Jenny (00:28)
this episode is a little different today. It is a recording from a live Q &A session I did a few weeks ago and we decided to publish it here because I think it'll be really useful for you. But basically we had people that are on our email list pre-submit questions and then I answered them in this live session. It was on Zoom, so if you hear me talking about the chat or if I'm reading questions off the chat, that's why. So you can kind of disregard that as you listen to this episode.
Enjoy.
Jenny (01:02)
welcome to this flower farming Q &A session. I decided to just do a general Q &A because I know when I first got started flower farming, I really wished I had a business mentor.
and I felt like a lot of people weren't accessible. So I'm trying to make it so I am accessible and I am able to answer any burning questions that you might have.
First question here, and one of the mistakes we made when putting this form together is we forgot to ask for your names, and so I apologize for that. So I'm not even sure who asked this question. They're all anonymous today, but somebody said, I am scaling up from a thousand square feet. I made $5,000 profit from that tiny plot.
What would be my smartest investment with that profit? We're moving to five acres with some garages and well water. Soil is just raw and healthy prairie pasture. So my answer would be the smartest investment is really depending on your biggest pain point and what your constraint of growth is. Like your constraint of business growth, not like flower growth. So for most people starting out their flower farm,
One of your biggest problems is that you don't have enough revenue. You don't have enough cash flow. So you probably are going to want to take some of that and put that into marketing. And this really depends. I'm not sure what this person's sales outlets are or anything. So what kind of money you put towards marketing will depend on that. But you also need flowers to sell. So you may want to put some of that money towards infrastructure. Think high tunnels, greenhouse, equipment, irrigation.
I actually have a podcast episode about this. You guys can listen to podcast episode. number nine. And the episode is called Knowing Where to Invest in Your Flower Farm Business. So if you're not here live and you're listening to this later, I will drop those links in the show notes for you guys to reference. But Taylor is gonna drop the link to that podcast episode.
in the chat right now so you guys can grab that. ⁓ I recommend listening to that podcast episode because it kind of goes more into depth about figuring out where your constraints are in your business, what your frustrations are, your bottlenecks, and then investing into that for a solution. For example, when I first started my business, one of my biggest pain points was seed starting. I needed to start seeds so I could have flowers to sell, but we were still doing it in my basement of my house.
under lights, like how many people are still doing that? Give me a little hand or a yes in the chat to see how many people are doing that still. And you get water everywhere, there's moisture. I'm seeing a lot of guesses coming through in the chat. ⁓ Like the moisture was like ruining our house and no matter how many fans you put in there, like there's still not really good airflow, at least in my situation. And so the seedlings were poor quality, we ran out of space.
And so my very first, I would say big investment in the farm was a greenhouse and we bought a used greenhouse. We bought it off Craigslist. The frame was 500 bucks. We had to fix a couple of things on it, buy new plastic for it. it was, at the time it felt like a lot of money, but it was a really relatively cheap solution that made me, or gave me the solution I needed to produce more flowers and to ⁓ grow the business.
Crystal says that she is starting seeds in her formal dining room. So yes. So I would say if you have money to invest in your business, always marketing and sales, because without that, you will not have a business. And then where your biggest bottlenecks are and pieces of constraint in your business that are preventing you from growing your business, and invest in that. So it'll look a little bit differently for everyone. ⁓ Mostly, you're going to be investing in infrastructure probably in your first three to five years of business.
So if anyone has any follow-up questions with that, throw them in the chat for me. Otherwise, I'm going to move on to the next question. So the next question here was, I've done markets, stem bars, which I think that must be like ⁓ a bouquet bar, I'm assuming, petal and paint, and pre-orders my first season, which has been so great. But I want to focus more on a niche to become great at a few things versus just OK at a lot of things. Smart business owner here.
What tools can you share to help me find my niche within flower farming? So I think that finding your niche, one, just kind of takes time if you don't have a really clear vision on exactly what you want. But the first step is to test things out, which sounds like this person has been. When you're testing different markets, different sales outlets, look and see which one is the easiest to sell, which one sells the most easily.
And then also look at which one is the most profitable. Because when you're looking at how easy it is to sell, that probably means there's a demand, there's a market for it, which you can meet. And then it's also just like probably what's gonna be the most scalable. And then looking at which one is the most profitable is going to help you determine which sales outlet should be your primary focus. So the way that you do this is you add up
all of your expenses and your time associated with selling through that one sales outlet. So like if you were selling to a farmer's market, this would be the labor it takes you to harvest those flowers and process them. So make the bouquets, put the bunches in sleeves, all that stuff. Everything from driving to the farmer's market. So the vehicle, the gas, the tolls, the time it takes to drive there and back.
the time spent selling at the farmer's market. So how many hours you're there? Probably eight hours or something like that. Plus all those supplies and materials. So a tent, tables, tablecloths, signage, your POS system, credit card sales. Like when I say credit card sales, mean processing fees from those credit cards. Like there's so many expenses that go into every sales outlet. And there's a lot that you might not really think about, but add up
all of those expenses and you can get a really good idea of how much it's actually costing you to sell every week or for the whole year. And then look at how much revenue is coming in. So like if you're spending $15,000 a year to sell at your farmer's market and you're bringing in $20,000 a year in revenue and you're making $5,000 profit, right? Cause 20,000 minus 15,000 is 5,000.
