Jenny (00:29)
welcome back. If you are working a full-time job like off-farm job and also growing flowers in your quote-unquote free time, this episode is for you. Now when I first started my flower farm I had a full-time job working for the government and I started my flower farm on the side.
Which meant I was working 40 hours a week off the farm, sometimes more, sometimes a lot more, depending on what was going on at my job. And then I was also growing this business on the side. So every early morning, every night, every weekend during the growing season, I was working on the farm and on the business. And it was a lot. And so you might be in that position right now, or maybe you're trying to
transition your way out of that. Like I did where I was finally able to quit my full-time job and pursue flower farming full-time. It took me a little bit of time to get there, but that's actually why I started teaching about the business side of flower farming. And this podcast is because I really want to help you get to that point where you have the option to maybe quit a job you don't like and just do flower farming.
I want to help you get there faster than the time it took me. ⁓ and that's my goal with everything that I do. So in this episode, I'm going to share a practical tips to help you grow your flower farm, hopefully without burning out
And you can do this while still doing an okay job at your regular day job and maybe even enjoying the process of it.
One thing I want you to know is that if your intention is to grow your side hustle, your flower farm on the side, eventually to a full-time business. If you're in this phase right now where you're working way too many hours or working way too hard, just trying to get your business off the ground, just accept that this phase is temporary. You're in a season of building
it will not always feel this intense or it should not always feel this intense. Like, yes, it is true. I'm, you know, a lifetime into farming and at times it definitely feels intense. Um, but it shouldn't feel like that 24 seven, like it does in that building season. You just have to keep reminding yourself that you are laying the foundation right now for something bigger. And a lot of farmers go full time.
because they really stuck it out during the stage of building and working really hard, still trying to pay the bills on the side, while also building up your flower farm. And I just want to say quickly that I think that is incredibly valuable. If you're somebody like me that didn't really have the option or for me, I didn't really want to depend on my partner to carry the financial burden of our
family and our house while I was starting a business. And so I felt obligated to work full time to help share my load of our bills and financial responsibilities. And, you know, it just didn't feel like an option for me to not have that money coming in while I built my farm on the side and sort of like prove to myself that I could do it. And so if you're in that situation,
Just know that you are not alone. There are a lot of people out there dealing with that situation.
So today I have about six different tips for you. If you are still juggling an off farm job, whether it's full time or part time, I think these tips will help you, ⁓ while you're trying to transition to full time. And even if you're not trying to transition to full time, if you're just trying to make a little money on the side of with your flower farm, hopefully these tips will help you stay, find some balance and some sanity in your life during, especially during the growing season.
So my first step for you is to schedule and fiercely protect time off first. So burnout is real when you're juggling two jobs, like, especially when you're getting a business off the ground. I think it's incredibly hard. Like that first little phase is the hardest when you're just getting your business off the ground. And when you're just trying to juggle all the things you can get exhausted and
Especially if you also have a family, it's, ⁓ just like crank that exhaustion dial up by 100. If you have kids, at least that has been my experience, but you don't want that burnout to happen to you. And a phrase that I most recently heard was that burnout taps you on the shoulder like a feather. It's just a reminder, like, Hey, you're feeling a little off. You, you're, can't keep going like this. ⁓ just like little reminders.
And you keep going anyways, because you feel like you have to, and you feel like there's not enough time and yada yada. And then eventually those little whispers and little taps on your shoulder end up being a crazy, like life stopping, life changing event where you either get sick, you end up in the hospital. Like, hopefully this doesn't happen to you, but you.
have a mental meltdown or breakdown. And I have definitely experienced this and I wanna help you avoid that. So I'm telling you to not do what I did and these tips are gonna help you avoid those mistakes today. So even if you schedule just one evening a week off from the farm, off of everything, like you just need to reset your mind and help you to avoid resentment of this business that you're trying to build.
help you avoid resentment of this job that you have that is bringing in income. You should be thankful that you have a job that is providing income for you or stability while you build your dream on the side. And you also want to be incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be a flower farmer. Do you know how many countries in the world that's just not possible for women? We are doing so good, and we want to be grateful and have a great mindset.
