Jenny (00:30)
This is one of the most powerful episodes I guarantee I will record in 2025. Today we're walking through one of the most powerful processes I do every single year on my flower farm. And that is my end of year flower farm business audit. Okay, this is basically where I sit down and I reflect on the entire past season. And this is a very organized process that I go through every single year diving into
what went well, what didn't go well, what I need to change, what I need to do more of, less of, all the things. And this matters so much because this prevents you from repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It helps you confidently plan for the next season and brings clarity to what worked, what didn't, and where you want to go. It also really helps protect my mental health, my money, and my time.
And if you're somebody who feels a little directionless with your farm, like you're not really sure which direction to go in. You feel polled in a million different places. You feel like there's all these opportunities and options out there, but you're not sure which one to focus on. This process will help you get that clarity you are seeking. It will help you so much. So as we go through this episode, this is a very like tactical, like do it along with me sort of episode. ⁓ I kind of recommend listening to it.
once through and then coming back again to listen to it. So grab a notebook though if you wanna take notes and I'm just gonna guide you through the exact six step process I use every season to do this end of year business audit. And by the way, I made an entire workbook that walks you through these exact steps. You can download it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash.
audit. It's literally all like a pre-made PDF for you. You can print it out and walk through these things step by step by step. So trademark farmer.com forward slash audit. This is a little mini training today.
All right, so farm business planning is crucial for success. You really cannot just close your eyes, shoot in the dark and expect success. And I think a lot of people are unknowingly kind of doing that without sitting down and getting very clear and strategic. So here are the basic steps of my end of year annual business review. The first one is to analyze or I guess kind of dream about your financial goals.
So just think about the finances. Then secondly, think about your lifestyle and business goals. Step number three is looking at your projected versus actual reports. So this is sort of like big picture, the whole farm, the whole business projected versus actual like profits, revenue, expenses, all that stuff. Then step number four is diving deeper into that projected versus actual details. So going into all of your products, like what you expected to sell, what you actually sold.
Step number five is making a stop, keep and start list. Go over that when we get there. And step number six is list out your achievements and your disappointments. And we are going to find ways to turn the disappointments into future improvements. So you can use this exercise also like whenever you feel like you kind of need to revise your business plans or help you make better business decisions, keep your plans moving forward. But I personally do this
at the end of every single season. So let's just start off with step number one. Step number one is to really look at your financial dreams and goals. The purpose of this is to open yourself up to possibility before really diving into the actual numbers here. So I want you to reflect on what revenue you want next season or
Maybe profit is a better thing to focus on because it's arguably much more important than the top line revenue. Reflect on your big picture goals for the next like one to three years, maybe even 10 years if you're like a visionary person, but if that feels overwhelming for you, just think about the next couple years, because chances are over time, you know, business is going to change anyways.
Think about what roles or offers or sales channels that you need to make that happen, okay?
We really want to start with just sort of dreaming here, thinking about what would be awesome for you and what feels attainable. Like, sure, I would love to make $5 million a year, but like, in reality, I'm pretty happy with a number that's much, much, much lower than that, right? So start with dreaming, and then we are going to build the plan because I think what happens to a lot of people is they start sort of looking at like,
the plan in front of them and they're not sure how to make it reach to their ultimate goal. They're like, well, I have this farm stand, like, I don't know, I'll never be able to sell enough bouquets to like make it to whatever my goal is. Where that is a key piece of it. You do have to think about that, but you also just need to start with thinking about like, what would I love to happen? Like really let yourself be fully like free and visualizing what would be awesome for you.
what you would love to happen, be really positive about it, and then we can build a plan to make that happen, all right? So I love journal prompts for this. I'm very much like a journaler, a writer. I just have to get my thoughts out of my head and onto my paper so my head doesn't explode. So I love writing and journaling and prompting, and I highly recommend it for any entrepreneur out there. So a couple of prompts to think about is just one, what money do I wanna make next season? What?
would need to change for that to happen. What are my financial goals? Simple, just see what comes up for you as you're dreaming and thinking about what you want your business to look like. So pretty simple and easy first step here. Don't get too serious about it or dive too deep into it. Next, let's move on to step number two, which is your farm and your lifestyle business dreams and goals.
