Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. And today we are talking about reasons my flower farm didn't fail. And I bet some of these will surprise you. And I'm telling you this so hopefully, actually not hopefully, so yours will not fail either. Listen, building a flower farm business that lasts is hard, but I want to tell you the truth. There are reasons why my flower farm didn't fail. And while
why other successful flower farms don't fail. And if you apply them, yours probably won't either. So just to give you a heads up that these are not shiny Instagram tips I'm giving you. These are things that really kept my business standing when things got messy or slow or scary. And hopefully you can learn some things from them. So we're going to jump right into this episode today. ⁓ first one is that I kept my costs.
Low and prioritized cashflow. So I was super scrappy and I still am. I'm still super scrappy. I am not a flower farmer who took out a giant loan to like build a brand new studio and a fancy cooler and put up all these hoop houses right away. Like that's definitely an option for people out there that I would recommend if you have experience farming, but if you don't, it's, don't know.
You do you, you make your own decisions. I'm not trying to like persuade you one way or the other, guess, but I didn't have any money when I started my business. I really didn't. Um, it was really struggling in that department. And so I really didn't have an option other than to get really scrappy and keep my costs super, super low. So I have always run a really lean business. I didn't buy any brand new equipment like at all.
in the first several years of my business. And still, I mean, really still, I rarely, I guess I should say rarely, but for like really big purchases, I a lot of times still buy like used equipment. Every single one of our tractors is used and like at least 60 years old, not kidding.
Our cooler was bought off of Craigslist. It was the back of a freezer truck that we bought for a thousand dollars. And I put a cool bot in it. Our first greenhouse, my propagation house was bought off of Craigslist for $500. was a $500 frame. We had to fix some things on it, buy new plastic for it, put a heater in it. My first two caterpillar tunnels or high tunnels were bought used
from another farmer in town who is moving his farm and didn't want them anymore. Bought those, bought two of them. Either it was a thousand dollars. No, I think it was a thousand dollars each. paid for them. So they were used and kind of bent and kind of broken. ⁓ but we bought them and I use them and I'm still using them today. So they're like eight years old. And so all this equipment I just mentioned all bought used.
for super cheap, we're still using it today. I 100 % believe this is like the best decision I ever made in my business because I was never like, oh my God, I have a $50,000 loan on a tractor and I don't know how I'm gonna pay this back because I'm not selling enough flowers or business is slow this month or whatever. Flower farming is stressful enough to add that into it would have been too stressful for me. Now everybody has...
There are different levels of risk tolerance, but for me, like I didn't have to worry about that because I ran everything super lean. I also like really prioritized cashflow and profit from the beginning because like cashflow is oxygen. You have to get money in the door. You just got to get money in the door. No matter how, just do it when you're first getting your business off the ground.
That low overhead of buying stuff like cheap and used buying stuff in bulk. So you can get really good prices on it. Like that buys you a lot of flexibility, especially in the beginning. So my practical tip for you here is to just kind of grow with what you can afford and sell stuff before you spend. Right. And that might be sort of a personal one, but that's my first reason for you. The next reason is that I asked for help and I hired well.
I feel like I've been saying this a lot on the podcast lately, but like, you don't have to do it alone and you shouldn't. Like I had a big fear over hiring, but the difference it's made when I did it and continue to do it is just amazing. But it's hiring the right people that helped me grow. So being discerning about who stays on your team. We've had some hires that
They were great people, but they weren't a great fit for our team or our work ethic or the core values we have as a business. And so unfortunately they had to go. And I have been like, I would say pretty much ruthless with that. If there's somebody who is just not meeting our super high standards, like they can't stay. And that really helps to make your flower farm business success. So start small, look for help that moves the needle.
Definitely revenue producing team members here or, you know, people who free you up so you can earn more money and making sure that they're the kind of people you really want them to be. Responsible adults, reliable people, people who show up on time, who are disciplined, who will go above and beyond. And even if they're not people who will go like above and beyond, they're at least like really care about what they do and really want to make your business a success.
