Jenny (00:28)
What does a kooky Italian economist from the early 1900s have to do with the success of your flower farm? Well, turns out kind of a lot in this episode, I'm talking about how the 80 20 rule, what it is and how it changed the entire trajectory of my farm business, leading to more profits, less burnout and a happier company culture.
So I first heard about the 80 20 rule way back when I first graduated from college. And I'll be telling you about that cookie Italian economist in just a second. But I read a book called the four hour work week by Tim Ferris that, and I am just now realizing that looking back, that book probably had a very significant effect on my way of thinking as an adult. apparently it was very, very important in developing my business acumen, but anyways,
This whole book by Tim Ferriss was really about removing obstacles and freeing up time to do what you really want to do in your business. And so the whole goal is to identify and focus on what was actually productive and what was really moving the needle in your business, which turns out to be about 20 % in order to maximize results. So this book was based on something called the Pareto principle or the 80-20 principle, which states that 80 % of results.
come from about 20 % of actions. Or said another way, 80 % of outcomes are the result of 20 % of efforts. So I promise I'm gonna tie this all into flower farming, but here is a quick little history lesson for you about this rule. An Italian economist discovered this principle in the late 1800s, early 1900s
and his name was Vilfredo Pareto. What a name, right?
And as an economist, he studied the distribution of wealth in England, which is where he was from. And he observed that 80 % of all the land in England, and in fact, every country he subsequently studied after that, was owned by 20 % of the population. So 80 % of the land in England was owned by 20 % of the population.
And then apparently he was also an avid gardener and then also somehow discovered that 80 % of the little peas that he harvested to eat in his kitchen came from only about 20 % of the pea pods that he harvested. So then was born the 80-20 principle. So Pareto's theory of predictable imbalance has since then been applied to almost every aspect of modern life.
hence it becoming known as Pareto's Law or more popularly known as the 80-20 principle. So this principle has been applied to endless topics in all kinds of pieces of life, from time management to project management to customer relationships and sales and personal finances, learning new skills, resource allocation, and even personal productivity, essentially anywhere where you can identify the 20 % of inputs.
that generate the most significant outcome. And an example of this, I learned from Tim Ferris, who wrote the four hour work week book. I remember, I don't know if it was in that book or somewhere else I read it, but he identified that learning language, this could be applied to that and to be fluent in almost any language. There was 20 % of all of the words in a language. If you just learned those 20%, you
could be dang near fluent in that language. And so this, I just think this is so fascinating and super, super cool. And so I learned about this principle such a long time before I started my business. I mean, I had started several businesses since reading this book, but before my flower farm took off. But I was able to apply the 80-20 rule and Pareto's law to my own flower farm.
And I found it to be so very fascinating. I found the most impact when it applied to three things within my business. So I applied the 80-20 rule to my flower crop selection, my customers, and time management, which also kind of doubles as like values. But this magic ratio of 80-20 has been strangely apparent in a lot of different ways when applied across my business.
But I do want to say that before we get into it, it's not always exactly 80 % to 20%. But the general trend here is that there's always a smaller percentage of items that are producing the majority of results. So a small percentage of the effort that you're usually making is resulting in the majority of the outcomes or the results that you want. So just keep that in mind as we dive into this principle. So I dove head first into applying 80-20.
to my business and have had so much success with it. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is applying it to flower products or our crop selection. So as you know, I used to grow a ton of different flowers on my very small flower farm. I was growing well over 75 different kinds of flowers. And I know that this is really common. Within those flower kinds, I was also growing a whole bunch of different varieties. So like I was growing snapdragons, but I was growing like.
five or six different varieties of Snapdragon's. And so it was really like hundreds of different kinds of flowers. There were so many that I wasn't even harvesting all of them and I was getting frustrated because I felt like I was working so hard and I was doing so much and I wasn't selling everything that I was growing. And so I took Pareto's Law and I applied it to our flower crop selection. So what I did was I analyzed the sales and the profitability of all of our flowers.
