Jenny (00:29)
Flower farming and owning your own business does not have to mean that you work sun up to sun down seven days a week. And today I am sharing five game changing secrets that really helped me reclaim my time and still run a profitable small scale flower farm business. A lot of farmers think that burnout is just part of the job, but it really doesn't have to be.
I think that if you're really smart about how you manage your business, you can avoid that burnout that so many people talk about. And listen, before we get really deep into this episode, I want to remind you that when you're first starting your business, are most likely going to have to work extremely hard for quite a while, and that may involve you working
more hours than you would like to, ⁓ but you have to look at it with the end goal in mind. At some point, you have to realize that you can't continue to keep running yourself into the ground. And in this episode, I'm going to give you five ways to help you alleviate some of that stress.
So let's dive into five tangible shifts that can make your workload lighter, your system smoother, and your life fuller. Because let's be honest, as much as we love flower farming, we also want to have a life outside of our business. We want to have friends or family or hobbies or
something that doesn't involve us being a dirty and sweaty and handling flowers every minute of the day. So my first secret for you and probably the biggest one here is to set work time boundaries.
When my business felt overwhelming, you know, when I was like three or four years in, this was the biggest thing that helped me. I decided at one point that I was only going to work from 7 a.m. until 4 30 p.m. Monday through Friday. And then I did work a little bit on the weekends, but only if there was something that
Like really needed to be harvested like peonies or tulips or sunflowers. And that was only a few times of the year. And so I felt really good and okay about that. And I also had some help with doing that as well. But before I did that, I tried to squeeze work into every single pocket of time possible. I was working through my lunch. wasn't eating lunch. I was working.
You know, after my husband went to bed, I was staying up late working. was working every single weekend, ⁓ waking up early to get things done before I had to go out and harvest. And it was just a lot, you know, there's always a lot of things to do on the farm, but if you're somebody that is, know, five years into your business and you're still doing that, setting this boundary and listening to the rest of this episode and the other tips I have will really help you with that. If you don't.
put these boundaries in place, specific work time boundaries, the farm is going to take up all of your time. So just like, even though you're a business owner, treat yourself like an employee of the farm. Be like, okay, well my work hours are, you know, seven to four every day or eight to five, whatever you want it to be. And it could be less than that. It could be more than that. Whatever you want your business to look like, you can do that. But setting those boundaries first is the first step. So
When you respect those work boundaries, you feel better. You're going to feel lighter. You're going to feel like the mental load isn't weighing on you as much. When you have more time for your family and for self care and just like not thinking about work for a hot minute, it's going to make your business so much more sustainable in the long run because we can't, it's not sustainable to work seven days a week, 14 hours a day.
I've been there, I've done that. And sure, maybe at certain points of your business, that might be possible and maybe even necessary for a short amount of time, but it can't be forever. It's not sustainable. So it's great to have those boundaries in place so you can feel like you actually enjoy your business. Now, when you don't respect these boundaries, and I will say that I still struggle with this from time to time is that I will break those boundaries because I do like working.
Um, I love to work. love what I do. And so sometimes I will break those boundaries and find myself working more than I should be. But you start to break down. I know for me personally, like I get really tired. I start to resent the business. I get really negative and then it starts to affect the business and it starts to affect the culture here. It starts to affect my team members and then the whole business starts to suffer. And so I really have to be careful.
And again, this is something that I am constantly reminding myself about, ⁓ being really careful about setting those work hours and really sticking to them so my business can be sustainable and so I can have the energy and the space to really breathe life into the business and make it what I really want it to be. And that's just gonna be really hard to do if you're stressing yourself out with working yourself into the ground all the time. Something else that can be helpful with setting these work time boundaries,
is creating a shutdown routine for the end of the workday. And I also have to admit that I didn't do this for a very long time, but now I have been pretty good about at the end of the workday, I am really great about setting myself up for success the next day. So what I'll do is I will clear off my desk. I will just sort of pick up my office, make sure that things are put away, they're put back in their spot. So when I come in the following day, everything is nice and neat and
Ready to go. That just sort of helps me with my like mental clarity, but it also is great for not letting things get piled up. I am guilty of just kind of throwing bills or papers or whatever onto my desk that I'm like, I'll deal with this later. I'll file that later. And then it piles up more and more and more, and it's never a priority. So it just keeps piling up and then it becomes this giant mess and this giant task that I don't want to deal with. And so.