So moving on to the next reason my flower farm didn't fail is that I got obsessed with the business side of things. I got obsessed with the numbers and making them work and marketing and sales and tracking things and figuring out what was moving the needle in my business and what wasn't. Pretty flowers don't sell themselves. You have to. So growing isn't not the same thing as like selling, you know?
Growing your business really has to do with way more things than just like getting more revenue in place because you also need to consider your profit margins and your team members and your vision, your community, your market. There's so many things that go into it. So you really just need to get really curious about your business, about your conversions, your offers, your content, customer behavior.
All those kinds of things. So getting obsessed with learning how to run a profitable and sustainable business will lead to, you know, no surprise here running a profitable and sustainable business. And a lot of people like to just stick their head in the sand and think that if they keep putting flowers in the route, by the road on their farm stand, that eventually a bunch of people are going to show up one day and buy them. And unfortunately that's not usually the way that it works. So getting really.
invested into learning real tangible business skills. Gonna be super helpful. Next one is keep going every time you get knocked down. I just, I have been knocked down so many times, so many times. And I just, you know, I usually threw myself a little bit of a pity party and then I just got up and I kept going.
Perseverance is probably the number one skill you have to have as an entrepreneur and a business owner because you are going to have catastrophes. You're gonna have disasters. You're gonna have people walk out on you. I mean, maybe not walk out on you, but actually, probably. I don't know, I've had it happen to me. I've had people say bad things about me and lie about me. I've had crop losses. I've had...
huge dips in sales for like seemingly no reason. I've had just so many disasters, competition. mean, there's millions of things coming to mind. There's been a lot of like rock bottom moments as an entrepreneur burnout. Things are just popping in my head if you can't tell. And if you can't have that resilience to just get back up and keep going, it's going to be really hard for you to succeed at this.
It really is. So having that sort of like bounce back energy really matters more than perfection and having it all perfect. You just have to keep putting one step in front of the other. So when you have a failure or a setback or a disaster, you have to reframe it. Like it's, it's data, it's feedback, it's experience that you learned from. And it's just part of it. Really. It's just part of it.
Having that grit to be resilient and persevere through the really hard stuff, like that's the difference between people who win and people who end up throwing in the towel for sure, because we all go through hard things and hard moments and you just gotta keep going. So keep going.
This next reason why my flower farm didn't fail is actually a real biggie that I think a lot of people ignore, but it is that I listened to what my customers wanted and still do. My customers told me how to grow. just had to listen to them. I just had to talk to them. I just had to ask them questions. I used to grow a million different flowers. You probably already know this. If you've ever listened to this podcast before, but
I used to grow so many different kinds of flowers and it's so many different varieties. And we used to sell the literally everyone and grow all the different colors. We'd go to grow the blush and the white for the weddings. And then we grow all the super bright colors for our retail customers. And you know, we just, when we decided what sales outlets we've really wanted to focus on, which we decided by looking at the numbers and what was making money and what most people wanted from us.
And what we liked, we had just really looked at what was selling well, what wasn't, what our customers were asking for, what our customers told us they loved. I actually sat down and interviewed some customers and potential customers and asked them like, what do you want? What kind of flowers do you like? What kind of colors do you like? What do you like your bouquets to look like? Like would show them pictures. Like, do you like this style or this style? Do you like these colors or that colors?
And then I would show them things that they would just be like in real life, like at the farmer's market, be like, yeah, I don't, don't really want that. You know, you just have to listen. I have made a lot of shifts in our crop plan and what we grow because of feedback or patterns we've noticed just with our customers buying habits and by talking to them.
It's not about what you want to sell. It's about what your customers are hungry for. And I still make this mistake sometimes where, for example, this year I grew some of the ballerina zinnias from Johnny's Selected Seeds. They're sort of a new variety and they are beautiful for sure. But I don't really know why I grew them because I know my customers don't like those like pale, blushy
light pink colors. They like bright, bold in your face colors most of the time. And that's what I try to grow. And so for whatever reason, I was just like, yeah, I want to trial these. They look really cool, but my customers aren't really buying them. And so I'm trying to sell them by putting them in mixed bouquets. And, know, we do some bulk buckets for events and weddings and giving them to those customers. like, I learned this lesson over and over again. So ask, observe, test.
