Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. And today I am a little bit nervous, but also excited to share this episode with you. In this episode, I'm sharing six surprising things I learned growing a multiple six figure flower business. And these are things that were very surprising to me.
And all the lessons I'm going to be talking about are things that I learned purely from experience. They weren't things that I learned in a course or a book or from another grower or farmer. was purely just from my own experience, like doing the work, making a lot of mistakes along the way and kind of just figuring things out as I went along. So I'm nervous to share these today because
It feels like a little bit vulnerable, but also excited to share them with you. So you can maybe skip some of the hard things that I went through to build your dream business a little bit faster. Now, before we go dive into these lessons, I want you to know that I did not start out with a perfect business plan or a team or a gorgeous brand, or even like a farm that was set up nicely or
land that was usable because none of those things were true. But along the way, I've learned some surprising and sometimes painful lessons that helped me grow my six figure flower farm. And before we dive in, I have just a quick story for you because when I talk about money, a lot of people tend to get triggered. And I totally understand that because I used to be one of those people.
And a quick story for you is this past winter, I gave a talk at a flower conference that was sort of about growing a profitable farm and the sort of aspects and keys that you needed to know to grow a profitable farm. And in it, I shared all of my numbers, like all of them. I shared how much revenue I had earned the year before our profit margins, our expenses, our expense categories, all of that.
And at the very end, there was a woman who stood up in the crowd and she had a question for me. And this was like during the Q and a, and she said, well, I want to know how much of that revenue was from selling courses or your podcast or from coaching or whatever. And the truth was none of it, literally none of it. I have grown my flower farm to multiple six figures.
selling cut flowers, Dalia tubers, and things of that nature. Now we've definitely done on farm workshops. We've sold experiences, but in this category of my flower farm, I count things like farm tours for my CSA customers or my like local cut flower customers. I would count you pick events. would count
Workshops where we had them come and make their own bouquet or do designing or make eucalyptus wreaths or something like that. So like all that kind of revenue went into building my flower farm to multiple six figures. It was not from doing any sort of education or teaching or anything like that. And this woman just could not believe that someone like me growing on an acre of just an acre of flowers could earn that much.
money and gross revenue. And I want to bring this up because a lot of people don't seem to like believe that this is real, but it is. There are people who make nothing in business and there are people who make millions and millions in business. And you can be anywhere in between anywhere you want. It might just take you a little while to get to where you want to be. And so I share this story because I want you to know that it's people like that woman who stood up.
And I feel sorry for her because she truly didn't believe that that was possible for her. And your mindset is everything when it comes to this. For the people who believe it's possible to earn a good living at flower farming, that's who it's going to happen for. People like that, that woman, she truly didn't believe it was possible. And she was absolutely, you know, shocked when I told her like, none of this revenue I'm sharing with you.
about these statistics from my flower farm have anything to do with like teaching or helping other flower farmers. But that's why I do what I do now is because I feel like it's this missing piece in the industry that doesn't get talked about a lot. And I'm really passionate about it. So as we dive into the next six lessons, I'm going to share with you, I want to say that the biggest overarching theme here is going to be mindset.
Your mindset is so important when it comes to running a business. it's not that you won't have days where you don't feel dog tired and like you want to give up or you have catastrophes and you feel like it's not worth it or you question yourself or you have self doubt. Like that happens to pretty much everybody. You just have to keep working on your mindset and really making yourself believe that it's possible to do what you want to do. So with that,
Let's dive into lesson number one that I wanna share.
Lesson one is that you can't do it alone. You need a team or at least some help. And it was hard for me to come to terms with this because I really believed when I started my flower farm business that it was just going to be me. I was going to be a solopreneur. I didn't need any help. didn't necessarily even want to work with other people. I just wanted to go to work doing something I loved every single day.
And just do whatever I wanted to do because I did not like being told what to do. didn't like following other people's agendas, which still stands true today, turns out. ⁓ so I think that I've depended on myself for way too long and that actually hindered the growth of my business. Like I did grow my business very quickly. Once I figured out all the business stuff, which is why I teach it because it was absolutely life-changing for me. But.
I really should have welcomed hiring people and giving people responsibility and delegating more things earlier. I finding even now in my business that I still sometimes struggle to delegate things because I'm like a perfectionist and I really want everything to be perfect. But what I've learned is that there's people out there who do things way better than I can, and I can welcome them onto my team and use their talents to basically explode.
my own vision. So really, if you want to scale your business, you need support, you need a team. You can just think of multiplying yourself by hiring team members. And I, I think that you don't have to go and just like hire full-time people right away. Like I don't even necessarily recommend that, but just a few hours of help a week can really change everything.