My shutdown routine at the end of the workday is to just kind of take less than five minutes. mean, really like two or three minutes, just to sort of pick up everything, throw away trash that I leave on my desk so I can start fresh and clean the next day. So if you're not working at your desk as much as you're maybe working out in the field, this can simply just look like putting your tools back where they belong at the end of the day and just taking a quick walk around the farm to really enjoy what you do.
This is something that I've had to do a lot in the farm. ⁓ when I've gotten stressed or overwhelmed with the business, I simply just take a walk around like I was a visitor of the farm and anything I need to do is like, just ignore them and I go look at the pretty flowers and I pick myself my own bouquet, which, know, I really don't do that often, but it reminds me of why I started this business and why I like doing it. And it's great to just have that routine and have a regular work schedule.
And having that regular work schedule, setting those work time boundaries is really going to help you live your life more and work less. So my second secret for you for working less and getting more life out of your life is to delegate like a CEO. Like it or not, we are the CEOs of our businesses as business owners.
Most of the time we probably don't refer to ourselves as CEO. It's normally a flower farmer or a small business owner, whatever, but you are the CEO of your business and you need to delegate like it. When you let go of some things, you can more easily grow. So let go to grow. And this is really hard for a lot of flower farmers, myself included, because you probably feel like no one does it like I do.
And that's probably true. No one will do it like you do. No one will ever transplant as nicely as I do. They'll never harvest as good or as fast as I do. It's just not the way it is, but if someone can do it at 80 % of the way that you can do it, you have to realize sometimes that that is good enough. It will save you your life. It will save you so much mental stress, just being able to let go of some of those things.
And I know for a long time, I felt like I had certain tasks or certain projects that I really needed to hold onto and that no one else could do it. But over time, I've come to realize that just about anything that I do, somebody else can do at least 80 % as well. And that's good enough for me. So if you're a perfectionist, this is going to be challenging for you, but you need to just kind of shift your mindset a little bit.
Delegation of certain tasks or all tasks really is an investment. It's not a cost to the business. It's going to help you get some time back for yourself. It's going to help free up your mental space. It's going to help your business grow because like it or not, you cannot do it all yourself. And so if you're just getting started with delegating, my advice is to delegate simple, repeatable tasks first. So
Delegating things that you do every single day or repeatedly every single week. So these are things like harvesting, processing flowers, delivering flowers, going to the farmer's market, even like running errands. If you do like certain errands every single week, anything like that. And it doesn't even have to be farm, like field tasks. could be marketing stuff too. You can delegate your social media marketing or your email marketing or
anything like that.
When you first start delegating,
just write out step-by-step what you do so you can train someone once, kind of check in with them a few times, and then they'll have that to refer back to forever. So delegation is key for getting some time back from your business. You can't do it all alone. You shouldn't have to do it all alone. So finding some people to delegate to, whether that's an employee or your mom, who knows? At your stage in business, it could be anything.
Secret number three in working less and getting more time back for yourself is learning to say no. And I know this is gonna be hard for some of you out there. It's definitely been hard for me in the past. I used to say yes anytime anyone wanted to give me money for flowers. Anything, anytime. If they wanted some weird custom arrangement, yes. If they wanted
wholesale flowers and they lived an hour and a half away and I had to go deliver them for free. I said, yes. I said yes to everything because I was just trying to make money from my flower farm business. And maybe when you're first starting out, that's a good way to test the waters with a few different things. But I'm talking about when you have an established business a little bit further on down the road. An example of this would be, ⁓ saying no to custom orders for me was a big one.
