Jenny (00:29)
If you are feeling overwhelmed in your business, it might be time to start outsourcing, hiring, and delegating. But which things should you start getting off your plate first? This is a common question that I get and today we are going to be diving into it, specifically going over four things that you can pretty easily outsource so you can finally take a breather and free up some space for you to do some big picture work in your business.
Now, as a flower farm business owner, the tasks that you eventually do should really be things that only you can do really only things that you can do focused on big picture, visionary type things that truly help move the business forward. Now you've probably heard that phrase that you need to work on your business and not in your business. And of course, when you're first getting started, you're going to be working.
in your business, probably every day. There's really no way around that in the beginning. And perhaps you will always be working in your business at some capacity. You'll probably be doing those day-to-day tasks always if you enjoy them. But at some point, you do need to reserve some time for you to spend time on those big picture items. For me, as a flower farm business owner, my big picture tasks and priorities are usually
One, hiring and training staff and maintaining a positive company culture, which really it starts at the top and trickles its way down. So you have to make sure that comes from you first, a positive company culture. Secondly, marketing. Thirdly, sales. Fourth, pursuing future opportunities and growth. So for me, this is always just kind of doing market research, seeing where we can go from.
where we are figuring out ways to dive deeper and do better at the things that we're already doing and just keep improving on what we're already doing so we can be better and better.
And if you find that you don't have the time for these kinds of tasks right now, it might be a sign that you need to start outsourcing or delegating. So when entrepreneurs start to grow beyond their capacity, the first few things they typically outsource are things that are time consuming, super specialized or low leverage tasks, especially things that take away from your zone of genius per se.
So if you have a special set of talents or skills that really move your business forward or things that you love doing things that you really want to work on, that's really what you should be focusing on. And it's important to delegate or outsource those other time consuming, specialized, repetitive, low level tasks to others. So you can free yourself up for those important needle moving tasks. So today we're going to be talking about four of the most common areas to get started with.
Outsourcing. The first one is a big one. The first one is bookkeeping and taxes. Most flower farmers didn't become flower farm business owners because they love running the numbers and doing the books. Most entrepreneurs are not accountants and getting this wrong can be pretty expensive and catastrophic for your business. So when I first started,
outsourcing this, which was far too late. Like I should have outsourced my bookkeeping to someone forever ago. And it was definitely way too late when I started. I wish I had done it from very early on and said it was embarrassingly very late into my entrepreneurship journey. But monthly bookkeeping, quarterly and annual tax filing, stuff like payroll processing, sales taxes,
doing your sales tax returns or sales tax tracking, all that stuff can very easily be outsourced to a professional who will do it probably way better than you can do. And maybe not you, but for me, I hired somebody that can do it way better than I can, and I'm so thankful for somebody to take that off my plate. So a sign that I was ready to outsource this was when I wasn't able to keep up with the monthly bookkeeping.
I was skipping months. was so busy with other things that kind of fell to the bottom of my to-do list. And then come like November every year, I would be like, Oh God, I haven't done my books in several months. Time for me to go back and try to reconcile five months of bookkeeping in one sitting. And it just wasn't good. So, you know, I actually got pretty good at prioritizing that after a while, but then it became time that
It just was a task I didn't want to do. I didn't feel like I was really good at it. Things I thought were getting missed. Like I wasn't keeping great track of certain things. And so that was one of the first big things that I outsource that I realized like, Holy cow, I really need to start doing this and start outsourcing more. So finding a good bookkeeper. There are tons of bookkeepers out there. It would be great if you could find one that specializes in agricultural stuff, but if not, that's totally fine.
