think that you could sell 20 bunches at your farmer's market every week for four weeks, that would mean that you would sell 80 bunches of tulips in total. And so this is going to be really helpful in knowing this data when you go to do your crops.
plan, and we are doing our crop plan right now, but figuring out the volume that you need to grow to reach your goals and not overproduce and everything. So again, marketing charts, sit down and write down all of the different crops that you will grow for each of your sales outlets. And then you know how many bunches that you will be aiming to sell of all the flower crops that you grow through each of your sales outlets. Now let's move on to step number three. Step number three.
doing your production plan and your field map. And this is really where we're getting into a basic crop plan. So if you've done a crop plan before and you have looked at how much you want to grow of every flower that you plan on growing and when to start the seeds, now we're starting to get more into that kind of idea. But for step number three, looking at your production plan, I'm going to look at all the marketing charts.
that we did in step number two, and I'm gonna add things up. So for example, if I plan to sell 400 bunches of dahlias total through my farmer's market and 500 bunches of dahlias total through my CSA, that means I need to produce 900 bunches total to reach my goals. And if I predict that my yields are a little less than, let's say, one bunch per plant over the harvest period,
That means I need to plant about a thousand Dahlia plants to reach my production goal. So I'll go ahead and do this for all of my crops. So I know how much I need to plant and produce to reach my goals. And this is, I am such a stickler on this. I think this is a incredibly important and super overlooked step in the process because you don't want to over or under produce.
Growing flowers is insanely expensive. If you ever take my online course, Six Figure Flower Farming, I will open your eyes up to see just how expensive growing flowers is with all the hidden costs and your overhead and everything. So just trust me today when I say that overproduction is extremely costly and a waste of money. And you're just leaving money on the table if you overproduce your flowers. So if you don't know how many bunches of dahlias, for example,
You need to produce and you just kind of guess and you grow way too many. Like I did this when I first started. I had like just started my farmer's market and I didn't have any other, I guess I had my CSA, but it was very, very small. So I didn't really have that many other sales outlets. And I just was like, I don't know how many delias to plant. I'm going to grow 2000. And I, I had so many tell you guys, it was so.
Painful. mean, it was beautiful. The whole field was like in full bloom and they were gorgeous. Like, and I cut, I don't know what the percentage was that I actually ended up cutting and selling, but it was a very small percentage that I cut and sold. And I could talk about this. I could do an entire episode on overproduction. I could talk about this for a long time, but I'll try not to, but I'll just say, if you are in that kind of situation, like don't be upset.
It happens to probably every flower farmer when you're first starting, because you really don't know like how much you need to grow and how much you need to produce. And so it's all part of that learning curve when you're first starting out. But if you have a flower field where you have a bunch of flowers out there that bloom and you never harvest, I want you to look at those flowers and think like every stem that's a dollar or $3, like every deli out there, that's four bucks that stem and another four bucks and another four bucks.
And if have like a half a bed that you don't harvest from, or you let go or you deadhead, like that adds up to so much lost revenue. And not even lost revenue if you like, you just don't have the sales outlets yet to sell them, but the cost of production, like the time and the energy and the money it takes to grow those flowers. Like even if it's something that's joyous for you in the moment, like trust me, farming will get, it will feel like that from sometimes where
It's just a lot of time and energy and money that goes into producing those flowers. So you don't want to overproduce and then not be able to sell those. Then on the other side of things, like you don't want to grow not enough flowers to reach your goals. Like if you have goals that you want to reach and you are like hustling, you want to go sell those flowers. Good for you. But if you don't have enough flowers to sell, to reach your goals, then you know, you're just not going to have enough money in the bank.
You're not going to make enough money, not going to make the money that you want. That's what I'm trying to say, not going to make the money that you want. OK. So in order to know your yields, to know how much you do need to produce, you need to track that information. You can start off by looking at resources out there.