that's gonna be a really good number for you to know and to compare that to your other sales outlets. Whichever one is the most profitable, you wanna focus on that one, right? Whenever possible, as long as it's scalable. So pick one thing to be really focused on. And that doesn't mean you only have to have one sales outlet. You can have multiple sales outlets, of course. I don't recommend having a bajillion of them, but do the math.
see what's working for you, and then focus on that. I also think it helps to do something called a SWOT analysis, which is S-W-O-T. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, where you basically make a list of the strengths you have, so things that you're good at, ⁓ weaknesses, things that you're not great at, or maybe you're not good in your climate, opportunities, so things that you see around that seem like good opportunities. Like for me, I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
There's a bunch of lakes here with all these like amazing vineyards and wedding venues. So there's a lot of weddings here. So like that would be an opportunity someone in my area could capitalize on and then threats. So that could be all kinds of things. The weather, that's a given threat. But it could also be like competition in your area or raising costs of something. So sitting down and actually writing out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that can really help you.
figure out your niche in your area. And then just like what you like and what you're good at too, like that helps as well. And sometimes this takes time. Sometimes you have to test it out. And after a couple of years, you'll just kind of figure out like what's working for you and what's not, and then leave the stuff that's not working well and really focus on the stuff that is. So if there's any follow-up questions on that, feel free to drop them in the chat.
All right, I'm not seeing any, so I will move on. So the next question is, how do I determine markup prices for my flowers? For example, if I'm paying $1 for tulip, wow, can't talk today, sorry. If I am paying $1 per tulip bulb, what should I price per tulip stem for adequate profit? And you are asking the million dollar question here, but it's actually relatively pretty easy to answer.
The answer is you need to know your costs. If you're paying a dollar a bulb, which is really high, by the way, really, really high, ⁓ make sure you're buying in bulk. It will decrease your costs a little bit or find a different supplier. But you just have to know what it costs you to grow that. So if you know you pay a dollar per bulb,
but then all the soil, materials, compost and labor all the time that goes into growing that, if you can add all that up, plus know what your overhead is for your business, then you know that it probably costs you, I'm just gonna shout out a number here, I'm gonna say $2 to grow that stem, then you just need to add a markup onto that. So add on a dollar, charge $3 a stem and you're gonna make a profit.
But the important thing to know here is that you have to understand your costs, your cost of production and the cost to run your business. And they're going to be different depending on how you grow them. They're different for everybody. If you just like toss them in the ground, like what we do, we dig a trench and then we take the bulb crane, we literally dump it in, smooth it out and cover it back up. I mean, it takes us like minutes to plant thousands of bulbs.
That process is going to be a lot cheaper to grow those tulips versus someone who meticulously digs a whole trench by hand, plants every single bulb pointy side up in neat little and carton rows, then, you know, covers it up, adds compost to it. Like that cost of production is going to be way higher than my lazy method that works really, really well. And so we're looking at two different ways to grow them with very different costs. So
Theoretically, the way I do it, I can charge cheaper prices or the same price as somebody else and make a higher margin versus that person that has those higher costs. So to get you started with this, I have a free resource on my website. It's our crop expense tracker. It's a starting point that lists out all of the potential costs, or I should say most of the potential costs, because there's always might be a weird one that I don't know you do, that
you can track and write down so you can get started to know how much it costs you to grow tulips. I'm gonna have Taylor drop the link for that in the chat right now, where you can just go, I think it's like a opt-in where you have to sign up for email list if you're not already on there, and you will get that expense tracker. Now this does not include your cost of running your business, which is your overhead cost. So things like marketing, advertising, your insurance, ⁓ your...
liability insurance, vehicle insurance, your mortgage, all that stuff also has to be factored into your cost of production. ⁓ It gets a little bit more in depth to teach something like that. And that's what I teach inside of my course. So if you guys don't know, I teach an online business course. called Six Figure Flower Farming. Registration opens up this November. If you are interested in learning more about that stuff, there's a wait list. I'll probably give you guys the link at some point, or maybe Taylor can drop it in the chat.
Summarizing this whole question here is you have to know your cost to produce and then add a markup. So if it costs you $2 to grow a tulip, you just have to charge more than that and you'll make a profit. Pretty simple. In theory, it gets a little bit more complicated when you're looking at all the numbers, but that's something I could totally help you guys with. Next question here, unless there's any follow-up questions with that.
Not seeing any. next question. What do you feel was your most profitable revenue stream and what did you do to make it profitable? I feel like we have a good product. We just need to figure out how to get more people to buy it. I feel like this is two questions in one actually. So first off, I just want to say that you can make anything profitable. You really can. You can make anything profitable.
you just have to understand your costs. Well, this question dovetails pretty nicely into the last one, but you have to understand your costs so you can price for profit. Now, the other piece of this is that you have to understand how to get customers and how to make those sales. So if you have a product that is inherently not profitable, like let's go back to our tulip example. If it costs you $2 to produce a tulip, but you're charging,
a dollar for it, you're gonna lose a dollar every time you sell. So you're not actually making money. So you have to make sure your pricing for profit starts with understanding your costs. And that's the basic, basic piece of business, right? Because you could sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of tool ups, but if you're not pricing it profitably, you're gonna lose money and you're not gonna be profitable. So you have to know your costs.
price appropriately so you're making a profit on it. And then you also need to know how to get people to buy. And so this is, I'm not trying to make this into a sales pitch, but this is exactly what I teach inside of six figure flower farming. But you basically need to know exactly where your customers are coming from. Like where are your customers coming from? And then figure out how to do that more. Need to make a marketing strategy that's like rinse and repeat. And it could be anything like,
For our CSA, we actually get most of our CSA customers from our farmers market. So we sell bouquets and bunches at the farmers market, and then we try to get as many of those people on our email list as possible. And then we have a sequence of emails that goes out to them that eventually, hopefully converts some of them into our CSA customers. We sell them on the CSA, right? For like agritourism.