When you work so much and you don't give yourself any time off or permission to relax, at least for me, I started to really resent my business. I started to resent the job I had before I left it. And it can lead you down this negative mindset path that you don't want to get on because it's only going to affect the performance of your business. So this time off, even if you just say like, okay, every
Tuesday evening, when I get home from my day job, like I am not doing anything for the farm. Like that is non-negotiable for me. It is me time. That's my time to rest and recharge. And if you can do more than that, awesome, do it. But I think it's really important to just start small and just pick one evening a week, if that works for you or even better one day a week would be best. But you know, if you're a workaholic, start small.
So this time off is strategic. It really keeps you in the game for the long haul. Something that has taken me an embarrassingly long amount of time to learn is that rest and relaxation and rejuvenation is, it's really a requirement for business success. Now there's definitely phases of business where,
You know, balance gets thrown out the window. And I think that's necessary from time to time where you just have to like nose to the grindstone, but it shouldn't be like that forever. ⁓ I know that when I have incorporated rest and relaxation and time off into my schedule, I just perform so much better within my business. My business does better. My team is happier. I'm happier. Like, ⁓ it actually helps you be more successful faster.
And I really wish I learned that a long time ago. And to be honest, it's still something that I struggle with because I like to work. I love working. I want to work all the time, but I know that I can't because then I will go down this path of being resentful. So that's tip number one for you. Moving on to tip number two is to choose sales outlets that fit your life right now. Some people might disagree with me on this.
Because they might think that if you have a very specific business model in mind, you should start off with that right away. Like, let's say you want to do weddings. You want to be a farmer florist, and you really want to focus on weddings. But your work schedule, whatever that is, maybe you have to work on weekends with your day job. Like, that's not really going to work if you want to do weddings. And so you have to find something that can sort of fit your life as it is right now.
Farmers markets might not work if you're tied up Saturdays with family stuff or work stuff. I first started doing selling to Florist, bouquet subscriptions, and farmers markets as my main sales outlets because I did my CSA and farmers markets on the weekend, and then I sold to Florist on Wednesday evening, so.
I would harvest flowers like really early on Wednesday morning and on Tuesday night the day before. And then I would go deliver them on Wednesday evenings, like when I got done with from work and that just kind of worked for me and my work schedule. So I think that that was one of the reasons I was able to kind of generate so much revenue early on while I was still working another full-time job. It's because I matched.
my sales model, my sales outlets to the time I had available to work on the business. So every single weekend, you know, I would work Monday through Friday. Every Saturday, I would harvest and process all the flowers and I would go to our farmers market on Sunday. And our big farmers market is on Sundays. And so that's why it works out like that. So I would take a look at your schedule and just see where you can fit in.
selling flowers right now. And then once you start to generate revenue and gain traction, you can pivot and do different things later. ⁓ And again, that might be controversial and maybe that doesn't work for you, but it definitely worked for me and I've seen it work for other people as well. And one last thing about this tip is maybe you can consider talking to your day job or getting a different day job that allows for
less hours or more flexibility or something so you can really start to focus on building the life that you want to create. Just a thought. Moving on to tip number three, it is to simplify your growing plan. I know when you first started out flower farming, or at least I did, I grew so many freaking different kinds of flowers. It was at least 75 or 80 different kinds of flowers and then
you know, like five to eight different varieties of each different kind of flower. And so it was just chaotic. Like my crop plan was chaotic. There was just so much to keep track of, so much variety, so many different seeds to order and plugs to order. And so at some point I figured out that that really wasn't working for me for a multitude of different reasons. And I've talked about that before in the podcast, but you don't need to grow everything.