I had tracked what revenue the flowers were bringing in and I just ranked them from the first one, the, at the top that brought in the most revenue was number one, all the way down to the bottom of the list was the flowers that brought in the least amount of revenue and profit. Um, so I also, had revenue, but I also figured out like the profitability of a lot of them. But what I found was that a very small percentage of all the flowers I was growing, like around 15 to 20 % to be more exact.
we're bringing in the majority of the revenue. And so I just thought, like, why am I killing myself trying to grow all these different kinds of flowers just to, not even use them or them not have that much of an impact on my bottom line? So it turned out to be, like, even less than 20 % of all the flowers I grew were significantly contributing to my bottom line.
Like 80 % of the flowers that I grew are only generating like 50 bucks or a hundred bucks or a couple hundred dollars. While 20 % of those crops were generating thousands and thousands of dollars for the flower farm. So when I applied the 80 20 rule to our crop selection, I made it, this just made it very, very clear and very easy to see which ones were needle movers for us. So we just cut out a lot of the fat like.
We just cut out so much waste and we're really focused and leaned into the flowers that were already generating a lot of revenue for us. And by doing that, we were able to get better at growing them or more efficient at growing them. And we were able to market those flowers better. So we actually pushed the profitability of those 20 % or less way more. And this is a key distinction because instead of trying to focus on getting those lesser or,
Less profitable flowers to be more profitable. did the opposite. We just really leaned into what we knew was making us money. And now those crops are making even more money for our flower farm. So currently 50 % and honestly, sometimes even closer to 60 % of our total crop revenue comes from just two flower crops that we grow on the farm. And you know, in total, we probably grow anywhere from like 16 to 20, you know, usually like 18 different flower crops.
but six of them are earning 80 % of the profit on the farm. So you can see that we went from that 80, 20 % to pushing it a little bit more. So now it's like 50 % of our crops are earning 80 % of the profit on the farm, but it's a much larger volume that we are growing of them. And I talked about these percentages a lot in episode number 30 of this podcast and
The title of that episode is the 2024 numbers are in. So feel free to go back and listen to that episode. If you're curious about, know, what exactly makes us money on our farm and what doesn't. So now instead of the numbers being, you know, 80, 20, the percentages are skewed a little bit more, but the point is that we've really focused on what actually makes the farm money. And, know, I could not have come to that conclusion if I had not applied Pareto's law to our crop lineup.
Now I want to say this before we move on that I know a lot of people will probably have arguments against this because they feel like our farm is not diversified enough and it's really risky. Like if you have a crop failure, like, what are you going to do? And I just don't really agree with that because we are still a very small diversified farm. You know, we grow anywhere between 16 to 20 flower crops a year. So, you know, if something fails, like we have a chance to make up for it later. We have lots of other flower crops that we grow.
And I know that there is people out there who are going to have arguments against this. And I just have to say that we've gotten so good at growing very few things really, really well that I am so focused and cognizant of potential diseases and potential threats that I'm super on top of caring for just a few things really well, instead of trying to juggling, taking care of all these different flower crops with all these different needs and all these different things that it needs separately from other flowers.
And so this is just what works really well for me. And I'm also a really experienced grower. So like, I feel like I've got a handle on this. But if you are a newer grower or you're not as experienced and that doesn't work for you, that's fine. Like if you feel safer being a little bit more diversified and growing more variety, you know, that's fine. I think that's great. I want you to know that there's no one way to do this.
I just like sharing what I've discovered and what's worked for me. I think it's cool. And so you don't have to do what I'm doing to be successful, but you can learn something from the way that we have approached our business. So maybe you applying 80 20 to your flower crops, isn't eliminating a bunch of flowers like we did. Maybe it's just really focusing on the ones that are really profitable and not putting as much focus on the ones that are not making you as much money.
So the way that you actually implement the 80-20 rule in your business can look a lot different from the way that I do it. But this is probably the biggest thing was applying Pareto's Law to our crop selection and our list of flowers that we grow. But the second biggest thing was applying it to our customers and our sales outlets. So we looked at our customers and our sales outlets and applied this same rule.