Like my husband works at a really big agritourism farm. They utilize the news and publicity. they just last week, they bought a giant pumpkin. It weighs like 1200 pounds or something like that. And this is like the biggest pumpkin in New York state or something. So they called all the news outlets and they're all coming out to do a piece on it. And so they get all their customers from news outlets. I get most of my customers from my farmer's market or from my
other marketing that I do. So ⁓ this is inherently like the basis of marketing. You have to know where your customers are coming from and then go and do that more. The most important thing you could do is if you sell things through your website in the checkout, put a little dropdown in there. Most websites can, you can easily do this with have a little dropdown that asks that those customers, where did you first hear about us?
And then you'll find your answer on where to go and focus. So if they are all saying like Instagram or Facebook, go to Instagram and Facebook and try to drum up more customers. If they're saying, know, I don't know, it could be anything, right? Your website, internet search, know, focus on SEO and getting your website optimized. So I think the other piece of this question was she asked, what do you feel?
was your most profitable revenue stream and what did you do to make it profitable? So I already said you can make anything profitable as long as you know your costs and you charge more than that. Our most profitable sales outlet is our CSA or subscription program because we get, it's the biggest customer value, customer lifetime value. Like if we look at our farmers market customers who only buy farmers market bouquets, if they're only buying once in a while, it's like a $20 purchase here or there.
But our full season CSA customers, they're paying like $700. And so they're really valuable customers and ⁓ it's less money to have repeat customers than to keep getting new customers. It actually costs you a lot to get new customers. So that's our most profitable sales outlet, but we actually don't earn the most amount of money from it. So we earn the most amount of money from our farmers market. That's like our
cast a wide net, get in front of as many people as possible, sales outlet, which you don't have to do. That's just our strategy. And then we kind of funnel some of those people to our farmers market. So about 50 % of our revenue is from our farmers market. Probably like 30 to 40 is from our CSA. And then like 10 to 20 is from our DaliaTubers, kind of just depending on the year. Okay, so next question. I think I see a follow-up question here.
I'm only in year two of Selling Flowers and have a CSA. I'm thinking of doing an end of season special event next year. Is this something you do? Kelly, do you mean a special event for your CSA customers or for anyone to drum up business for the CSA? Sorry, yeah, for my customers. Like a thank you kind of thing. Yeah. It's a relationship building thing. I love that. So yes, and we actually do this as a sales tactic.
So what we do, like we're going to be launching our CSA, and actually I think there's another question about this coming up. We are going to be launching our CSA. We're doing an early bird this year for our previous CSA customers. And if they sign up between October 15th and October 30th, they get a free ticket to our invite only private CSA farm tour and you pick experience.
That's how we word it. And so this is an event we only do for our CSA customers as an incentive to get them to buy the CSA again. Because people are busy and they will be like, yeah, I keep meaning to sign up for your thing. And I'm just so busy, I keep forgetting. But when you tell them, like, if you sign up by October 30th or whatever the date is, you will get this free ticket to this event. And it's amazing.
And so we actually use it as a sales strategy, which also rewards them for being our customers, you know, once they're a customer. yeah, and then Kami just asked, what's the most efficient way to gain new CSA members? Exactly what I just said. You have to give them a reason to buy. And we do that using limited time bonuses. Basically, that's what we do. We do limited time bonuses. We also will do...
like giveaways, like a giveaway contest kind of thing to generate interest and to get people to buy. So I can kind of walk you guys through our marketing funnel. Basically, we start with our farmers market because we have a really great farmers market. We're very lucky. It took us a couple of years to get into this market, but when we did, we're never leaving. They do a ⁓ lot of marketing for the farmers, which is what a farmers market is supposed to do.
and we get exposed to a huge range of people. So we have this group of people that we're exposed to, and then we try to get as many of them onto our email list. From that email list, we funnel them into like a sequence of like nurture emails and then eventually sales emails where we have these irresistible offers where they can sign up for the CSA and they get, so here's what's included in our offer for this early bird launch.
free ticket to our on-farm event, which, you know, we talk about it like it's private, only offered to CSA customers, not, you can't come if you're not CSA member, whatever. They also get a video library of flower arranging tutorials. So I spent one day, like two years ago, where I set up my barn and I made like probably 10 or 15 videos on like how to arrange flowers, how to spray flowers, how to arrange dahlias, how to take care of lisianthus, how to take care of
Eucalyptus, all that stuff, and they get the whole library for free. What else are they getting, Taylor? There's another, oh, they get two weeks free if they sign up for the entire season. So that's like, I think it's like $700 this year, and they get two weeks free if they sign up in that period. I think there's, oh, and a gift card. Thank you, Taylor. They also get a, I think it's a $20 gift card for our farmers market. So all of that is included.
if they sign up for our CSA during that 15 day window, like you'd be stupid to say no. So that's how we get sales and customers to sign up for our CSA. Another thing that we do is we take our CSA bouquets and we put them up front and center at our farmers market. So they are different bouquets. They're bigger, more beautiful bouquets. They are... ⁓
wrapped differently, so they have tissue paper and paper sleeves. And they're just like generally look way nicer than anything else we offer at the farmers market. And we have people all the time, they're like, my God, I want that one. We're like, sorry, that's for our subscription members. Would you like to sign up for a subscription? And if they say yes, great. And if they say no, we're like, well, you can get on our email list and we'll let you know next time we open them up because you can get like this bonus, that bonus, whatever. Okay, going off on a tangent about this, but.