And I recently talked about this in another podcast episode. It's podcast episode number.
58. It's called My Biggest Business Regret. I also sort of touch on this hiring thing or outsourcing thing in episode number 55, where I talk about four things to outsource. That's the name of that podcast episode. So if you want after this episode, feel free to go back and listen to episodes number 55 and 58. If you want to learn more about hiring or outsourcing and what that could possibly look like for you.
I talk a lot about which roles have kind of made the biggest difference for us, but to summarize lesson number one is that you can't do it alone. I'm realizing now more than ever the power of a team and it can just be so helpful for you personally and professionally. So moving on to lesson number two, this lesson is that your business will change.
And that's probably a good thing. I put this one in here because when I first started, I would agonize over so many different decisions and details. mean, I'm, telling you agonize. I remember being in our spare bedroom, which is like not really a bedroom. It's more of our office and our house.
with like millions of sticky notes and papers spread out all over the floor and like notebooks of ideas and just like thinking about what I wanted to do and what I needed to do to make it happen and agonized over which sales outlets I should pursue and how to do them. And, you know, I just agonized over these decisions that ended up all changing anyways. Like the business that I started is not the business I have today.
I started out by testing a lot of things, trialing a lot of different things, thinking I was going to go in one direction, then ended up going in sort of another direction and then kind of came back to the original plan. And that's just a part of business sometimes. Like great. If you have like that vision where like, have friends like this, that they knew exactly what kind of business they wanted to start and then went into it and just kind of kept doing the same thing. But I think that that's really rare. ⁓ my sales outlets, my.
offers the flowers that we grow the whole farm, literally the farm layout, the whole vision has changed and evolved over the years. so I'm telling you this because if you're someone who is really struggling with trying to make a decision on where to bring your business, what direction to go, what to do. My advice is just to not sweat as much because.
No matter what decision you make, you're going to learn from it and you're either going to stick with it, or you're just going to pivot later on down the road and you're going to have so much more knowledge changing that decision. So that's like really not a big deal. The biggest deal is just to make a decision and keep moving forward. Flexibility in business equals survival. Like if you can't be flexible within your business, you're not going to survive. Just think of things like.
COVID or the economy changing, like the crazy political swings, all these things. What works one year may not necessarily work the next, which can sound scary, but in a way, if you just go into it with that open mind of knowing like, this is what the plan is right now, but I'm open to changes and having that flexibility. It's really going to make everything easier when you do have to make pivots. So really just don't get too attached to.
A singular, like very, very specific vision. If you are feeling unsure about it, have a vision, have a plan, but just be okay with knowing that you're probably going to be reevaluating every single season. Stay curious about it and your business is going to keep evolving. So your business is probably going to change and that's probably a good thing. Moving on to lesson three. This one was.
I don't know why this one was so surprising to me, but it was that relationships are everything. I went into business way before my flower farm. had several different businesses that all failed before my flower farm, which is so funny looking back now, because they were all seemingly like much easier businesses to run than a flower farm. However, someone told me at some point during my
startup years and one of those other businesses that the biggest thing that will bring you success in business is good relationships. I really didn't understand what that meant. I was like, okay, relationships. Sure. Like I had friends. I had like a boyfriend at the time. And that was like my extent of like understanding what relationships meant. ⁓
But people really grow businesses. It's not just the flowers, the relationships you make with people in your local community or, and maybe you're not local community, depending how you're selling flowers, but in whatever community or audience you create, like those people are what matter. You're here and in business to serve your customers. So it's really important to understand that the
More really strong relationships you can build with people, the stronger your business is going to be. So this is not only just with your customers. It can also be with like your vendors or suppliers or partnerships with other businesses, or even like a mentor that helped your business grow. Like having relationships really help your business. And I saying this kind of like.
I'm an introvert. So when I'm talking about this, it's a little weird for me to say like relationships are everything because I'm not a person who wants to have a close relationship with everyone. Like I have a very tight knit close group of friends. Like I love people and I love talking to people, but like I'm an introvert. I, I get energized by having like a lone quiet time, not necessarily by talking and meeting and being around people all day. And so it was really hard for me to sort of grasp this in the beginning, but
Now I understand that I can still be an introvert and still have really strong relationships with customers and other people in our industry and just everybody by just really caring about people, which I do immensely and treating them with respect and trying to serve them in the highest and best way possible. So connections with real people in real life matter way more than algorithms.