So once again, back when I started my business, I was really, you know, not even when I first started, it was like five or six years in, I was trying to sell to everyone. We sold through like seven different sales outlets. We sold Dalia tubers. did a big CSA. went to multiple farmers markets. We sold retail on the farm, like a farm stand. did, you know, sales wholesale, the florists we did on farm retail workshops, you know, like pick your own or make your own arrangement, something like that. So we did so many different things.
But I looked at the revenue and approximate profit that all these sales outlets were bringing in. then vast majority of the revenue was really coming from like three of our sales outlets, our farmers market, our CSA and our Dalia tubers. So instead of working really hard to try to make those other, smaller sales outlets work, you know, that was just like a thousand bucks here and a thousand bucks there. just like cut a lot of it out.
and stopped focusing on it and instead really focused on doing a better job with our farmers market and our CSA and our Delia tubers and funneling more of the effort into marketing those things. So we can do fewer things better. And that's been really great for us and in a bunch of different ways. another thing is we're able to be more efficient because of applying the 80 20 rule. So we're really growing one kind of
type of crop because we're serving one very similar customer. So our farmers market customers and our CSA customers are very similar. They like bright showy colors. They like focal flowers. They don't like a lot of foliage. And so I don't have to grow a lot of little filler flowers or whimsy flowers or, you know, whatever you do for bridal bouquets and stuff. I don't grow a lot of foliage, you know, that you would need to grow for a florist or for wedding sales.
And so if you do that, that's great. But I don't have to grow a huge variety of different flowers to meet the demands of all of those different kinds of customers. I don't have to grow flowers for the CSA and retail customers for CSA and farmers market, plus wedding and event florists plus for weddings and something else. Whereas back when I was trying to sell through all those outlets, I had to grow Lysianthus in both bright showy colors and muted tones and whites so I could sell them.
through our CSA and farmers market and also to florist and weddings. So like I had to grow a bunch of different colors of the same kinds of flowers for wedding designs and bridal bouquets and the farmers market and yadda, yadda, And so it was just like I was growing a lot more variety instead of growing less variety and more volume. And for me personally, it just felt like a lot more to manage. And so I found that applying this rule, it also helped us get a lot more efficient.
Because now like without fail, there would always be a time when we would not have a wedding or our forest wouldn't have a wedding and we'd be stuck with all these white flowers that we couldn't sell through our farmers market. And so now we just are really focusing on one kind of type of flower crop for one type of customer. And so that goes for our Dalia tubers as well. Like we grow like a couple of white flowers, but it's a very, very small amount. And.
We're growing mostly bright showy colors of dahlias. And so a lot of our customers in our areas buy those for their gardens and their backyards. Not a lot of backyard gardeners want a ton of white, at least in my experience. Maybe your customers are different. But so as you can see, our whole entire crop focus has become really streamlined and efficient because.
of how 80-20 principle applied to our customers and our sales outlets.
So we have a lot less waste now. Getting even production on a farm is really hard. You're always going to have some underproduction or overproduction. But in the past several years, we've really nailed it. We were really good at this. We don't have a lot of waste. We don't have a lot of overproduction. Every year, we tweak it a little bit. And so we just have been getting better and better at it. But again, I know there's probably going to be another argument here about not having a super diversified
list of sales outlets. And I think it's great to have diversified sales outlets, especially in terms of risk mitigation. Like if one sales outlet goes down, you have the other ones. And an example of this that happened to us is probably happened to a bunch of people is during COVID, our farmers market closed. We weren't allowed to sell flowers at our farmers market for a while. But because we had our CSA, we actually sold a ton of flowers through our CSA program instead.
So we funneled a lot of our business through that sales outlet instead of the farmer's market. So we did, we pivoted a little bit. We had to do a no contact delivery with our CSA, but we were still able to sell a bunch of flowers because we did have multiple sales outlets. So we were diversified in that manner. But again, that might not work for you, might not be super comfortable for you, especially if you're just kind of starting out. And I get that.