If you can just focus on a few really reliable, really profitable, easy to grow crops at first, you're gonna be way better off and you're gonna have so much more time to work on the important needle moving things. Like obviously you have to have flowers, but you're also gonna need to be working on marketing and sales and all that kind of business stuff to get your business off the ground.
And when you reduce the variety of things that you're growing, like obviously you're probably still going to be a very diversified flower farm and you'll have lots of different flowers every season. But instead of trying to grow everything ever that you could find in the seed catalog, it really reduces your overwhelm. It makes your harvesting easier. makes bouquet making more efficient and it just makes the whole farm more manageable. So give yourself the gift of
fewer decisions after a job where you're probably making a bunch of decisions for your job all day long. And try to make this as easy as possible. Like this sounds really simple, but I feel like I'm always reminding flower farmers of it. It's like, do the thing that you get the most out of with the least amount of effort. It's not being lazy. It's being strategic. And I feel like I teach that kind of mindset all the time.
Moving on to tip number four, it is to use your commute and downtime for business brain work. So if you have a job where you're commuting and you're in the car for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour day, whatever it is, turn on a podcast, sign up for cut flower courses and listen to them in the car. Like really use that time to educate yourself.
You can also record voice memos with ideas and to-do lists or ⁓ content brainstorming, all that kind of stuff. I used to drive a lot for my job when I worked for the government. I was an inspector and I would have to go drive around to all these different ⁓ livestock markets and do inspections. And I would drive sometimes three hours one way just to do an inspection, have to drive three hours back.
And during that time, I learned so much about flower farming and I use that time to think a lot about what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it. And I would just sit there and I would record like a voice recording on my phone and I would just talk to myself cause I was alone in my truck driving about what I wanted my website to say, what kind of blogs I could write on my website, like what kind of customers I wanted to attract, ⁓ what kind of
products and offerings I wanted to create. And I just use all of that time to really focus on my business. So.
if you have a job where you have any downtime, like I'm not, I'm not encouraging you to steal time from your employer. Please don't do that. But I know that there are jobs out there where you're basically getting paid to like sit there and do nothing. Right? Like I have a lot of friends who have jobs like that and you can use that time to study up and work on your business. So I highly recommend doing that if you can. But like I said, don't steal time from your employer. That's.
Not cool at all.
Moving on to tip number five, it is to batch your farm work like a boss. What I mean by this is that you can time block as much as possible. So you can just be way more efficient with your time. So things like harvesting, bouquet making, admin, you can time block that, like schedule it into your weekly schedule. When I, I've always done this.
Well, I guess I shouldn't say always, but at some point when I was juggling my off farm job and the flower farm, I figured out that time management was a really important skill to have and I needed to figure it out. And this is actually something that we're going to start teaching in our course and our business program. But I sat down and I wrote down on my calendar, everything I had to do that week for my job. basically, you know, Monday through Friday, nine to five was like blocked off for my off farm job.
And then in the mornings, in the evenings, in the weekends, I wrote in my schedule when I was gonna spend time harvesting, prepping bouquets, getting things ready for markets, delivering, and then doing the behind the scenes admin and marketing and sales stuff. Which the marketing and sales stuff, if I'm completely honest, basically all happened in the winter time. And actually a lot of the admin stuff too. Because there just wasn't a lot of time
for me during the growing season when I was like out schlepping flowers. So I would batch create a lot of my marketing materials like over the winter time. And that's also something that I teach my students inside of my programs, how they can do that and what to do and all that kind of stuff. But when you batch similar tasks together, like sitting down and doing all of your office work in one sitting, instead of trying to like come into the office, pay a few bills, like go back out to the field, grab some.
you know, whatever cut stems you need to harvest. And then also try to weed on that same day, try to batch similar tasks together. So you do all your office stuff on one day, you do all your field work on another day. And then obviously you will have to harvest almost every single day, but scheduling it in with those similar tasks together. This really reduces your decision fatigue and it adds predictability into your everyday. I find that just sitting down on Sunday nights or Monday mornings,
doing my schedule for the week. do this religiously every single week of my life now and have for years. It really just helps my brain go from a screaming person, I feel like my own brain is screaming at me all the time, to being way more manageable and way more calm and just all I have to do is flip open my calendar and be like, all right, what's on the schedule for today? This is what I'm gonna do. And it adds.