Someone recently reached out to me and asked if I could make them a specialty bouquet for their mom. And they wanted sunflowers, which at the time we didn't have and a few other very specific flowers in the past, I would have said yes to this and really tried to make them happy. The people pleaser in me was like, I want this person to just praise me and love what I give them. They want them to be so happy. ⁓ but now.
I'm weighing the cost of that communication, the cost of me running out to the field and harvesting those very specific flowers and making the arrangement and weighing that against what I'm actually getting for it. And I can easily say no to that now. And instead of saying, yes, I will say something like, we can't make that custom arrangement, but you're welcome to come to the farm stand or the farm market to see what we have available this week. We should have, you know, X, Y, and Z.
And I just think that having the ability to say no to things that aren't serving you to the maximum capacity, frees you up to do better work in other ways. So instead of just reinventing the wheel, every time somebody asks you for something, you are able to have reusable workflows that save you time. You don't want to open yourself up for like too much communication or too many new things all the time, because every new sales outlet, every new project is.
It's kind of like its own mini business in a way, because it requires its own webpage, its own marketing, its own specific promotional stuff, its own specific flowers, its own specific processes. But when you can focus on doing what you want to do and do it really, really well, you can get into a routine that runs smoothly and really runs more efficiently. So learning to say no to specifically things that you don't normally do.
Or excessive communication, you know, unless it's like a big opportunity or something like that. But I think you can discern what I'm trying to say here. ⁓ excessive communication is also a big one for me. I limit my phone notifications. I do not have any notifications on my phone at all, except for text messages and phone calls. And my text messages are usually silenced to most people and only available for, ⁓ employees that are working for me or my immediate family.
And then I will check my messages a couple of times a day otherwise. ⁓ and especially email, like I do not have email or social media notifications on my phone. find it incredibly distracting and totally unnecessary. And so I say no to all that excessive communication. And nowadays I'm able to delegate a lot of that. Like we have somebody that monitors our farm email inbox now, which is super helpful. if that's something that you can delegate from
The last secret I told you, go for it. But the whole idea here is learning to say no so you can make fewer decisions and you can have more consistency and less mental clutter, which really frees up your time to have more free time outside of your business and so you can work less. It's all about efficiency, people. Saying no for maximum efficiency.
Moving on to tip number four or secret number four for more time to yourself and less work is ruthlessly prioritizing what actually moves the needle for your business. Not all tasks are created equal. I've talked about the 80-20 rule before on this podcast. I'm sure you can go back and listen to some of the past episodes where I've talked about it, but 80 % of your farm's income
likely comes from only about 20 % of your efforts. And maybe it's not quite 80-20, but the majority of your success from your farm, a lot of times comes from just a few core tasks. And usually those things are things like harvesting, marketing, and sales. So letting go of tasks and other things that are just sort of like nice to haves.
Because a lot of times they can just be distractions. You don't want those distractions. You want to be really focused on what makes your farm profitable and what makes it sustainable and learning to let go of a lot of those other things. So again, this also comes back to saying no to things that don't align with your goals. Something that's really helped me is having a strategy around our weekly top priorities. So we set our top three priorities for.
the entire business at the beginning of each week. And we talk about it as a team. And this helps us get really clear on what needs to happen to move the farm forward. What's going to end up in a good result as in more revenue or more profit or more of our time back or whatever the goal is at that time and prevent us from just focusing on our never ending to do list. Because let's be honest, that to do list, it's always going to be never ending and
So really sitting down and prioritizing what's truly moving the needle for your business and really focusing on that is huge. So ruthlessly prioritizing what actually moves the needle in your business. If you have two tasks to choose from, do the first one that is going to move the needle. So finally, we're moving into my final secret for you on getting your time back from the farm. And that is making time for
Non-farm you. You're more than just a flower farmer. You're more than just a business owner and your business is better when you remember that. Without the rest and joy and time outside of your business, you're really on the fast track to resentment and burnout. And I, I know I said this earlier, but this is a lesson that I feel like I continually have to learn. And so like, I, I definitely don't have this perfect. think that most business owners don't.