But again, you can still apply the 80-20 rule to your sales outlets and just really focus on the 20 % that are getting you the 80 % of the revenue or the results that you want. Just keep those other sales outlets that maybe don't make as much, but just don't put a ton of effort into them. Like keep them as a contingency plan, which by the way, I still do all the time. Like I grow more Zinnias every year than I'd like to because they are literally our contingency plan. I call them my insurance plan.
So in August, if our dahlias aren't blooming out or they die or they tank or low yields, rainy year, whatever, like if that happens, like I still have something, but that's done carefully and on a purpose and with intention instead of just like, you know, growing a bunch of stuff and being like, Oh, well, if something fails, you know, something else will make up for it. Like we do things with a lot of intention.
So I encourage you just to take a look at the revenue from all your different sales outlets and see if you can apply the 80-20 principle there.
And something else that I actually just thought about is that I was recently at a flower conference. It's called flowering the North. was in Maine And I heard Becky said, lousy from rooted flowers in Massachusetts talk about how she really tries to make her business as like evenly rounded as possible. like big chunks of her pie chart.
come from a bunch of different sales outlets. And so I just, I'm throwing that out there because maybe you're going to find that the 80-20 rule is happening in your business right now, but you don't want it to be. You can work towards something like what Becky has done and really evened out her business. So she has all these different sales outlets and you know, if one goes down, she can depend on these other ones. So for me,
That doesn't work for me. I don't like that. It's just too much to think about, too much to do, and too much to manage. But it's not for everyone. So just taking this information, and it can be applied in a bunch of different ways. So at least you know what's making a difference in your business, so you can kind of focus on it a little bit more. But the final way.
that I have found to be most impactful when applying the 80-20 rule to business is by applying it to time and values. So as you know, we are such busy flower farmers, we're juggling families and business and sales outlets and flower crops, and the farm can be such a busy place and it can take over your life if you let it. But when you look at all the different tasks that we have to do on the farm, what I found is that 20 % of them
are really yielding about 80 % of the results for our farm. So we try to focus on that 20 % and make it more like 30, 40, 50 % if we can. So an example of this is weeding. Like weeding is necessary, we have to do it on our farm to have quality products and yada yada. But that's not directly resulting in money in the bank or the result that we want. Like I wanna minimize weeding as much as possible.
So we try to make sure that that's minimized and the majority of our time on the farm is spent on things that are directly producing the result we want, which is like making more money and bringing us joy without the expense of our time. So we really focus on things like harvesting and CSA sales and farmers market sales and marketing, because all of those things, all of those tasks and demands on my time directly result in the, you know, in the result that I want.
And getting a quality product to the customer, more money in the bank, you know, more of my time back. And a quick side note here, not really a side note, but I know I talk all the time about profitability on the flower farm and making money on the farm because I think that's so important and financial stability is really important to me,
but so is having a farm that you actually love working on. We have to design our businesses around the lifestyle that we want. And the reason why I focus on profitability so much is because I think a lot of people love flowers and they love working outside and they love farming. And so that's why they get into it. And then they kind of fail to focus on the profitability side of things. But maybe you're opposite. Maybe you really focus on profitability.
But that can also get you in trouble too. You have to design a business that you actually like the work that you're doing. And you know not every day is going to be amazing. You're not going to love going to work every single day. But that's just BS that we're going to love what we do every single day. We all have days that we don't want to go to work, that we don't want to be a business owner. But the majority of your time should actually be really enjoyable. And I see people make this mistake where they
You know, start looking at these things. When I talk about Pareto's law, they just go all in on profitability. They see like, Ooh, weddings are bringing in the most, you know, most amount of revenue. So we're really going to focus on doing that, but they fail to consider what's really bringing them joy and what they want to do. And then they end up kind of making this whole business around weddings when they don't actually really love doing it.
And so they end up years down the road realizing they don't want to work every single weekend. They don't want to go set up weddings every Saturday. They want to be home with their families and you know, they don't want to do the communication. And so then they have to backpedal and find a different way to do it. So maybe it's great at first, if you know, doing a wedding serves a purpose. Like for me, I did weddings early on and it did serve a purpose. It brought revenue into the farm that I really needed when I was trying to get my business off the ground.