If you need recommendations, send me a DM or send me an email. ⁓ have a small list of people that I can recommend, but getting bookkeeping and taxes off your plate will free up a ton of time for you to work on those bigger picture items that only you can do. And really bookkeeping, there's a lot of people who can do this. So that's the first thing that you can start outsourcing to getting some of your time back. The second thing that you can start outsourcing.
our administrative tasks. And I would put all of these things under an umbrella of virtual assistant work. So you can actually hire someone who is a virtual assistant, a person who works remotely or they could work near you if you want to or in the same geographic location. But a lot of the time these people work remotely, could be anywhere in the world, anywhere in the US if you want.
that help you with routine administrative tasks. These are things that really eat up your time, but don't directly move your business forward. So this is things like email inbox management, customer service replies, customer communication, calendar management and scheduling, data entry, or just organizing files and even helping create things like SOPs.
⁓ and there's AI that can do this as well nowadays too. I should definitely do an episode on that soon in the future. Stay tuned for an AI episode. But as far as administrative tasks go, you can hire a virtual assistant that can. Manage your email inbox, ⁓ and do a lot of customer communication for you. They can even book things for you. Like if you're booking weddings or events and stuff, you can hire and train somebody to specifically be like your office manager and take care of those things for you.
So you can execute on some of the higher level things and more specialized stuff like floral design or harvesting specific flowers, making those color palettes or whatever it is. I will say that I very recently hired somebody to do my email inbox management for me. And I wish I had done it way, way, way sooner. I am actually a little ashamed that it's taken me so long to hire somebody to do this for me. But for so long, I thought that
I could only do it because I got such specialized questions that I felt like nobody else could answer. Things like, you know, well you have peonies in August, or I wanna book you for an event and I want ranunculus in August. And it's such specialized information that I felt like no one else could answer it. But I was so wrong, because you can have all of that information available for somebody.
to answer those questions for you. And as questions come up, you can create a database of frequently asked questions that whoever is managing your email inbox can respond to those messages. And of course, we all get commonly asked questions that, for me, people always ask if they can come to the farm. And we just have canned responses that say, no, but you're welcome to visit another farm in the area that does you pick or whatever. Or you can only come to our farm for specialized events or ticketed events and stuff like that.
So you can create canned responses for somebody else to answer those commonly asked questions, and then just start to build a bank over time that somebody can reference when people do ask those weird questions that you feel like only you can answer.
Something I have found to be really helpful is doing a sort of audit of my time where for a week, every once in a while, I'll just track what I do every 15 minutes of the day and see what kind of tasks I'm taking on that somebody else could do. And these are generally just really routine administrative tasks that I will outsource to my VA or my marketing assistant or whoever is available to take on those tasks.
finding someone to help you with admin stuff. And it doesn't have to be a VA. If you're just getting started, it could be just a part-time person. It could be your mom or your sister who's looking for a little extra project or something like that. Um, but at some point you may want to hire a VA, even if it's just for five hours a week or 10 hours a week, that can make a big difference. Imagine if you had five hours back a week that you have freed up to do
big picture items, what that could possibly do for your business. So moving on to number three is social media. So if you've ever listened to this podcast before, you know that I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I think it's a wonderful tool, a great way to connect with people, but I also think a lot of times it doesn't really move the needle in the way people think it does, and so I love...
delegating and outsourcing social media stuff to my assistant. So this could be anything from entirely managing your social media channels or just executing the actual creation of it while you can write, you know, your captions, you can write the content, but you have somebody else actually put the reels in the post together. So it could be planning, creating and posting consistent content. ⁓ whether that's strategy or just taking off some of your time.
So as far as like content creation goes, it could be them creating graphics in, ⁓ Canva or just whatever. could be writing the captions. If you don't want to do that yourself, it could be taking photos. could be just taking photos from a Google photos album that you upload. Could be scheduling posts, engagement. You have somebody respond to comments and DMS, ⁓ for some people that feels a
inauthentic. know for me it felt like that for a long time, but
that's not something you feel comfortable with, then you can always do that yourself, or you can just jump in for certain responses, whatever you feel comfortable with. I will say that for me, it makes the most amount of sense for me to do the majority of the content planning and strategy. So I will write a lot of my own content, my own captions.