There's a book called specialty cut flowers by our, Alan Armitage and Judy Loshman. think there's a few different authors. I think they also just came out with another like handbook. I haven't read it yet. I don't know anything about it, but it might be worth looking into, but that specialty cut flowers book is probably a good place to start. If you have no idea what your yields are going to be. but you can also just use kind of like common sense here. Like if you're
growing tulips or stock and you only get one stem per plant, then it's really easy to figure out what your yields are. But other things like snapdragons and dahlias and zinnias where you get multiple stems per plant, just try to think about like how many stems you think you've gotten in the past or you will get to figure out your yields. But I will say this all gets so much easier if you just track your harvests or samples of your harvests. You don't have to track everything, but like a few times throughout the season,
You know, track how many zinnias you're cutting from the whole bed every time you cut them or, know, something like that. You can sample it as well, just to get an idea. And I'm telling you that you need to track this because it can vary widely based on weather and climate and your soil and the varieties. And so we're doing rough numbers here. And if you only have rough numbers and guesses to go off of the first time you do this process, that's fine. That's how we all start. And then you'll get your own data.
And you can go from there. Once you've been doing this for a few seasons, you'll really get the hang of it and you can make little adjustments. And that's what I do now after 10 years. So an example of this is this year we were selling out of a Salocia every single week, which I was shocked at. Like I was like, what is happening right now? But you know, we're wishing that we had more of it. And so next year I'm just increasing the amount of bed feet of Salocia that we're growing a little bit.
is great for me. So I'm really happy about that. You know, on the flip side, I couldn't sell all the Lysianthus I had this year. I don't know what it is, but you know, our CSA was a little less this summer than it had been in the past. And our farmers market, just really, the sales kind of tank over the summertime. And I don't know why customers don't buy as much of it. Honestly, I think it's because they buy it and it lasts for like two to three weeks. And so we're not selling as much of it as
We could because we're really good at growing it and it just lasts forever. So it's kind of disappointing that we didn't sell all of our lisianthus this year. And so we are going to grow less of it next season. And so, like I said, once you've been doing it for a few seasons, you'll get the hang of this. That's it for step number three.
So once you know the volume of all the different flowers you need to grow, so let's go back to that example that I said in the beginning that I figured based on my marketing charts, I needed to produce 900 bunches of dahlias, which means I'll plant about a thousand dahlias plants to reach my production goal. Now I am going to pick a spot in my field to plant that. This is non-negotiable, make a map.
of your farm, every bed on my farm is permanent and it has a number assigned to it. So like one through 80 or whatever it is. And within the hoop houses, it's hoop house, bed one, hoop house one, bed two, hoop house one, bed three, so on and so forth. So they all have a number and all of my plantings get assigned to a bed during the season. This is...
really stress relieving because you will have a place for all of your plants to grow and you don't have to worry about getting beds prepped or flipping beds like unexpectedly when you have a bunch of zinnia transplants that are ready to go on the ground but you have nowhere to put them. So I really recommend this simple step of just making a map of all the beds on your farm and then for every planting assigning it to a bed. And if you do a lot of double cropping,
where you rip out things from a bed and replant them, you can just work that into your field map as well. I hate double cropping. get it. You get more money from the same spot of land on your farm by double cropping. And if you're limited on space, it might be an option that you have to do. But I just don't do it. So I don't worry about it. Again, kiss. I'm keeping things simple. All right, so now moving on to step number four.
talking about our greenhouse plan and our seed starting schedule. So this is what probably most people do when they think of a crop plan. But this whole thing that we're talking about today, all of these steps in our business and crop planning process, this is all part of your crop plan. So now we're gonna just make our greenhouse and our seed starting schedule. We're gonna take all of the production plan that we had in step number three and make your seed starting schedule.
So we're going to plant things in the right amount.
So let's say that you need to grow 800 zinnias, 800 zinnia plants. You figured that out in your production plan to meet your goals. I know that I can fit 400 zinnias per bed on my farm because I do them at nine inch spacing and my beds are 30 inches wide by 100 feet long. And so I know that I'll have to plant two beds of zinnias.
And then I will look at those zinnias and I'll look at when do I want to be harvesting these and when realistically can I harvest them? Because obviously you can't, in my climate, in zone six in New York state, I can't harvest zinnias in March very easily. But I know that they tend to bloom July through frost, you know, if I do several successions.