But at some point, you have to ask yourself, what is the 20 % of my business that I'm spending time on that is generating 80 % of the joy in my life? What is generating 80 % of the satisfaction that's generating 80 % of what I really love focusing on? And for me, I was really lucky that I loved doing farmers markets in the CSA. I never really loved wedding design. And even though that brought in a lot of revenue for us early on,
I could still change my farm. I shouldn't say lucky because I had to work at this, but I had to change my farm to really focus on those farmers markets in the CSA. And I fell into the 20 % that is generating the majority of my farm is also what I really enjoyed doing. So I think it's important to sit down and consider what you like to focus on and what you like to do and focus on doing things.
that you love so you can have a sustainable business. Because part of having a sustainable and profitable flower farm is to spend the majority of your time working on things that you actually like doing. And so I think you can take this and apply it to your life as well. Like look at what you do every week, every hour of every week. And I, I would bet for a lot of people, 20 % or about that, a small percentage of tasks are the ones that you really love doing.
And the rest is just like junk. It's just busy work. It's just like obligations that you have to do. And so this is something I'm always working on in my life, is to try to take that 20 % of my time that I spend doing things that I really like to do and that are producing the result I want in my life and trying to make that percentage bigger. So in conclusion,
taking that rule and applying it to how you're spending your time and also applying that to your values because you want to spend as much time as possible doing things that are aligned with your values in both your business and your life. So in conclusion here, applying Pareto's law or the 80-20 rule can really be an absolute game changer for your flower farm business, at least it was for mine.
And again, this magic ratio of 80-20 has strangely been apparent in a lot of different ways when applied across my business in my life, but it's not always that 80-20 ratio. The trend here is that we wanna identify the small percentage of items that are producing the majority of the results that we want. A small percentage of the effort is resulting in the majority of the outcomes and focusing on that. So keep that in mind as you dive into
And the 80-20 principle. So I really encourage you to go sit down and analyze what's bringing money in for your farm. What's bringing in joy for your farm and for your life. You know, what's taking up the most amount of your time and see if you can identify the 20 % or the small percentage that is yielding the 80 % or at least the biggest results. I know for me, this has honestly been life-changing. I've applied this to fitness.
time, values, like just anytime I'm learning something new, like what's the 20 % that I need to learn that is really going to move me forward, you know, that kind of thing. And so I think it can be really powerful to do. So if you want more insight on how I do this, every step of the way on my own farm, I'm actually teaching an in-person workshop this year called Lean Flower Farming, Systems and Efficiency for a Profit Driven Business. It is an intensive
multiple day workshop on my own farm in Clifton Springs, New York. And I teach a systems and efficiency in a bunch of different ways. So we go through the systems I utilize on my own farm and how you can implement them on your farm. And almost every aspect from seed starting to transplanting, do bed preparation, weed management, time and employee management, crop planning, harvesting, bouquet making, sleeping, record keeping, I can go on and on and
But this workshop is designed to show you step by step how we implement systems based on the Pareto's principle to save you tons of time and money on your flower farm in the future. So the Lean Flower Farming Workshop is taking place on July 28th and 29th in 2025. And there's an optional third day that you can sign up for as well when I teach about
high earning high tunnels. So we go over growing profitable flowers during shoulder seasons on that third day as well. So this is a small group workshop. We limit the amount of people that can come to this. So it's really small and intimate and we can really like talk over all the different things in detail. So spots tend to fill up quickly. So be sure to head over to trademark farmer.com forward slash lean. That's L E A N. If you want to sign up.
And I would love it if you snagged a spot to come hang out with me on my farm this summer. So again, you can register now at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash lean. That's L E A N. So thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I hope this was a fascinating episode for you and that you can apply the 80-20 principle to all sorts of things in your business and your life. I'm releasing new episodes of this podcast every Monday. So I will see you next week.
at the same time, same place.