But I will have somebody else do the actual execution of it where they will take the photos that I take out of a Google photos album that we share and they'll match it with a caption or they'll pull videos and match it with whatever content I wrote and put the actual. Posts and reels together and post them for me. They'll schedule it for me. So we use a schedule. use one called planable. There's a bunch of ones out there. There's later there's plan only. ⁓
There's a few different ones out there that you can use, but we like Planable. We use the paid version and I'm okay using the paid version because it saves us a lot of time and headache. And I just like that whole process, but it makes it really easy to outsource to somebody else and work with somebody else in that capacity. So social media management and execution can be a really big one.
Then moving on to number four, outsourcing physical labor for on-farm tasks. As your revenue grows on your farm, you're gonna need help scaling your production. I mean, maybe you'll be a solopreneur, but for most people, you're gonna need a little bit of help on the farm. So that's probably gonna look like weeding, harvesting, making bouquets, sleeving bouquets.
⁓ market help, delivery, if you do wedding or floral design, somebody to help you with that floral design, even if it's just a freelancer. It could even be like event setup or cleanup if you do weddings and stuff like that. But.
This is probably most commonly the first thing that you start to hire people for, helping the field with that weeding and harvesting and everything. And a lot of this work is actually pretty specialized. I know a lot of people call farming like low skilled labor and I just think that's such BS. Like I think the ability to transplant well, to harvest well, it is a real skill that has to be developed. And so when you do hire,
for these physical labor on farm tasks, you have to very carefully plan out how you're gonna train and onboard somebody to make sure that they know what they're doing and they can execute tasks efficiently without you. A lot of times I see farmers make this mistake where they just bring people on and they kind of get thrown into the mix and they work alongside them to get them up to speed for...
different things like harvesting and transplanting. And while that's absolutely necessary, you definitely have to work alongside people as part of the training and onboarding process. You have to do it in a way where eventually you can let them go and fly on their own without you. You don't want to set it up in a way where you're going to be tied to working with that person indefinitely. So empowering people with the right tools and know-how so they will eventually be able to work on their own is really important.
And I would say that hiring people for those repeatable tasks that you do day in day out every single week is going to really help somebody get up to speed and find success on your flower farm. So harvesting big one, weeding another big one.
bouquet making, sleeving, going to the farmer's market, all that good kind of stuff.
But out of these four things, I mean, there's endless things that you can outsource, but these are probably the most common things to get started with outsourcing. Once you already know what you're doing and you feel like you know a little bit to help train somebody and get moving on the farm.
When deciding what to outsource first with your business, I think you should ask yourself three big questions. The first one is what is taking the most time and energy from me that I don't specifically need to be doing. And somebody else could do what is taking the most time and energy. Then the second question is what do I dread doing or consistently avoid?
Okay, for me, this was bookkeeping for a while. So what do I dread doing or consistently avoid? And then the last question to ask yourself is what tasks could someone else do 80 % as good as me or better than me? Cause there are definitely things out there that somebody could be doing a lot better than you because you simply just don't have the time for it. Whether that's customer communication, administrative tasks, weeding or bookkeeping.
Whatever it is, I'm sure there is somebody out there that can do it for you almost as good or better than you can. So if you're finding yourself overwhelmed on the farm, I would love for you to start thinking about what you could start delegating, getting off your plate and outsourcing so you can finally breathe a little bit and get a little bit more time and space for yourself in your business. And even off the farm too, if you just find that you're working too much and you need some more time for you.
I hope this episode was helpful and I hope that you are able to start outsourcing. And finally, if you found this episode to be even a little bit helpful, please leave a positive review for us wherever you're listening to this, specifically on Apple or Spotify. If you just go to the Six Figure Flower Farming profile on Apple, you can scroll down and you'll see a spot where people have left reviews and you can click to leave a review yourself.
I would appreciate it so much and leaving those reviews really helps other flower farmers find this information that they need to build a profitable and sustainable business. So please join me on my mission to help every small scale flower farmer grow a profitable and sustainable business that they love. And with that, I will see you next week in our next episode. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I will see you next week. Same time.
Same place. Have a good week.