And I know from experience that if I plant my zinnias around the last frost date, and for us that's the beginning of May, I will begin to get zinnias around the end of July. And that's when I really want them, is the middle of end of July, we kind of have a lull there. And so I will plan to start my seeds so I can plant them at the right time so I can harvest them in July. Now, if I didn't have like a CSA or my sales outlets didn't start,
until August or something like that, I would look at those Zinnia, those two Zinnia beds that I know I wanna produce and I would push back my seed starting date and think, okay, like I will plant them a little bit later. They'll probably mature a little bit faster because I'm planting them later. And then I can figure out when I will be harvesting those. And of course, every year is different. We're just kind of playing a game here with Mother Nature.
But looking off our past records, again, you'll hear me talk about past records pretty much constantly, but they're so valuable to me for my planning process and helping me reach my goals. I just think that it's the more data you have, the more data driven decisions you can make, and it will just help you reach your goals and help you plan better. So this is what making this greenhouse plan is all about. So I'm going to do all of that. You know, look, make
go through every single crop, make my seed starting schedule, do my six sessions and all that fun stuff. And so now I will know how much seed I need to order so I'm not wasting money on seed. I know in the past, I've just sort of guessed at how much seed I've needed and I've ended up wasting a lot of it. And I don't like to waste things. So after you do your greenhouse plan and your seed starting schedule,
you'll know how much seed you'll need to order and you won't have to waste any precious money on it in the future. And you know, that being said, seed is a pretty small expense for me. So it's not really a big deal. Like I always order a little bit of extra of certain things like snapdragons because they're like dust and kind of hard to seed, but you know, you don't want to just waste money on guessing what you need. So after you make your seed starting schedule,
You know, I like to, I do it in Excel spreadsheet and I give the spreadsheet to all my six figure flower farming students in the course. But once I'm done with that, I just filter it or I guess, you know, make it so all of my seed starting schedule is in order. So I start seeds at the earliest around week 10. And so I'll see all what needs to be done week 10, you know, start X, Y, and Z what we need needs to be done week 12. I have to start X, Y, and Z in the greenhouse. And so.
I just copy that over to my planner and into my calendar. So every week as the season goes on, it's all right in front of me. I don't have to go back and find my crop plan. It's all in my schedule in my calendar. And then it's really easy to just look at what needs to be done every week and super easy from there. And then finally, let's move on to the final step, the marketing plan.
The final step, step number five, we're going to make a marketing plan to actually sell all these flowers that we've just put all this effort into planning to grow. And I create a marketing calendar just in a spreadsheet and I do it for every week of the season. But for you, that might be a little bit overwhelming at first to think of every single week throughout the whole year. So maybe just think of making a column for every single month of the season. But I outline,
what I'll be promoting, what I'll be launching, all of our email campaigns, and I put it all in one place in a spreadsheet. And so it's all right in front of me. And anytime I go to do any marketing work throughout the season, it's already been planned out for me during the winter months. So I don't have to like panic during the season. So let's walk through an example of this.
So for promotions and sales that I put into my marketing calendar, in February, for example, we have a huge DaliaTuber sale launch. And this sales launch is really big for us. It makes a lot of revenue and we put a ton of effort into it. I do a lot of email marketing. I try to add a lot of value and help our DaliaTuber customers. I make blog posts on which varieties I really liked this year, which ones I didn't, which varieties were really productive, you know.
which ones were worth buying and which ones weren't updating our website. you know, uploading all of the items and the inventory and all that stuff. And so that is a really big launch that we do. And so that is like forefront of my calendar. And then our farm stand and return to the farmer's market is another big promotion in sales that we do in like March through April. Then in May, another big launch that we do sales launches in.
For Mother's Day in May. In June we push peonies. July we push our August CSA and bulk buckets. We do a lot of these bulk bucket sales. We stopped doing them for a few years, but we got so many requests from our customers to offer them again. We have started offering them again and we get a lot of requests for like graduation parties and summer cookouts and stuff like that throughout the summertime. Then in September,
We are pushing our CSA again and in the fall we are promoting our farmers market sales. And then in November we do a huge push for our CSA. A lot of our customers give our subscriptions, our CSA as Christmas gifts and so we really push sales and do a big sales launch in November and December for that. And so that is what goes into my marketing calendar. It's pretty much every month.