Somebody asked how many weeks our CSA is. You can go to my website. We do it by the month. It's May, June, August, and September. We sell those separately. Or you can sign up for the whole year, get every week from May through the end of September. Julie is asking, do you offer payment plans for your CSA? No. It's $140. So no. But you could to get more people to sign up.
All right, next question here. Next question is, small town, this person is in a small town of 1200 people. How do I grow my email list and market to buyers? Would a large YouPick event with vendors work in a community that size or is it better to focus on selling to flower shops in that community size? And then she said some nice things. I love your openness and honesty. I appreciate you and your info so much. Well, thank you.
So I think that either one of those can work. I think you can make anything work. ⁓ I do think it's way, way easier if you have a bigger town or city nearby. Flowers, whether we like to admit it or not, are luxury products. And people with disposable income buy flowers, unless it's for a special event. Funerals, weddings, celebrations, people buy flowers. But if you are selling flowers like
If you want to sell them consistently and not do events, if you don't want to be like a florist, then you need to find people who have the disposable income to spend on it. So you want to search for those people. I live in a town of a little less than 2000, I'm sorry. Yeah, 2000 people. I live in the middle of nowhere. We have more cows in my town than people. A lot more cows than people. So I drive 45 minutes to Rochester, almost.
All of my customers are in the city of Rochester. That is a city of 200,000 people. So 2,000 people or 200,000 people. I also sell in the communities that have the highest median or average gross income. ⁓ It really helps to sell flowers that way. And if that's not an option for you, which it's not an option for everyone, and I know that, that still doesn't mean that you can't make it work. You can definitely make it work.
I think you pick with collaborating with other people in your community, like really becoming a community focused business and collaborating with food trucks, people who do like street shows, live music, doing events, like photography events, doing farm to table dinners, like any of that kind of stuff to draw people from your community in and make it like a very, you know, community like minded thing. Like in my community, we have like,
one brewery and everybody goes to that brewery when they do like live music and other like events and they have like a festival every year. And you could be that like community place for people. ⁓ You know, you can always sell the flower shops. There's always gonna be weddings. So if there's flower shops that do weddings, can always have business there. You can make anything work. You just have to kind of test it out, I think, and decide that you're gonna make it happen. I think it comes down to that. So ⁓ before we move on to another question,
I want to share, there is this tool that I used when I first moved to this area, because I didn't grow up where my farm is. I'm from another state. When I moved here, I started my farm. So I knew no one, literally my husband's family. And that is it. ⁓ I had no connections. I had no ties to this area. So I 100 % started from scratch. And I didn't know anything about the area. And so I use this thing called the USPS EDDM tool.
So United States Postal Service, every door direct mail. ⁓ There is a link I gave to Taylor earlier. If you wouldn't mind dropping that in the chat, you just go to the USPS website, go to EDDM, ⁓ and you can look at different postal zip codes around your area, around the cities to find.
I don't know, I hope this doesn't sound bad, but you can find affluent areas, like areas that have really high household incomes. And those are the neighborhoods and the areas that you wanna go to and try to sell your flowers. So ⁓ I found it really helpful for like finding areas where people had disposable income. Maybe you will find it helpful too. All right, so next question is sales channels. How do you go about securing them?
In our region, locally grown flowers is relatively new. Wow, lucky for you. Everything around here is imported. How do you get in front of customers? Cold calling has been my go-to with limited success. And in the summer, there's no time. I have big plans to deep dive into Ranunculus because the market is a major city. The market, yeah, market is a major city. I just don't know how to break through into the market. So I don't know what sales channels this person is trying. ⁓
you just gotta kinda like start selling. I also am quite, I'm not sure what this person is saying. In the summer, there's no time. If you're saying that you don't have time to sell in the summer, that's like a non-negotiable for business, right? Like if you're prioritizing just like being out in your field, you're grow all these flowers, spend all this time and money growing flowers, and then they're just gonna go to waste. So like your business is gonna fail.
Your business is selling flowers. It's not growing flowers. It's selling flowers. That needs to be the priority. That has to be a priority. I usually tell people that I have this rule of four, spend four hours a week minimum dedicated to marketing. Whether that's cold calling, whether that's knocking on doors, whether that's doing social media content, whether that's reach outs, spend at least four hours a week doing this. Whether it's
Like I used to just block off Tuesday mornings, every Tuesday morning from like seven to 11 or seven to noon. I didn't do anything else except focus on marketing my flowers. I would write blog posts. I would write emails. I would try to find partnerships with other business owners in the community. I would, I would do anything and everything. Make social media content. If you really want this to work, do it for four hours a day. And I guarantee if you
actually did that for four hours a day, every day, your business would blow up. The problem is most people aren't actually spending the time and getting like the reps in, getting the volume in of trying things and trying out different marketing to get results. They like call a couple of florists and they say no, and then they're like, that didn't work. That's not it. You gotta keep going. You have to keep trying. ⁓
So like I said, I need some more information, I think, to answer this question, but...