The purpose of this step is to align your business with what you actually enjoy and value because your business should align with your ideal lifestyle. I just have so many friends that if you are into weddings, you love weddings, go for it, do it. We need people to do that and I think it's amazing. But just in this example, I've had several friends who...
knew that they could make a lot of money doing weddings and they knew it could be profitable for them. So they started out their business doing it, even though they didn't really like it. And they knew that they didn't really like it. And then seven years down the road, they're like, I hate this. I don't want to do it anymore. can't, you know, I don't even want to hire people to help me do it anymore. I want to pivot. want to change. I want to do something else. And it's like that maybe could have been avoided considering they knew from the start that they prioritized money over
sustainability and joy. And so obviously this is a very personal decision on where to go and what you love doing, but just really think about what you love, what you enjoy, and consider what let you up this past year. Like what, that's probably something you want to do more of, right? What drained you mentally or physically? Maybe that's something you can get help on. Maybe that's something you want to minimize in the future.
Think about what isn't moving the needle. What do you feel like you're kind of spinning your wheels on? What supports your lifestyle, your health, and your family? Because I know for me, I've got a young kid and anybody out there who has kids, maybe working on the weekends is not the right answer for you because you want to spend it with your family. Maybe working on weekends so can bring your family with you is the right answer because...
That's gonna work for your lifestyle. It's different for everybody, but really think about that. And what you want your days to look like and feel like. Again, I totally encourage this stream of consciousness writing and journaling here. Just put a pen to paper and see what comes out when you ask yourself these questions. And connect your answers to next season's planning. Think about what aspects of your business you wanna focus on in the future.
What do you wanna do more of? What do you wanna do less of? Or none of at all? What do you wanna minimize or eliminate? These are all important things that you have to align with your values and align with your lifestyle goals, okay? So huge fan of that. So the first two steps of this process are kind of all about like,
visualizing and thinking about what you really wanna get out of your farm, out of your business, out of your life, what you want your life to look like, what you want your life to feel like, what your ideal lifestyle is, what that looks like. So it's very much like big picture, thinking broad, visionary. And then in the next step, which is step number three, we're going to start digging into some numbers. Okay, so.
kind of a 180 from what we were doing before. Step number three is looking at your projected versus actual numbers. And this is big picture of the farm. So the purpose of this is to compare what your expectations were or are with reality because we all know that they are not always the same. What we expect to happen, what actually happens, right? So we wanna review things like what
overall revenue and profit did I expect to earn this year? If you even had that planned. And if not, maybe it's a happy surprise or maybe it's a disappointment, whatever it is, write it down, okay? What was the overall revenue and profit you actually earned this season? And if the numbers are different, why? So any major surprises, good or bad, write them down here, okay?
So we're looking at what I expected my revenue and profits to look like, what it actually looked like, and if those are different, why? So some questions to ask at this point would be, why are these numbers different? Where did things go off track? What levers can I adjust next year? You want to ask these questions so you can assure that in the future, the numbers are going to line up a little bit better, they're going to be more satisfactory, and.
Not to say that unexpected things don't happen. Like if you have a natural disaster, there's a huge shift in the market or something happened in your personal life. Like, yeah, those might be very real right reasons that your business looked different than how you expect it this year. But sometimes it's just a matter of like, I didn't really market my business as much as I should have, or I lost an entire crop of dahlias to some disease or whatever it is. And based on your answers,
A lot of times you can find solutions to those to make sure that they don't happen again. Or if they're happy surprises, figure out ways to make that happen more. Right? So really looking into the actual numbers here and diving into why that happened and what you can adjust in the future and optional here, you can also kind of look at like productivity, weather impacts, yields, that kind of stuff. Moving on to step number four.
is looking at same idea, projected versus actual numbers, but in much more detail. So looking at your products and services, your individual products and services. So the purpose of this step is to identify your true money makers in the business. So looking at how much revenue and profit you earn from each product, so like each flower crop or each service you offer, and looking at which ones make the most amount of money.
which ones are earning the least amount of money, and really looking at the profitability of them, or lack of, right? So like which products are carrying the farm? Which products drained time, labor, resources, and weren't like pulling their weight, okay? A profitable flower farm focuses on what makes money, what is profitable, not what feels romantic, not what feels sexy, right? What is actually working.