Your next plan might already be right in front of you. You don't have to grow at all. Just grow what your customers actually want and are asking you for, not what you think is cool on the internet or the brand new variety of whatever that's coming out like I did, just because it's cool and people are talking about it. Like ask your customers first and it will really help. My last reason that my
Business has been really successful. And yes, there are lots of reasons, but these are the biggest ones. And I've already alluded to this before, but it's that I work on my mindset. I've talked about mindset already in this podcast. I've talked about how I've had setbacks and failures and disappointments and catastrophes, but I have always worked on my mindset through it. And that's not to say that I don't get disappointed.
Or don't get down on myself. I, I feel like I'm very highly sensitive and I get down on myself a lot. I'm really hard on myself and it's something that I'm working on to try to be proud of myself when I do cool things or when I succeed. But most of the time I literally just feel like a failure and I pretty much walk through life feeling like that. It is a constant thing that I'm working on is my mindset constantly.
And like I said, when disasters happen, I do throw myself a little pity party. Like you are 100 % allowed to feel sad, ashamed, embarrassed, disappointed. Even you could even feel like.
let down, sorry for yourself, whatever. But you can't feel like that forever. At some point you gotta do something to pull yourself up out of that and move on. I have had a lot of doubt, a lot of comparison to other people. Like I tell people all the time, don't compare yourself to others, but I do it unconsciously and like I catch myself doing it. So mindset.
tools and rituals really help keep me in that positive, open, abundance mindset. And I know it sounds like very woo woo or in like out there, but this may be like one of the most important pieces to making sure your business doesn't fail is to keep your mindset strong. Like the biggest battle is really in between your ears. So some tools and rituals that have really helped me
probably the biggest one is journaling. I just love to write. I'm a writer. I'm a paper and pen person. I love to like write things down. And I kind of just write like affirmations in my journal all the time to like basically keep reminding myself that like, I'm doing a good job. We are doing big things. What I do is important in the world. Like it is possible to do what I want to do. All the things, ⁓ coaching and having mentors taking.
courses and classes with other people that are more successful than me or can teach me stuff, getting in rooms with people who are way better at this than I am, like that really helps. Those are all things that I use on a pretty regular basis to keep my mindset strong. it's, there have definitely been times when I don't make as much time for that as I should, but I always, always come back to it. So,
Just a reminder that the thoughts you believe shape the results that you create. So mindset is probably the biggest thing here.
So just to recap, here are some of the biggest reasons my flower farm didn't fail. So yours won't either. One is keeping costs low and prioritizing cashflow. Second, hiring well, hiring good people and keeping them with you.
So asking for help, then three, focusing on marketing and sales or basically just the skills you need to move forward. So finding that bottleneck and really learning that skill so you can get unstuck, then persevering through setbacks, listening to your customer needs and strengthening your mindset. So if your goals feel like a little shaky right now or out of reach or
Difficult like it's really feels difficult. Like just know that that's 100 % normal. It's kind of supposed to be, think, maybe not always, but you're going to have difficult moments, but you just gotta keep going, build smartly, really build smart, believe in yourself. The fact that you're even listening to this episode, this podcast tells me that you're not going to quit. And that's really just half the battle.
So I would love for you to let me know, DM me on social media, trademark farmer, or send me an email. Let me know maybe a reason why you're still going. And that would really help me and probably a lot of other people too, to get some inspiration to keep going even when things get tough. So I hope that these reasons.
Gave you a little bit of insight into why I really believe that this is why my flower farm hasn't failed and why yours won't either. So really hope this was helpful,
If you got any value out of this podcast at all, I would love it if you could share it with a friend who may need to hear this right now. Maybe a flower farming friend who is feeling like this is tough or this is burnt out or they're having second thoughts. Maybe this could really help someone else on their journey as So please feel free to share with a friend. And with that, I will see you next time in the next episode of the six figure flower farming podcast.
Don't forget, we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