Everyone's out there trying to get a hundred thousand social media followers. And I'm here to tell you that I really don't think that matters that much. I really don't. ⁓ you, I think. So that's, I'm going off on a tangent here, but social media can be such like a vanity metric with like your followers and stuff like that. What really matters is the real relationships you have with real people in real life. So always be kind, follow up, say thank you.
be someone that people want to work with and do business with. Moving on to lesson number four.
Fancy branding is overrated. Hopefully this is not controversial. It probably will be, but you don't need $5,000 to invest in branding and a logo to make really good sales. I just DIY'd like my first logo. Like I kind of like mocked up what I was looking for and I found someone on Etsy and paid them $75 to kind of make it come to life. So.
And for me at the time, I was like, Whoa, $75. That's a lot of money. But like now I'm like, okay, that's, that's so worth it, but you can just go onto a free platform like Canva or probably AI, or there's probably a million tools out there where you can create your own for free or very, very, very cheap. Okay. Now I recently for trademark farmer and for six figure flower farming invested very heavily in.
a couple of branding packages with a couple of designers. And I'm to tell you that it was like not worth it for me. I don't think that it's going to do really much for my business. Like I think it's going to be great to look professional and have like everything be clean and cohesive. And that was the whole goal of it. But I have had the same logo, the same font, the same like black and white colors in my flower farm business.
since the beginning and I don't think that it's really made that big of an impact on my success or not. I don't think that you need to get stuck in branding land. What matters more is clarity, your messaging, your marketing and consistency. So a brand is way more than just a logo on fancy packaging and your colors and your typefaces or your typography or fonts, whatever it is.
it's really how people experience you and experience your business. And so for me, when I first started selling flowers and still today, every single customer, mine or every single person I come into contact with, if I'm like at the farmer's market or out in town and someone asks what I do, like I make sure that their experience is incredible and really amazing, or I do it as much as possible. And that is really my brand, you know, and I train.
our team members to have that same kind of mindset that everybody they come into contact with, they give them this incredible experience, whether they end up buying flowers or not. And that is our brand, even more so than just a logo, fancy branding. I really don't think it's that important at all. Moving on to lesson five, is skills pay the bills.
⁓ learning real skills, which you're going to have to learn a lot of them to succeed in flower farming is what's going to make the success in your business. It's not just like producing good flowers, which obviously takes a lot of skill and usually a lot of time to acquire that skill because you need experience to do it. But it's also skills in things like marketing and sales and financial management and focus.
All that stuff, you have to develop those skills in order to scale your business and find success. Like I know that there's so many, I actually get frustrated sometimes with flower farmers because I know that growing is a huge thing. It's the first thing you need to learn and you have to learn how to get good at it. And there's so much to it and you never stop learning.
But there's just this massive focus on like the brand new varieties of Dalia tubers or Lysianthus or peonies or whatever. And it's just like for most flower farmers, like that really doesn't freaking matter. What matters is selling the flowers that you have right now and learning how to market them and learning how to connect with your ideal customer. like, you know, just growing great flowers is not enough.
You could be the best grower in the world, which again does take lots and lots of skills, but investing in learning those business skills is what's going to make the difference. It's going to make or break you because you can grow beautiful flowers, but if no one buys from you, then you don't have a business. have a really expensive hobby. So not great for anyone, right? Unless you're like independently wealthy or something. If so good for you.
So learn how to market, learn how to sell, learn how to look at the numbers in your business, how to figure them out. Like you don't have to be a math whiz. Like I'm not, I hate math. It was my worst subject in high school. I avoided at all costs in college. I had to take like one math class in college. was statistics and I sucked at it. It was the worst grade I got in college. ⁓ so like I am not a math whiz. I'm not a numbers person, but I know enough to be dangerous, right? Like.
You just have to know enough to get yourself in a position where you're going to be successful. So moving on to my final lesson, my final surprising thing that I learned is that profit matters way more than revenue. It's really not what you make. It's what you keep that matters. And so I, my biggest goal when I first started
is I wanted to earn $100,000 a year. I was like, I feel like this is a stretch, but I feel like I can do it. I feel like once I get there, I will be able to do this full time or I'll be able to make this work better. Whatever thoughts I was having, that was like the biggest goal I had. And honestly, that was the best goal I ever hit. When I hit that, felt...