You know, one thing that I love doing and that really, really works is getting in front of other people's audiences. So when I first started my Flower CSA program, when I was just doing it off the farm, I got one friend sign up for it because she felt bad for me and she was also a business owner. The next year it was that friend and her mom. Okay, then the third year I was like, I gotta try something different and actually market my business.
So I went out to a local ice cream shop that was like a really fancy schmancy ice cream shop. Like I knew a higher end clientele went there. It was in an affluent area. And I asked them if they would be a CSA location host. And they said, yes. And so I advertised my CSA there. They let me put out flowers, which made their business look beautiful. I had my little cards there. I got my first 10 CSA, like real CSA customers that weren't my friend and her mom to sign up that way.
And then word of mouth, I learned how to market and sell after that. And that's how I got started. And that's how I think most people get started. So try that. ⁓ If you want like really gritty details on how to build out a real marketing funnel, feel like that's something really deep I can't get into too much today. ⁓ Sign up for Six Figure Flower Farming. We have two whole modules.
all about marketing and sales and it's good, it's good. But okay, I'm gonna move on to the next question. ⁓ I am going to check the chat really quick. I think, I don't see any follow up questions there, I don't think. So let me move on. Okay, next question. How do you gauge how many flowers to order for spring when ordering corums and bulbs, not in terms of space?
but in terms of sales projections. Does it or did it ever make you nervous that you'll have way too many when increasing your orders? Ooh, I like this question. So our crop planning process, our whole crop planning process does not start with, what do I wanna grow and how much do I grow of it? If you have learned that way, that is for gardeners. It is not for businesses, okay? You have to start with projecting your sales first.
So our entire crop plan process starts is looking at how many you need to hit your sales goals. So we've lined up all of our projections for each of our sales outlets first, and then based on those numbers, we figure out what we're gonna plant and grow. So for example, let's just do like a really easy example here. ⁓ If you need to sell a hundred bunches of tulips, excuse me, sorry. Let me take a sip of water real quick.
Okay, so for example, if you need to sell 100 bunches of tulips to hit your sales goal in April, and those are 10 stem bunches, you need 1,000 stems. So you'd order 1,000 tulip bulbs, or maybe 10 % more than that, depending on how good you are at growing tulips and what your risk aversion is. Or like zinnias, if you need to sell 100 bunches of zinnias to hit your sales goal, and your average yield is, I don't know,
just gonna make up a number of 10 stems per plant, then you know that you need to plant 100 plants, plus a little extra if you wanna have a little bit of wiggle room there. I have an entire video series, or I don't think it's a series. I have a video on our crop planning process. This is actually something that we have inside of six-figure flower farming. I give as a bonus to our students, the whole crop planning ⁓ steps.
And I also give you a spreadsheet where all you do is like input your numbers and like does it all for you. That's all inside of our online business program. But I do have like a YouTube video that I did for the Kentucky Horticulture Council. Taylor is going to drop that link in the chat. And again, if you're listening to this later, it'll also be in the show notes for you. And that will help you get a head start with crop planning. yeah, figure out like, all right, if you need to make, you know, $10,000, how many bunches you need to sell, then how many plants do you need based off of that?
If I can distill it all down into like one very simple sentence. ⁓ Next question. Can I still have a viable farm business if I'm in a low income area and can't charge what those in high income areas can? Ooh, I love this question. 100 % yes. What you chart, well first of all, what you charge is really based on the perceived value more than anything else. Like don't just charge less.
just because you don't think people in your area don't have money. I guarantee there's people out there that would love your product and that would spend the money that you need to get in order to have it. Now your branding, your brand positioning, like how you position your business, how you market and sell it is all gonna depend, or that's all gonna.
That is going to determine what you can charge for your flowers is what I'm trying to say. The other coin of this, the other side of the coin is that if you live in a low income area, chances are your costs to produce are lower too. So those flower farmers in high income areas that look like they're charging a lot, you know, they're charging $9 a P &E stem or something crazy like that. Like their costs to produce are extremely high.
Like I have a lot of friends on the East coast, cause I grew up in like New England area. I have a lot of friends around Boston that have flower farms. The real estate there is insane. It's insane. You have to like spend a couple million dollars to have like a few acres. So of course they have to charge a lot for their product. Their costs are more so that they charge more. In a low income area, if you live in the middle of nowhere, your costs are probably going to be lower. And so you can probably charge less. It's all about margins.
So it's all about knowing your cost of production and then adding a markup so you make a profit. But you can have a profitable business no matter where you are, as long as you understand your costs, your pricing for it, and there's a demand for what you're offering. Like if you're in the middle of nowhere and you're trying to sell, ⁓ I don't even know, I'm trying to think of an example, luxury wedding packages.
that are like $20,000 a wedding package, but you live in like rural Kansas and like nobody has money for that. you might not get that, but could you offer regular like cost conscious budget wedding packages where like you still have a really good margin and you can like help a bunch of people get wedding flowers? Of course. Like I, when I did weddings, I did a lot of these like a la carte packages. I don't do weddings anymore, but
It was for cost conscious couples who couldn't afford $5,000, $10,000 wedding packages, but they could afford $2,000 or $1,000 or do the DIY thing. And it's like, and I made really good profits off of them. So, good to know. Jenny asks, what's a standard markup percentage? It depends on your sales outlet. That's like really nitty-gritty deep into pricing. That's something that I go over in the course as well, but.