that predictability so you don't feel like you're always in chaos mode every single week. I should probably do a podcast episode about this, like a whole one on time management. If that would be helpful for you, please DM me on social at trademark farmer and let me know that would be really helpful for me to know if you want to hear about that. So moving on to my final tip for you, tip number six is don't be afraid to outsource.
And this again is something I wish I learned sooner on in my flower farming career. But the fact is that you don't have to do it all yourself. You can outsource things that maybe are not your favorite or are not your forte or things that are minor tasks that are not really like moving the needle for your business. Like when I first started, I hired somebody to do my logo, like design my logo and do my branding.
I had no idea how to do any of that stuff. Canva wasn't really a big thing, like those free design tools where you can basically make it yourself. Like that wasn't a huge thing when I first started, or maybe it was and I just didn't know about it. And I really couldn't afford like a high-end designer. So I found somebody on Etsy who did it for, I think I paid $75 or something like that for my very first logo and branding.
And for me, like that was huge. And then I could get all my stickers done and all my website done and all that. And I didn't just try to do it myself.
So you can outsource things like mowing, bouquet deliveries, childcare, parts of social media, like anything that you want, you can get help with. I want you to acknowledge that when you're outsourcing, it may feel like you might not have the money or the finances to pay people to do things yet, but you kind of either,
pay for your business with your own time or with money. So it's like whatever you have more of. If you have more money, you use it to hire help and outsource things. If you have more time, you gotta try to figure it out on your own. I feel like somewhere in the middle of that is probably like a good happy medium. But when you're outsourcing things, you're buying back time so you can focus
on things that only you can do. And so those are my tips for you. guess one bonus tip, ⁓ mindset, more of a mindset thing would be to really celebrate your wins, no matter how big or small they are, especially small wins. You're working two jobs or maybe you're not, if you're listening to this, but if you are like that alone is worth celebrating. Do you know how many people in the world?
just simply won't do that because they think it's gonna be hard. And you're doing the hard work that's necessary right now to build the business and the life that you want, and that alone should be celebrated. I also think it's important to acknowledge your milestones, like your first sale, successful subscription deliveries, getting your beds prepped on time, completing a crop plan, any little thing that you do.
you should really just pause and acknowledge it and know that you are making progress. I know sometimes it can feel like this. know I felt like this, that it's taking forever for my business to get off the ground. Everyone else is moving so much faster than me. I'm such an idiot. How come I haven't figured this out yet? Like everything I just said, that was like my internal dialogue all the time. And I wish that it wasn't because I think it really held me back from
succeeding in my business. But if you have any of those thoughts, if you're also feeling that way, stopping to just take a look back on everything that you've accomplished so far is really going to help you with that mindset. That momentum of moving forward with positive progress, it comes from seeing and savoring your progress so far and what you've done.
So just know that you are not behind. You are truly building something that really matters. I want you to go at your own pace. Like you are on your own unique journey here, but no matter what, just keep going and you can't fail. So I really hope that this was helpful if you're somebody who is still working a job, but trying to maybe flower farm more as a side hustle or flower farm full time someday. And I hope these tips resonated with you.
If you found this podcast helpful or insightful, or you learned something, I would really love it if you could share it with somebody. Share it on Facebook, share it on Instagram, send it to a friend, send it to somebody you think it could help. Maybe they're not even growing a flower farm business. Maybe they're just trying to start a different kind of business. This is really applicable to anybody trying to start their own small business.
You can help me in my mission of trying to help as many small scale business owners find the success that they want and they need as quickly as possible. And so I would just love it if you could share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple for this podcast. And that's it for today. Don't forget that I am publishing new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
Take care.