The most amazing ever. ⁓ it was way more amazing than hitting any other number of it in my business. And I'm really glad that it happened, but looking back, that number wasn't really that important. I sacrifice a lot that I probably didn't have to just to get to that number of making $100,000 a year. When I really should have been focusing on my profit, like what am I paying myself every single year? What does my work life balance look like?
Like how, how am I building my business in a way that gives me the lifestyle that I really want. And so now I could not give a crap about what my top line revenue is in my business. What I care about most is what my profit is, what I'm able to pay myself, what I'm able to keep to reinvest back into the business. And of course, revenue is part of that equation, but you know, when you look out at all these
people in the world, if you see people bragging about how much money they make on social media or throwing out numbers, I see all these creators on social media being like, this month I made $80,000 from posting videos on TikTok. And it's like, OK, cool, but how much did you spend on video production? How much did you spend? How much time did you spend?
making those videos, editing those videos, putting them up online. How much money did you spend in video equipment and like editing software? Like, I want to know like how much you actually kept, you know, like, I don't know anything about content creation in that aspect. So like, maybe it's a lot, but all this to say those big numbers is like sexy. Big revenue is sexy. It sounds really good, but profit is what really matters.
That's what makes your business sustainable because if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, but you spend 99,000, like you're not doing that good. Right. So.
There were years where I seemingly made a lot in sales, but I took home very, very little. And so when that was happening, I realized I really needed to track my expenses better. I needed to get really honed in on what I was spending and learned my numbers. So I make decisions now based on what it's going to profit me, not popularity. Like if we're going to do a new sales outlet and it looks like
We're going to earn a lot of revenue from it. I crunched the numbers to see what the actual profit would be because it might sound really great to make like $50,000 a year from doing weddings, but like, what am I actually keeping after all of that work? Like that's what matters to me. So that's my last and final lesson of six surprising things I learned while growing a multiple six figure flower business. So to recap, just a quick rundown here.
My first lesson was to get help. The second one is to realize your business will change and not agonize over all the decisions. Number three, relationships are everything. Number four, fancy branding is not necessary. Cool for sure. Very cool, but not necessary to have an amazing business. Number five is learning business skills, especially marketing and sales and numbers. Essential. And finally,
prioritizing profit over top line revenue. If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to really focus on what matters most, like really looking at, which I did early on, like looking at what mattered, what was moving the needle, not just what looked good on Instagram, and like really picking the lane I wanted to be in and sticking with it.
Just to build the business that supports your life, not the other way around. Like I say this all the time when I'm teaching in my course, six-figure flower farming, like you don't let the farm run you, you run the business, right? So I'm curious to know which one of these surprised you the most. Maybe none of them surprised you. It's possible that these all sounded like common sense to you, but for you to really, or for me to like really
know and to learn these things, I had to go through and experience them. I had to make some mistakes and figure it out the hard way. And I think that's the hard part about a lot of this stuff is we hear general business advice repeated over and over again. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. But like a lot of times you don't really know it. You don't really understand it until you put yourself in a position to experience it. So I'm curious.
What you thought about this, send me a DM on Instagram at trademark farmer. Send me an email. Let me know it's info at trademark farmer.com. ⁓ I would love to hear from you.
And if you want to up level your business and learn a lot of things that I really wish I knew in the beginning of my business, I highly encourage you to check out my online business program, six figure flower farming registration is going to open in November for just a week probably. ⁓ so you can get registered then, and we will be diving deep into a lot of business stuff like marketing skills, numbers, focus.
profitability, all that good stuff. And it's really an amazing program that we're doing a total revamp to this year. And I'm really excited about it. So I'd love to see it inside. So mark your calendars for November, if that's something that interests you. And thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. If you got any value out of this whatsoever, I would really appreciate it if you could take 30 seconds to leave me a review on Apple podcasts or iTunes as it used to be called, I think.
⁓ it's super easy to just go to our page and scroll all the way down to the bottom. You'll see a little section for reviews and a little tiny, ⁓ link that says, leave a review there. If you've already left a review, thank you. It's helped me so much to know that what I'm doing is on track and in helping. And I just want you to help me in my mission to help every small scale flower farmer be profitable and sustainable. So.
With that, I will see you next time. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
