Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Today I'm sharing how you can audit your business in order to find what's broken so you can actually fix it and grow, or maybe I should say scale your flower farm with way more ease.
So many of us think we need to do more to grow our businesses, when often the real answer is actually fixing what's already in place. So instead of just adding a new account or another sales outlet or another variety of flower to try to earn more or to increase our profit, a lot of times we just need to focus on fixing what is going on right now. So by the end of this episode, you'll have a simple framework to take a
Overview like a 30,000 foot overview audit of your business. Help you fix what's leaking profit and focus on what's actually moving the needle for you. So the big problem that we want to address here today is that there's this common mindset trap where we think if we just hustle harder, if we just hustle more, if we just, you know, put more effort in that will lead to more growth and more success. But unfortunately that's not.
generally how it happens. I feel like I've had a lot of conversations with other flower farmers that say to me, if I just work harder, if I just work at it long enough, success is inevitable, right? And part of me is like, well, yes, but actually no, because I've said this a million times before, but you have to be working hard on the right things. So I used to believe that if I just planted more flowers and I...
launched more offers and I worked longer hours, I'd hit that next milestone I was shooting for. But really a lot of the times all I was doing was adding more stress and adding just more stuff to my plate, more to my overflowing plate that I really couldn't handle. And this is something that I still battle today. Like I'm, I always am telling myself these things too, because I've actually over the past
few months, we've kind of been working on scaling our flower farm a little bit myself this year. And that's because we've been selling out our flowers almost every single week. And we've actually had a shortage of flowers this year, which is, you know, kind of making me want to scale the business up a little bit more. And immediately my first thought is that, I'll just add in another sales out. Like I used to do weddings, so I'll just do that again. Or we used to sell the floor. So I'll just do that again.
And I know better than that. And that's the first thing that pops in my head. And I have to just be like, no, Jenny, no, don't do that. Let's find an easier, better, more streamlined, more efficient way to scale the business. I know that the solution is instead of doing more, I just need to audit, fix, and focus. So like I said, this is something I'm continually doing in my business, but here's exactly how to do that.
It's basically a three step process. So the first step is to do a general business audit. And all that is, is just looking at your business from say, pretend you're somebody from the outside looking in, looking at your business and looking at what's really going on. It's sort of like pulling back the curtain and asking questions. Like if I were looking for a business to buy, would I want my own business?
And if right now you're like, no, don't worry. I've been there and just know that doesn't have to be like that. There's basically three key questions you want to ask yourself. Where is the money coming from? Where is money leaking and where is time being wasted? So let's kind of go through those a little bit further. First of all, first question.
Where is money coming from? So take a look at all of your revenue streams and look at which one is coming out on top, not just in terms of revenue, but in terms of profit. So this means really looking at how much time and money you're spending for each of your sales outlets and trying to do a little bit of a deep dive on like which one is actually earning the most amount of profit, not just the most amount of revenue. Then the second question, where is money leaking?
Just looking at things like your expenses, what you spent money on this year, certain inefficiencies, if you have underpriced products or offers, those are really simple ways that you can cut those costs or increase your prices to make more money in your business. And then question number three, where is time being wasted? So looking at tasks that you're doing that are actually moving the needle versus just busy work. So this is things like.
Weeding. always come back to this. Yes, it is necessary, but it is definitely not contributing to your bottom line. Right. So an example of this where I sort of did a little audit of our business and discovered something surprising was that I looked at all the hours we spent on the farm last year, or most of the hours we spent on the farm and looked at what we did.
And I found that we were spending over 80 hours throughout the course of the season on just flipping beds. So that means getting rid of crop residue, know, like terminating crops, getting rid of them, doing bed prepping to get everything ready for the next crop to go in. And when I was looking at that number, I was like, I'm really surprised we're spending that much amount of time. And this is definitely not something that is directly contributing to the bottom line on the farm. So. ⁓
When I'm doing this overall business audit, I'm like, okay, what can I do to make that better and make that faster, more efficient, and basically like squeeze more out of it. In this scenario, when we were doing a lot of our bed flipping in our hoop houses, we were hand pulling things from our bed. like when a bed of Dianthus was done, we would just go in and.
pull all of those plants up by hand and then do our bed prep process. And so I took a really careful look at that. So that brings me into step number two. Once you've gone through these three questions, doing an audit of where's money coming from, where is money leaking and where is time being wasted? You need to fix it, right? You can't just identify the things that are problems in your business and then hope that they go away because trust me, they magically will not.
So now we have to fix it. You know, the audit shows the leaks and now you're patching them. So when I found that that bed flipping was taking way longer than it should, I came up with a solution. I ended up investing in an implement for our skid steer, which is a flail mower just to mow things down, to terminate crops instead of hand pulling. And so there's a lot of different reasons. Like this works for some crops, but not for other ones. You know, some things you can mow them down, but they'll just start growing again.
which is why you have to hand pull certain things or at least have a plan for when you mow them down to, you know, tarp them or remow or terminate in a way where they're not going to come back again. Right. But that flail mower has saved us hours and hours and hours of time instead of hand pulling everything out. So I actually haven't done the exact math on this yet, but I know that this past year in 2025, we have been using that method.
