Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to the show. I am excited to have you guys here for this episode. ⁓ this is going to be a good one today. I'm sharing something that might surprise you. It is my biggest business regret, and it's not something about pricing or something about a crop that I failed at. It's not a mistake. It's
Well, I guess it is a mistake, but it's not like a bad investment or crop failure or anything like that. It's something way more foundational than that. And it's that I wish I had built a bigger team earlier on. Whew. So let's get into it. ⁓
The honest truth is that you cannot do everything yourself and your business. And when you first start out, that is exactly what you will be doing. And that is how everybody starts their business for the most part. I think with the farming business, that's probably true. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself, the farming, the admin, the emails, the marketing. mean, literally wearing every single hat, which is
Absolutely normal for the, you know, typical DIY startup phase of a business, but it is 100 % not sustainable. Like at first it's scrappy and it's smart, but eventually you become a bottleneck in your business. And I realized that early on for the first, you know, the first few years of my business, I didn't make any money because I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I didn't know how to sell things. I didn't know how to market.
Which is why I do what I do now because I wish I knew about it sooner But you know when I was finally starting to figure that out I knew that I was overwhelmed I knew that there was more that I could realistically do myself And so I did hire people early on you know my first person that I hired was just a part-time You know a few hours a week to help me harvest and do things out in the field and then very shortly after that I hired
more and more people to help with that stuff. So I definitely hired people in the beginning, but the thing that I was missing was I wasn't hiring people for key roles in the business. So we'll talk about that more in a second, but I guess this is gonna be sort of a two-part episode where we're gonna talk about hiring, but also building an incredible team that can help move your business forward.
So in the beginning, it feels like you don't have enough money to hire a team. Maybe you can't afford people, but the truth is that you can go so much further and so much faster with the right help and the right team behind you. mean, it can speed you and your business up by light years because you just have such a limited capacity. You only have so many hours in a week.
And even if you are really strategic and smart about what you spend your time on, the truth is that you really can't do it all and you can't do it all well just by yourself. So at some point during your journey as a business owner, you have to shift from that mindset of the business is you to the business is the business and you are the visionary for it. And you are the person just leading a boat.
And there's people on the boat other than you that are going to be rowing alongside you to move the business forward. You have to switch from that doing it all yourself to a CEO mindset. Going from. I have this giant list of things to do that all have to get done to being sort of like a conductor of a music orchestra. Like you're just orchestrating all the work that needs to be done, overseeing all the departments while also probably most likely doing the work yourself.
I think that with small business and I'm very, I'm definitely talking to small businesses out there. I'm not talking to corporations or huge businesses that truly have like giant departments for marketing, a giant department for sales, a giant department for fulfillment, a giant department for customer service. Like obviously that's not who I'm talking to here. ⁓ that's not what I have in my business and probably not what you have either. of.
Of course, we have to find a balance here, where as a flower farm business owner, chances are you will most likely always be doing some of the work yourself as a small business owner. But you should definitely not be trying to do all of it. A team can truly move you so much further and faster. And I just wish that I had realized that sooner on in my business, because I really feel like I would be
so much further along than I am even right now if I had just hired the right team of people. And I've always hired amazing people. I've always had great people working for me, but just focusing more on hiring more of the right people for the right team roles. So there are different types of roles that you can hire for. If you think of your business as sort of having three main departments,
You can think of operations, which is like finance and bookkeeping and management, which is probably something that you will always be doing. Or maybe not the bookkeeping part, like overseeing the whole business. Then you have your fulfillment department, which is actually growing the flowers, delivering the flowers, getting them to the customers.
And then you can think of the third department as marketing and sales, which with a really big business, these would kind of be split up into two separate departments. But for most small businesses is kind of the same and it's not, but it, but it kind of is it all falls under this one, like lump category of marketing and sales. So you have operations, fulfillment, and then marketing and sales.
who you hire first is kind of going to depend on where your weaknesses are. So you can hire somebody for field work, for doing stuff out in the field on the farm. You can hire marketing and sales help. can hire admin, customer service, inbox management help. You can hire a virtual assistant to do a lot of that stuff for you. You can also outsource stuff to contractors like a bookkeeper. So there's a million different.
roles and responsibilities that there are on your farm, don't be afraid to ask for help in whatever department you need help in. Maybe that's one department. Maybe it's all the departments right now. I know for probably most of you, it might be all of the departments and that is 100 % okay. This isn't stuff that happens overnight. It's not like you get help with all the things right away. It's a process. It takes time. And sometimes it can take
a while to get it all figured out. So don't stress if you are the lone wolf right now. Like we've all been there. But I really hope that this episode can help you realize how much further and faster you can go with a team and how to not be afraid of hiring and asking for the help that you need. Hiring a team and building a team is not,
It's not like you're just shelling out money to have other people help you with the farm. You need to kind of reframe hiring as growth. It's going to help you grow your business. It's not a luxury to hire. I mean, for some positions it might be, but hiring isn't a reward for being successful. It's really how you can become successful.