Basically, if you're selling wholesale, your markup is gonna be a lot less than if you're selling retail, and it's gonna be even more if you're selling through a wedding, because the cost to sell through each of those sales outlets is more. So like, if you're just selling to wholesaler, you don't do any marketing and advertising, they just come and pick up all the flowers that you have. ⁓ Your markup's gonna be less than if you are sitting down and doing consultations with couples and doing design work and putting together color palettes and...
and all that stuff for them, like there's more to it, so you have to charge more for it, if that makes sense. There's other factors too, but.
Next question. How would you recommend going about flower sales and promotion in a small rural community? So I feel like I kind of already touched on this and talked about it a little bit before, but my favorite marketing method is to network with others and to basically use other people's audiences to get going and not even just get going, just collaborate with other local businesses. So doing pop-ups in your community, doing community events.
going and collaborating with other businesses. Did I already talk about this? I may have. If not, I'm to talk about it again. But when we first started our CSA program, we went to the ice cream shop. Yes, I did talk about this. We went to the ice cream shop because they had customers that I wanted. They was the same kind of customers. And we did this a bunch. So when we went to Rochester, we went to a fancy coffee shop and a wine bar.
And we said, hey, you know, could we give you flowers every week and get increased foot traffic into your store on a slower day of your week and, you know, do X, Y, and Z for you and have our flower pick up here? And they were like, yeah, sounds great. We got nos. We get a lot of nos. You're gonna get nos, but don't let that stop you. When you get a yes, just go with it. And it's the best way to get in front of
other people's customers that are like your customers. So the key to this is to partner with other businesses who have customers that you want, that are like your ideal customers. So like if you're trying to sell like a luxury CSA program, don't go to like the dollar store down the street. You know what I mean? Like your customers probably aren't hanging out there. They probably are hanging out at like,
fancy wine bar in the city, which is what I do. So, well, I don't personally hang out at fancy wine bars in the city, my customers do. Let's get that straight. ⁓ The other thing is make sure you have an email list. Like make sure you start to your email list, email them, keep it active and really use that to your advantage. ⁓
It's huge. You get a one-time customer and you can turn them into a repeat customer over and over again. I have a couple of podcast episodes about this. Episode number 25 is all about email marketing and episode number 23 of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast is three simple ways to market your flower business and I talk about this in that episode. So go listen to those if you want to learn more about that.
All right, next question is, what is the biggest thing you did in your marketing and sales that changed your profits? ⁓ I would say streamlining my marketing funnel. So instead of trying to do like 10 things, we just have like sort of an ascension model now, which I already talked about earlier. We meet people at our farmer's market, we get them on our email list, we try to convert them to the CSA member. ⁓ My email list has made me more money than anything else.
please start your email list. And if you need help with that, I can help you. I kind of already answered this question, but it's a good one, so I'll say it. What are your foolproof methods for selling a decent amount of subscriptions? We struggle to sell more than 50. We need tools to make people want to come out in droves to buy our subscriptions. So, like I talked about before, those bonuses, time-sensitive things, you really wanna instill that urgency and scarcity in people.
You wanna market it so it's like a status thing. All of your friends and friends with like multi-million dollar houses all have our flowers on their table, like paint that picture for them. You might not wanna say those exact words, but that's the message you're trying to get across to like, maybe not your customers, but that's my customers. And then tell the truth and use it to your advantage. Like if you are just starting out and you can't take more than 50 people, say that.
Say that, like when we were limited, when we were first starting, we used to say like, our CSA is limited to 50 people. And then they would sell out within two days because we like marketed that urgency and that scarcity. ⁓ You can also do things like giveaways to generate interest, like give away a week of your CSA or a month of your CSA with like a contest, have people like, you know, mention you on social media, spread the word.
all that kind of stuff. And then for the people who entered into it, but maybe they didn't win, you know that those people are interested in your CSA. And so after you do that giveaway, follow up with those people, reach out to them, be like, hey, sorry you didn't win, but I'd love to give you like five or 10 % off our CSA, whatever. I know we're talking about CSAs a lot today, but just really using that information to your advantage.
Next question. Hold on, there's a couple of questions in the chat here. Let me get those. What social media channels have been the most successful or interactive for you? Facebook, for local, Instagram too, but I get like a lot of other flower farmers on Instagram. like on my, so I have two Instagrams. I have my farm business, Instagram, and then have trademark farmer, which is probably how you know about me. And Instagram is fine.
but we do get a lot of other flower farmers on there. Like, I don't really want you guys on my, like, you can be there if you want to. I shouldn't say I don't want you there, but like, I want local customers. And so I'm targeting local people through social media. And I find that Facebook has been easier to get that than Instagram for me personally. Kimi said, is there a minimum number of emails you send per week or month? We always try to send two emails a month. So like every other week, depending on the time of year and the the promotions we're doing.
And ⁓ yeah, I see Taylor kind of answered some of these questions as well. So, and yes, Taylor said, y'all are just not our target audience for our farm Instagram. Yes, that was a, I didn't mean to like offend any of you guys. You can definitely follow me, but yeah, I'm not targeting other flower farmers. I'm targeting local people who want to buy my flowers. So, all right.