Because we like to work and we want to see our business succeed, but really making time for yourself, even during the business day
can be really empowering. You want to schedule your time off on purpose. So this means maybe leaving evenings free or Sundays or scheduling in vacations, even if it's mini ones, just like a long weekend, once a quarter or, you know, twice a year or something like that. I try my hardest to schedule in my time off and my vacations for the year.
before I schedule any work projects or work activities. So before we schedule any like farm tours or events at the farm or add in new sales outlets or whatever, I'm making sure that my time with my family is taken care of first. And that's really important because that guilt-free rest is really a business strategy. It's not a luxury. And for a long time, I really thought that it was a luxury and I ran myself into the ground and I made a lot of mistakes.
And my business suffered and then I had to recover from it. But when you give yourself the time for rest and relaxation and rejuvenation, you show up to work on Monday morning, feeling like you can take on the world or maybe not take on the world, but at least ready to make a difference in your business and tackle some of those really big issues or projects that you have to solve head on.
Something that I do is I frequently go for walks around the farm or like around my property. have 22 and a half acres ish here, but we only farm, um, flowers on one acre. And so I'll walk around my property just to give myself like a little mental break during the day, or I Make sure as soon as I get off of work, I'll do something really fun with my son for a half an hour or an hour before I have to get into like.
making dinner mode and like bedtime routine and all that stuff. But I try to carve out just like small little moments throughout the business workday in addition to carving out family time for myself as well. So making time for non-FarmU, although it can be incredibly hard, it's really important for you to do for the overall success of your business. So scheduling that in before...
before you schedule any work stuff, especially if you're doing weddings. Like I just thought about this, but if you have the opportunity to do weddings, it can be really hard to carve in weekends off if you're just always booking weddings. So I recommend picking a few weekends a year that's just for you and yourself before booking any of that kind of stuff for work. It can make a really big difference in your mental health, wellbeing, and therefore,
a bigger difference in your business. So those are my five secrets for you for having more time for yourself and less work. One setting work time boundaries, two delegating like a boss, three learning to say no for ruthlessly prioritizing what moves the needle. And finally making time for non-farm you making time for yourself.
Now, listen, these are not like overnight hacks, maybe all of this stuff you can't put into place right away, but gradual changes into prioritizing your life outside of the business can add up over time and can make a really big impact. So if you feel like you are working way too much right now and there's no end in sight, it might be a process for you to get there and that's okay. Just chip away at it and work at it a little bit at a time. So if that just means,
hiring more people, delegating some of the work, saying no to some things that you feel like aren't really moving the needle or you don't want to do anymore. That's totally okay as well. So my action item for you is to just pick one thing that you can do this week to maybe not work so much, help you avoid burnout and get some more time back for yourself. Just pick one thing to do this week. And I would love for you if you shared that with me any way that you can, but
especially on social media, share a post about what you're doing to get some of your time back outside of your business and tag me in it or DM me and let me know what you decided to do. My Instagram is trademark farmer. So feel free to DM me on there anytime. I would love to see what you're up to. And finally, if you found this episode to be helpful in any way possible, it would be so amazing for me if you could.
leave a review for this podcast. Just go to Apple wherever you're listening to this podcast and you can scroll all the way down to the bottom on the profile of this podcast and you'll see an area to leave a review. Those reviews really help other flower farmers find the information that they need to build a sustainable and profitable small scale flower farm and you can help me on that mission to help everybody achieve that. Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I'm
Honored to have you here as a listener. Don't forget that we have new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