So it's not like, oh, well, I need to wait until I make $100,000 a year before I hire somebody. No, no, no, no, no. You need to start hiring people so you can get to that next phase in your life. And I'm not saying you need to hire people to get to $100,000, although it could be helpful. I'm just saying that whatever your goals are, there's most likely a position that can help you get there. So you might think that you need help, but you're not sure how, you're not sure if you're ready to hire.
signs that it's time to hire somebody is if you have more work than you can get done, you're maybe turning down opportunities because you don't have time to fulfill them. Like if forests are knocking on your door or if there's another farmer's market that pops up or I don't know, some kind of opportunity and you're like, I'm maxed out right now, like that should never happen. It's okay if it does, but.
Instead of saying no to that, you might want to consider saying like, yes, but I need to hire more people to do that or to help me do that. Other signs that you might be ready to hire is if you're stuck in low level tasks, like things like just delivering the flowers, weeding, inbox management. I know for the longest time, I felt like no one else could do these things except for me.
And I'm here to tell you that it's just not true. It's just not true. It may be true that nobody will do them as good as you, but if they can do it 80 % as good as you with the right training, like have them do it because that frees you up to do better, more powerful, higher level work that can truly move your business forward. And if you're somebody who is working more than like,
50 hours a week and you're past like the startup phase of your business, like you definitely need to hire people for sure. It's just a, you just gotta, you gotta. So what I want you to reflect on is thinking about what you could hire out that would help you move your business forward. So if it's just starting small, like you can just hire somebody for five hours a week. What could you do with five more hours a week? Like that's actually a lot of time.
Like if I had five more hours a week, I would 100 % be spending it on like marketing and sales so I could do more business. Um, if you had 10 more hours a week, like what could you do? And for some people having 10 hours a week back might just be for you to get like some work life balance. And for other people, it might be to free you up to work on some really key revenue generating tasks like marketing and sales. But.
Thinking about if you just hired somebody for a little bit of extra time a week, that could really free you up for focusing on sales, on strategy, or your next big move. But when you're hiring people, and if you are half paying attention to me, I want you to come back, because this is probably the most important part of this entire podcast. You need to hire people who are going to generate revenue for your business. You should not just hire people
just because you need help. That is a recipe to have a very expensive payroll and lead to the business failing. There is a difference between just hiring people to weed for you, ⁓ which is not a revenue generating task, and then hiring people that will either directly or indirectly make the business money. So let's get into this for a second.
There are direct revenue generating tasks and roles, specifically people who are doing marketing, salespeople, people who are like answering the phones for you, answering emails for you that can book calls, book consults, know, close deals, get people to buy. Anybody who can do that for you is directly making the business money. And as long as they can generate more than what you're paying them,
It is a great investment for your business. Now, of course, there's also going to be people in your business who are not doing that, obviously. There's people who have to do the field work. They need to fulfill your services. Like they need to fill your CSA or harvest or go to the farmer's market or do whatever. Those people may not directly be making the business money, but indirectly they may be freeing you up.
to do the higher level sales and strategic work, which is going to make the business more money. So you just need to make sure that when you are hiring people, they are either directly or indirectly generating revenue for the business. Now, like here's an example. So my field crew leader, her name is Rebecca, she fulfills all of our CSA our farmer's market. So she harvests.
processes and delivers all the flowers for our CSA and our farmers market. And she has a support, some other people in our field crew who help, you know, sort of support her in that role, but she's doing 95 % of that. So her role is generating over a hundred thousand dollars a year for our business. So her pay is paying for herself plus generating revenue for the company.
And that's kind of how you need to look at these types of roles and responsibilities when you're hiring somebody. So I just think back, this is why this is my biggest regret in building my business, is not doing that sooner, not finding and training and building people up sooner to take on those revenue generating tasks or at least take work off my plate so I can do more sales and get in more business.
Because we could be generating so much more revenue we are right now if I had just done this sooner. ⁓ so that's why it's truly my biggest business regret. And there is an opportunity cost of not hiring you guys. Like every hour that you spend pulling weeds could be an hour that you spent booking a wedding, promoting your CSA, designing a new product or offering.
Like experimenting with paid ads, learning how to run paid ads and getting revenue from that. could be spend doing so many things that could make your business really, really successful. And I know that you probably became a flower farmer because you love growing and harvesting flowers and you want to do that. But at some point you need to let go of some of those things. And it could just be things that you hate in your business.
Think about things that are really important, but you put off or things that are really important, but you don't make time for. I know for a lot of flower farmers, this might be marketing and sales. And although I, I really think that you as the business owner need to be the head of marketing of sales, like you need to have the vision. You need to know what needs to happen, but you can hire people to help you execute those things. So you can still be out in the field harvesting flowers and
You know, overseeing your field crew and all that fun stuff. You can hire somebody to literally put together Instagram reels and Facebook posts for you. Like you can write the copy. You can write out the, whatever you want it to say and just have a library of photos that they pull from. And they actually do the execution of that. And that would save you like potentially up to like an hour a day. If you're posting like every single day and just think of what that could do for your business to free you up to do something else.