Next question here, in the early years, what was your most effective marketing strategies? Please be specific. I feel like I already answered this. That network marketing, getting in front of other people's going to places where we could get in front of a lot of people like festivals, doing pop-ups in our community, the farmers market, and then getting all of those people on our email list so we could keep them engaged and keep them interested. So again, episode number 23 of our podcast is more about marketing.
Um, next question, how, when and how much will your course be offered at? So, um, we're offering this November 4th is the opening date for registration for six-figure flower farming. I think Taylor already put the wait list in the chat, but I'll make sure I put it in the show notes for you guys. And this time around, it'll be around 1500. And the price will be going up next year in 2026. We are moving to a new model, more of like a mentorship model.
So kind of the last chance to get it at that price point. All right, next question here is, could you please explain how you manage the collection of funds from farmers market sales when you're not there and you have an employee working the market for you? I kind have to laugh at this question a little bit. Just like any other business or any other store, know, the owner of the grocery store or the bar or boutique shop, maybe a boutique shop, but like,
They're not usually at the register collecting money, right? You have team members that you train to do that for you. So you just train them to swipe the cards, put the cash in the drawer. I have a feeling that behind this question, there might be like a trust issue more than a training issue. So if it's a trust issue, you need to get better employees or if you still don't feel comfortable, just track how much you bring to the market.
like how much projected revenue is there and how much that comes home. And if it doesn't line up, then you gotta investigate there. But I feel like this is probably just a training issue. Next question. What accounting software do you recommend for a first year farmer? Also, does it matter if it's an app or computer-based software? So we just use QuickBooks. It's fine. There's also like Zero, I think is another one out there that a lot of people like. People have told me that there's better like
capabilities from an app. I have never gone into QuickBooks from my app only to like scan in receipts. I always just use it on my computer, but I'm also like an old school millennial and I like to do things on my computer. So maybe that's just me, but QuickBooks is pretty easy. If you're just starting out and like QuickBooks I think is like.
Oh gosh, I don't even know, maybe like $15 a month, like for a starter might even be like 30. If that feels like a stretch for you, you could just use credit card statements. Like take out a business credit card that's just for your business. Every single expense goes on there. A lot of credit card companies kind of have like categories that they will like kind of do that for you. There's also free budgeting software like Mint.com I think is one. Don't quote me on that, but you could do it.
for free at first. I recommend though, if you think you're gonna stick with this business, like just open QuickBooks or an accounting software and just get started with it.
Okay, next question is, do you recommend setting up an LLC for each entity of your business? Farm stand workshops, classes, you picks, et cetera. No, no, just one LLC for your business. Those are just your sales channels. That's just like where you make money from. You don't have to have a separate LLC for each of those. That would be a giant headache.
As someone who started as a sole proprietor and then moved to an LLC, it was a giant headache. ⁓ So yeah, you just need one, just one. ⁓ Let's see. Next question.
Ooh, this one's kind of a long one with some context here. Would it be better to scale up five times and focus on new markets and customers or go slow, spend less and scale up two to three times and figure out efficiency and systems before finding that max growing space? I'm a mom of four, so time is precious and my husband works full time. So going slowly is a luxury we have.
We don't have extra money to invest in the flower business outside of the 5,000. ⁓ so this person made $5,000 profit from this year. I think this one might've been the same person who asked that first question. So this, feel like has a lot, this is a lot of personal ⁓ preference and what your business goals are, but it sounds like you're not really in a rush here. So I would say slow and steady is the way to go, especially if you have young kids, you don't have time.
Like I have one toddler and I don't have time for anything. Honestly, that constraint is like a little bit of a gift because it will force you to get clear on what's profitable and what works and just like really focus on that because if you don't, like it's not going anywhere, right? I think, yeah, this is like a lot of like personal, it's a personal question. ⁓ I say slow and steady.
is the way to go in a lot of scenarios. If you're not in a huge rush to get there, don't rush it because a lot of times when we rush, we make a lot of big expensive mistakes. But you learn faster and you get there faster. So like, I don't know, if you want to get there faster, do it. I don't know. I feel like I don't have a good question or good answer for this question. So I'll move on to the next one. Next question.
Off-season dried florals. Yay or waste of time. I had so many composted stems this year and it seems like such a waste of time, energy, and ultimately sales. What are your thoughts to a new flower farmer? Time is also limited for me because I don't live on the farm. And then there's a second question here. So I will answer this first one first. So if you are composting a bunch of stems, like stop growing so much, just grow less. It costs you so much time.
and money and energy that you're just like throwing out. So just grow less. And then as you start like selling out a product or you're selling pretty much everything that you're growing, then grow more. Overproduction will kill a business. I have seen, this is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see some flower farmers make and I did this too.
is that you grow like a whole field of flowers, but you have nowhere to sell them. And like, yes, you're learning about growing and that is important. You do have to do that, but you're doing it on a scale where you'll never be able to sell that much with the like stage of business that you're at. And you're just bleeding money and energy. And so you're not gonna get ahead. ⁓ I also just hate dried flowers personally. So probably not a good person to ask this question. I think they look like dead flowers. I don't really like them.
I know some people do it. I don't know like how profitable, like I said, you can make anything profitable, but you have to have a good outlet for it, I think. I know one flower farmer in, I think she's in Vermont, might be Maine. I think she's in Maine. Anyways, she does a lot of dried flower wreaths. I know there's another girl in California that does that too. And that's like a huge thing that she does. She's built her business around it. So I think if you can do that, it's great.