And it's probably cut down our time, I would say like by 60 % or more if I had to guess. And like I said, I haven't completely done all the math yet, but if we spent about 80 hours last year bedflipping, the goal this year is to do maybe half of that. So it's eating up a lot of our time before, but not contributing to earning any revenue or making profit. So my goal is to free up that time, make that process more efficient so we could spend that time.
Making more sales or doing something else that will actually generate revenue on the farm. So some common and easy fixes when you do your audit and you find problems is one, just raise prices where you're undercharging. One thing that I did this year is I almost accidentally, but I raised our prices on our Zinnias. were selling them for $15 a bunch for 10 stem bunch. And I was like, you know,
I really got to raise my prices on this. All of our costs have been going up. So then I raised our price to $17 and we were selling out every week. So I was like, well, screw it. I'm going to raise my price at $20 and we were still selling out every week. And so it was clear to me that I was under charging in that market and maybe it was just that particular time of the year.
probably was, or maybe the demand had kind of raised a little bit, which I felt like it had in our summertime more than it had in years past. But I saw an opportunity to raise prices and it was clear that I was definitely undercharging. You can also simplify your offers. You can really dive deep into creating one very clear customer path, like one customer journey in your marketing to
take a person from someone who doesn't know about your business to someone who knows about your business, to someone who tries you, to someone who comes back again for more, to someone who becomes a raving fan,
to hopefully making that person a raving fan that tells all of their friends and does marketing for you. You can do that and really focus in on that instead of trying to do 10 scattered different customer paths or customer journeys or 10 different sales outlets. Just doing something, getting really focused and streamlined in how your business model is set up can actually save you a ton of time and make you more profitable.
You can also trim expenses and wasted efforts, looking at, like I did with the bed flipping thing, looking at tools or maybe certain crops or subscriptions or anything like that that can trim that wasted effort.
So then, once you've identified ways to fix your issues you found in step number one, probably the most important step of this is step number three, and that is to focus. This is by far the hardest thing for business owners to do. Probably because if you are a business owner of a flower farm, chances are you are a visionary. You have that.
personality or that character trait where you can see the big picture and you have this idea of this vision of what you want your business to look like and what you want it to feel like. Chances are you're an ideas person. You come up with all these different ideas all the time, but perhaps you have a problem really executing on them or really focusing on the ones that are going to make the biggest difference in your business.
And I'm saying that because I know that I am one of those people. I have all these different ideas and I want to do a thousand different things. I want to do it all. You know, I wanted to be amazing at every single sales outlet and I want to help all these flower farmers. And it's just like, there's so many opportunities out there for us. One of the hardest things is just to pick something or a couple of things to get really, really, really, really, really good at and just continuously.
keep beating ourselves at it and continuously getting better and continuously improving on them until we're like the best in the world at it. Or maybe the best in your community at it, whatever. So this whole idea of shiny object syndrome, I feel like we are all familiar with that, right? And probably all of us have experienced that, where we see another flower farmer doing workshops on Instagram, we're like, my God, that great idea, I'm gonna do that.
But then you start getting into it you're like, Oh, I actually have to buy like all of these vases specific for this, or I have to buy all this decorations or something to make my farm look pretty. So I can have people come here and then, wait, I need to like find places for people to park. And it turns out since I live on a busy road and we're going to have people here, I need to find somebody who's going to direct traffic. And then it turns into this whole thing that you never expected it to be. And then you're like, Oh, I have to write lesson plans that I could go on and on. Right. So we.
We see these things that look amazing on Instagram, like other flower varieties and sales outlets, and we wanna try them, we wanna do them, and I'm all for testing things out and trying things. I'm never gonna tell you not to do that, but we need to refine that focus, right? We need to identify just one or two or maybe three things tops that's actually gonna drive our business growth. So looking at your best offer or your best sales outlet. And like I said, this means your most profitable one
Not necessarily the one that brings in the most revenue because profit is really what matters here. Right. We're looking at maybe your most engaged customer base. Like if you sell the florist and you sell retail at a farmer's market, which one of your customers is really engaged and is easiest to sell to you? Like which ones do you find the most joy in selling to and the ones that like actually pay you the most amount of money? Maybe try to focus on the one that.
you spend the least amount of time on but is bringing in the most amount of revenue, right? Or just really focusing on a marketing channel that's already working. Really think about how you can drive more attention and traffic to the channel that's already right now working for you and is the most profitable.
And like I said before, I, trust me, I have had this thought so many times this year where I feel like our farm is sort of leaving money on the table right now. I think that we could grow and scale more. You know, I don't want to scale a ton because I have other projects and other things in my life going on that I want to focus on too. But there have been so many times this year I'm like, we'll just start doing weddings again, or we'll just start selling the florist again.