Now, I know this is probably one of the hardest things with business is actually finding really good, reliable people for your team. I'm not going to lie. This is 100 % a very big challenge in this industry. And it probably always will be just due to the nature of the work. Most of us are seasonal businesses. It's just hard to find reliable people that want to come back year after year to a seasonal business.
However, those people are so out there. They really are. I have found plenty of them. I have lots of friends who have hired lots of them. And so that's not to say that just because it might be challenging to find people, it's not a reason to give up and throw in the towel. When we post for job postings, we just kind of look anywhere and everywhere. We post it on Indeed. We post on Instagram and Facebook. We do a shout out to our email list.
We put signs up at our farmer's market and just ask everyone we know, hey, do you know somebody? And we've always found really good people that way. I would say that it's easiest to hire part-time positions when you're first starting out rather than like a full-time seasonal position. However, there's definitely people out there that will do both. I encourage you to kind of start within your own community, asking if anybody's interested in working on your farm.
And I think that you'd be surprised at some of the interests that you do generate. That being said, I feel like I should do a whole other podcast episode on this sometime, but you want to be realistic with people's expectations because as you probably know, everyone thinks that working on a flower farm is just rolling around in rose petals all day. And it is 100 % not that at all. So definitely being realistic with people.
setting clear expectations on what's expected of them, what the job is like, and then doing a really good job at being there for them, training them, pouring into them to really build them up as a reliable team member.
And if you do end up hiring people, or if you've have hired people in the past and it doesn't work out, it's okay. It is 100 % okay. I think that we need to normalize these like hiring misses because it just happens sometimes when you hire people and they don't work out either they're not the right fit for you or you're not the right fit for them, whatever. The majority of the people I've hired have
been incredible, amazing people. A few of them didn't work out and they were great people as well. It just wasn't a good fit and that is okay. It doesn't mean that there's nobody out there. It doesn't mean that there's no good help. It doesn't mean that you're never gonna find anyone, because these are all things that I hear from flower farmers all the time. It just means that that was just not the right person and it's okay. You just try again. It's not bad.
You just got to try again. And I think due to the nature of this business, you always will have like more turnover and churn with your employees than you would in a different kind of business where you have 12 months of the year work laid out for somebody. think it's just the nature of our business and what it is. So how I would start is to do a sort of time audit, like track your time for one week or a couple of weeks and just write down everything that you do.
and identify things that are either low level tasks that anybody could do, that you can teach anyone to do, like weeding, deliveries, inbox management, and then think about hiring for those tasks and also identifying some high level tasks, like the, I don't know, like $30 to $100 tasks, which would be like marketing, strategy, fulfilling partnerships.
selling that kind of stuff and then keep those tasks on your plate. And if you need help executing them, think about hiring somebody that can just assist you and executing those tasks.
also want you to make a list of things that would 100 % move your business forward that you are not doing right now. What is one thing that would skyrocket your business, but you don't have the time for it, you're not making the time for it, or you're not good at it, it's not your forte? And then consider hiring a role around that.
You don't have to go from solo to CEO of a big team of people, or even just a small team of people overnight. You can start just by offloading one thing at a time. You can grow slowly. think that that's actually a great approach, but the whole point I'm trying to make here is that you don't have to be afraid of hiring people, even though it is a very scary thing to do. My biggest regret isn't a failure. It was just waiting.
too long to get the help and build the team that I needed to create a really, really amazing business. And I have an amazing business, I really do, but I just think it could be so much better and we could have gotten to the point where we are right now so much faster if I had really prioritized the importance of hiring key team players for the business. So I want you to leave this podcast episode
With this one question, ask yourself, what is one task that you could delegate this month and what would change if you did? I would love to hear what you think about this. I would love to hear your thoughts and what you came up with. So please feel free to DM me on Instagram. My Instagram is trademark farmer. Don't Instagram my, or don't DM me on my farm Instagram, please. That's just really for my customers. ⁓
DM me on the business one, which is trademark farmer on Instagram. DM me and let me know your thoughts or your experiences with hiring. I would love to know. And if there's any other episodes you want me to do that would help clear some of this up for you or help you out in the future. And finally, if you think that you know anybody else that could benefit from this episode, feel free to share this episode with a friend or a farmer who really needs to hear this today.
I think that there's a lot of us who are sort of drowning in these tasks, drowning with the everyday to do, and we're just afraid to hire and to hire a team that can really help us out and to take ownership of tasks, not just do tasks, but take ownership of things and help free some of our brain space up as business owners.
So please share this episode with a friend or farmer who needs to hear it and really help make their day. And otherwise, I will see you next time on the six figure flower farming podcast. New episodes are released every Monday. So I'll see you next time. Same time, same place.
Jenny (23:37)
Hey, one last thing before you go, if you haven't yet, could you please leave the six-figure flower farming podcast a review on Apple or Spotify? If you have gotten any value or insight out of this podcast at all, it would seriously mean the world to me and to your fellow flower farmers because those reviews help them find the super valuable information they need to build their profitable and sustainable flower farm businesses. So.
please just take 30 seconds. It literally takes no time at all. So go ahead and leave a review now and I will be forever grateful. Thank you so much in advance and I'll see you next time in the next episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