We have a different focus on what we're promoting and selling. And there's some months where we're doing a lot more sales and others, and that's just kind of the way it goes. We don't want to be like really promoting and being really pushy about sales all the time. I, I don't feel like that's a way that I feel good about selling. Like I, I like to have breaks throughout our year where we're not like actively really trying to push sales and like our customers are
on vacation a lot during the summer too. And so this is just the way that our marketing calendar works. But once that's done, once I'm done outlining all of our big promotions and sales launches and putting those into my marketing calendar, then, based on what's in our marketing calendar for those months, I plan out our email campaigns. Now I try to write...
all of my marketing emails during the winter time. So all I have to do during the season is double check and send some emails. I'll schedule an automate to send out cause you can write emails in your email marketing software and I can write it, you know, now in January and say, I want this to go out on, you know, May 15th, 2025, but because of the way that farming goes and the weather is different every year, I don't
always know exactly when I want to be pushing sales for like vernunculus or peonies or you know, whatever, when we're gonna go back to the farmers market, that kind of varies from year to year. So I'll make a big draft and then when I know the time is right for me to push those sales, I'll just go in and hit send. So all of my sales emails, I try my hardest to have those all written before the season starts. I also map out our sales launches.
So in the past for our daily YouTubers and CSA launches particularly, those involve a lot of emails, social media campaigns, and creating like a big buzz of excitement to get people interested in the product and create urgency for them to buy. So all kind of Outline exactly what we'll do for those sales launches.
And like I said, I try to execute as much of this during the winter because we do get so busy during the rest of the growing season. think farming is really unique in this. I mean, maybe not super unique. There are lots of seasonal businesses out there, but we have this unique opportunity to take advantage of slower times of the year. Like I don't sell flowers during the winter and so I use that time.
to really get a head start and get a lot of my marketing and sales stuff done because during the season, you are just pulled in so many different directions and you're putting out fires all the time as a business owner. And so having as much of that done ahead of the season as possible, all you have to do during the season is just hit send once in a while and just kind of check in or do your social media as you go throughout the season. So having this marketing calendar in place before the season starts.
You have a whole marketing plan so you don't have to worry so much about pushing sales and then meeting your goals throughout the season. So there you have it. Use these five steps to create your 2025 business plan to have your best year yet. And now if you want a spreadsheet that walks you through this whole process, step-by-step, plus a bonus marketing calendar template, plus a step-by-step product launch framework,
that will result in more sales for your business. You can get all of that inside my online business course. It's called Six Figure Flower Farming.
Now registration for six-figure flower farming is only open January 1st through the 9th of 2025. And this course is only offered once a year. And so this is your chance to take your flower farm to the next level in 2025. You can head on over to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash enroll to learn more and enroll today. And during the course, you'll be walked through a step-by-step program to shift your mindset.
find your most profitable flowers, create a profitable business plan, and learn how to market and sell so you can move more flowers than you ever thought possible. You don't just have to take it from me. You can read tons of student success stories and results on our website at trademarkfarmer.com. This course really changes lives, and I am just honored to be a part of helping our flower farming community grow and move forward together even better.
So if you're tired of struggling, feeling doubtful and unsure and really wanna make your flower farm work for you instead of you working for it, then you're wanna look into this course. Or maybe you're at a point in your life where you feel like you have spent so much time giving to other people and now it's time for you to just do something for yourself. I know that this course will help you get to where you wanna go.
And I have an entire spreadsheet system that you can use to do this entire crop planning process we talked about in the podcast today. It is a huge bonus that you get when you sign up for six-figure flower farming this week. But remember, registration closes on the 9th at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time sharp. So don't miss out and head to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash enroll.
So thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I know if you take these steps and enroll in six figure flower farming, you're gonna have your best year ever in 2025. So I'll see you next week, same day, same time for the next episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