Or we'll just start doing workshops again. Like all three of these scenarios have run through my brain and I've really seriously considered them. And then I have to have the focus and the, that skill of focus to come back and be like, well, actually, if I start doing these things again, I'm going to need to like hire a bunch of more people, which I mean, I have to hire more people anyways, but we'll have to put all new systems in place or bring back systems that we used to have that.
I don't even, they all are probably gonna have to be reworked. We're gonna have to figure out new processes. We're gonna have to buy new supplies. And it's like this whole other thing when what I keep coming back to for good is our CSA is working and our farmer's market is working. And so how can we just do more of what we're already doing well now? When it comes down to it, all we really have to do is find ways to
A drive more traffic to our farmer's market and find better ways to increase our email conversion rates. So getting more people on our email list and then finding more ways to increase our sales conversions via email. So really instead of adding on another sales outlet to grow the farms more. What I'm doing is just tweaking the systems that we already have. I'm we're doing more paid ads to drive more people to the farmer's market when they're at the farmer's market.
We're giving them a, you know, a special deal to try our flowers or whatever. And then when they're there buying something from us, we're getting them on our email list. Once they're on our email list, we're sending them a nurture sequence, which is basically just a series of emails that gets them sort of like warmed up and welcoming them to our world and introducing ourselves and letting them get to know us and trust us a little bit better. And then offering them a special bonus or offer to get them to try our CSA subscription. And so.
I'm not actually changing what we actually do on a day-to-day basis. I'm just tweaking our marketing in order to increase our traffic, increase our conversions, and that is going to result in us doing more sales. And we've already been implementing this, and we're just kind of doing it a little bit at a time because we've had a lot going on, but we've already seen a huge increase in sales of our subscription program.
just from some really teeny tiny tweaks in our marketing. And so all that means for me next year is that we can continue doing this, continue testing, increasing those conversions, and then I just need help with actually fulfilling those orders. That's really the only additional labor and stuff that I have to hire for. And so this is why this step is the most important, is focusing. Because when you focus on
doing a few things really well, you create space for mastery. You stop chasing and you start compounding. You will see compounding results if you can just focus. And now don't confuse focus with like trying to make something work that's not working, right? If you're trying really hard to make a sales outlet work and it's just not, you know, maybe it's time to explore other things.
Or maybe you just haven't given it enough time and effort yet to see the results you need. So, you know, don't get that confused, but something that really helps with this is data, you know, collecting data, keeping good records. The more data you have, the better off you're going to be able to be making these data driven decisions that can help you focus and lean into what's already working. So.
That's the framework for doing this business audit and to finding what you need to audit, fix, and focus on now in order to get the results that you want. So basically, you're gonna audit your business, you're gonna figure out ways to fix things that are wrong, and then you're gonna focus on the things that are going right to really maximize your results. So this is how you scale a business without working yourself into the ground. And it doesn't...
It really doesn't mean that you do less. It just means that you get way better at doing fewer things. And so we are deep diving into ways we can drive up our farmer's market revenue, deep diving into our marketing funnel, really spending quality time figuring out how to blow that up, blow up what's already going well instead of jumping in, trying to pursue other opportunities that are frankly...
new or unproven and risky or things that we've done but decided not to do in the past and there's reasons why, right? So I encourage you to grab a notebook and just do like a little mini audit this week. If you don't have time to like dive into all this stuff right now, I know we're kind of like winding down the end of the season. You're still got stuff going on. Maybe thinking about digging up Dalia tubers or cleanup,
All those things, but maybe just do a little mini audit. Just jot down where you think your biggest revenue generators are, or profit generators, I should say, which things are the weakest, where money might be leaking, where time might be wasted, or maybe writing down where time should be being spent, but it's not, and writing down what's preventing you from doing that so you can find a solution to it.
So, and I would love to hear your biggest discovery. Like, please share it with me, because I would be so interested. You can DM me on my Instagram as Trademark Farmer, or you can send me an email, info at trademarkfarmer.com. I think it would be so fun to hear what you guys came up with after doing this. Plus, if you really need help going into depth with some of these things, like really deep diving into your numbers and figuring out exactly how profitable each of your sales outlets are,
or looking at each of your flowers, figuring out how profitable those are, or figuring out which marketing strategies are working best. I can walk you through that step by step in the Six Figure Flower Farming Business Program. Now, registration for that program opens up on November 4th, 2025, and registration is only open for a few short days. So be sure to mark your calendar.
Plus, I'm hosting an in-depth...
free training coming up, like a really great training for completely free. go really in depth on some of this stuff to help you discover where you could be leaving potential pockets of profit on the table. And I'm doing that also the first week of November. So you can sign up for that at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash profit. Please go sign up now. I know you don't want to miss this. And lastly, I want to assure you that
This doesn't have to be overwhelming, even though it might sound like a lot. You just need to start with one small audit and one small fix. And like I said, if you need help, I'm here for you. So thanks for being here. And don't forget that new episodes are published every Monday. So I'll see you next week, same time, same place.