I also know that there's like the store somewhere in Texas, maybe on Austin or Houston, where all they sell is dried flowers. So if you have an outlet like that, or if you could do something like that, go for it. But I think if it's an afterthought, it's gonna be an afterthought and it's probably not gonna be that successful in your business. Like you have to really focus on it to make it work. Okay, I have just a couple more minutes left in today's Q &A session. And so I'm gonna take one more question.
And this is actually a good ⁓ leeway into what I wanted to talk about at the very end of this Q &A session. So the next question was, who was my biggest mentor in farming? Any book or podcast recommendations for farming? So I grew up on a farm. I grew up in all different kinds of agriculture. So farming wasn't new to me. However, my whole life, everyone told me not to be a farmer because it was too risky, it was too hard.
⁓ You know, you don't make enough money, all the things, right? But I loved farming and I loved working outside and everything about it was appealing to me. Like I liked the lifestyle, all that. And I just thought it was never really like an option. I didn't think I could do it as a career until I found out about this guy. His name is J.M. Fortier. He is a Canadian small scale vegetable farmer and he wrote a book called The Market Gardener.
and I highly recommend that book to everyone who wants to farm on a small scale. Not about flowers, it's about vegetables, but a lot of the information. There's a lot of crossover, you guys, especially when it comes to setting up your farm for efficiency, learning how to grow and farm. It's a good resource for that, so I recommend that. ⁓ also, Taylor just dropped in the chat, I have a resource that is my favorite book list, so it's just a list of...
all my favorite books from farming, marketing, sales, business, all that kind of stuff. I also make sure it's in the show notes for you guys. But I really learned a lot about farming as a career and how to do it profitably and have a business from JM Fortier. And a side note, if you guys go way back, Taylor probably does not have this link ready, but if you go way, back to the...
first episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming podcast, I talk about JM Fortier and I talk about how he was the inspiration for me to start my farm ⁓ and try to do it as a career, which I did successfully, obviously. And so it kind of all started there. It's also the reason why the course in the podcast is called Six Figure Flower Farming. It's because I didn't think it was ever possible to earn six figures on a small scale farm, but he showed me that it was
that was possible and he was my inspiration to kind of start down this journey and it all kind of started there for me. So, ⁓ Taylor, Taylor said she had it ready. So she has the link for you guys in there. So I am kind of gonna wrap up this Q &A now. And if I didn't get to your question, if you submitted it beforehand, I'm so sorry. I wish I had a million hours every day to answer all your questions.
but I just don't and I'm sorry. But there were a lot of questions about growing flowers and farming. So I have some resources for you guys to help you learn how to grow flowers, how to get your farm set up. And specifically, there were a lot of questions about pest and disease management, growing techniques, farm set up, season extension. And so if those things, those are things you wanna learn about, here are some resources for you.
First, I usually do an on-farm workshop every summer. We haven't announced dates for 2026 yet. We haven't opened up registration or anything, but we probably will sometime this winter. And Taylor's gonna drop a link in the chat for you guys to get on the wait list, but we go through a lot of this. We go through pest and disease management, all of our growing techniques, our systems, you see exactly how our farm is set up and why, everything from like record keeping, how we train our employees to our SOPs or...
standard operating procedures. We talk about season extension, high tunnels, all that kind of stuff. I also have a course that I don't know if it's up on our website right now. It might be, but we do have a course on growing ranunculus and growing in high tunnels if you're looking for information about season extension and specifically growing cool flowers in like zones four to seven. So we have that resource for you. There's also just...
Guys, there's just a ton of free resources out there. You don't have to pay for it if you don't want to. Paid resources are definitely more streamlined. You get better information that way. But there's just free stuff like the Florett website. She's got a ton of resources on there as well. There's also the ASCFG, the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers. It's an association you can join.
I think it's $225 a year and it's honestly a steal for all the information that they have. It's just like a wealth of knowledge from all kinds of flower farmers. It's been around for a really, really long time. I am the Northeast Regional Director for the ASCFG. It's great resource. And then I think the last one I wanted to tell you guys about was the Market Gardener Institute. So this is a
business that JM Fortier, that vegetable guy that has the book I told you about, they have a relatively newer course on growing cut flowers. I've not taken it. I've not taken Florett's course or the market gardener's course, but I've heard a lot of good things about them. And so I just know that other people have recommended those resources to me in the past. So if you have growing questions, start with these resources. Okay, so I hope this was helpful.
We might do this again someday, so keep an eye out if you want to submit a burning question and have me answer it. We'll probably only open this up to people on our email list. I love just rewarding people for hanging out with me in email. So if you want to ask me a burning question, if we do this again, go get in our waiting lists or go get on our website, trademarkfarmer.com. You can opt into any of our free resources or freebies. You'll get our email list there. And yeah.
That's it for today. Thank you guys so much for joining me and I really hope this was helpful.
Jenny (1:00:23)
One more thing, several times throughout this episode, I referenced our six-figure flower farming online business program. That's an online course and registration for that is open for a very short time from November 4th to November 13th, 2025. So if you're interested, head on over to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash enroll. That's E N R O L L. And also have a link in the show notes for you to get signed up if you're interested.
I would love to see you inside. All right. Have a great day, everyone. See you next time.