because if you can identify the things that are really moving the needle in your business, it's going to help you get to that number you were thinking about in step number one, that financial goal that you were dreaming of a lot faster, right? And step number two ties into this because of course you could always pick the most profitable thing, but if it doesn't align with how you want your life to look like or with your values, then obviously we need to consider some other options, right? So from here, you'll kind of make some decisions on which
products or flowers are focused on growing and selling more in the future. So those would be your top performers and which ones you would eliminate or minimize from production in the future. These are ones that underperformed. Okay. And then from here, you can look at what you'll scale up, what you'll maintain, reduce, eliminate, right? Now, if you need help with this section, like really diving into step number three and four, ⁓ I teach an online business program all about this. can email me and I can help.
get you started, but looking at the details inside of your business and figuring out where are the levers you can pull to get the biggest impact. Moving on to step number five, this is a very simple, actually the next two steps are very simple, but very powerful exercises. But step number five is to make a start, stop, and keep doing list. So the purpose of this is to capture
actionable insights while they're fresh from the season, because I'll tell you what, I always think I'm going to remember things from the springtime.
I never do. I never do. gonna, I always think I'm gonna remember where we planted, which variety of what, and I never do, which is why we write everything down because I never remember, right? So this is a really great way to have a reflection on the business.
So what you're gonna do for this one is you're gonna take a piece of paper or you can download the workbook I have for you and you can just print it out. It's all done for you, but you'll make three columns if you're doing it yourself. And the three columns will be the start doing column, the stop doing column, and the keep doing column. can just make a list of start, stop, and keep doing. And here...
Consider what you'd like to start doing, stop doing, or keep doing in the corresponding column. So freely just write anything that comes to your mind that you and your team felt like didn't work well, isn't worth doing anymore, or things that you thought did really good, or things that you think you can improve, like procedures, work-life balance, literally anything that comes to mind. Write down under the start column, like new habits, new systems, offers you want to think about.
In the stop doing column, write down things that were draining, unprofitable, stressful. In the keep doing column, write down wins, successful systems, consistent performers, things that went really well this year that you wanna keep doing and keep improving on. Now I really encourage you to be honest here and be a little brave because this part becomes your action plan for next season.
Now, if you want examples of this, I have included in this workbook I made for you guys examples, so it will make it a lot easier for you to understand what I'm talking about here.
So I'll give you some examples of things I have written down many years in the past, because I actually have in front of me one from, I don't even know what year is this? It's like from 2019 or something like that. But under my start doing column, had scouting for pests weekly, because apparently I wasn't doing that then, which you should be doing, scouting for pests weekly. I have selling more single variety bunches instead of mixed bouquets, scheduling in
office time, more office time every single week. Under the stop doing column, I wrote flowering tobacco, so never growing that again, weddings and workshops. Really interesting, okay. And under the keep doing, I put email marketing. It's really working. Zinnias, Salosha, sunflowers, and classic summer flowers, and then I also had subscriptions, okay.
So as you can see, pretty simple but very, very effective exercise. Now, when you look at this, make sure you actually stop doing the things you wanna stop doing, start doing the things you want to and keep doing the things you want to. So like I said, this part becomes your action plan for next season. Now moving on to the sixth and final step, this is listing out your achievements and disappointments.
I got this idea years and years ago from Taylor Mandel over at footprint farm. So thanks Taylor for sharing this with the world because this has been super valuable for me. And now I'm sharing it with all of you guys. So this is.
just a list of your achievements and disappointments. The purpose of this is to celebrate and diagnose what went wrong and what was a disappointment. So what you're gonna do here is take another piece of paper or like I said, download the workbook that I made for you. You can just print it off and do it right on here. basically have three columns on this page as well. The first column is for achievements. What you will list went well.
⁓ Then you have a column for disappointments, list what didn't go well. And so we'll just start with that. And then the final column is for improvements or solutions. So just take a basic inventory of what went well and what didn't. Try to think of anything and everything that comes to mind. Okay? Anything and everything. Then once you write down all of your achievements and disappointments from this past season,
you're going to carefully assess your lists of disappointments. For each disappointment you write down, you will assign an improvement category to each so you can improve or solve the problem for future seasons. Okay, so the five categories are research, infrastructure, equipment, systems, and help or team, however you want to think about it.
Now again, this is a lot to remember, write down, just go down on that workbook I made for you and it's all right there in front of you. But here is what this looks like.
So I'll give you an example from one of my past ones. For achievements, I had Mayflower subscription getting over 110 subscribers. P &Es were a success, zinnias were a success, taking two days off this summer was a success, not working past 5 p.m. was a success, okay? Then there was a bunch more, but I'll leave it at that. For disappointments, I had not keeping good enough sales records, which I know a lot of you are probably struggling with right now.
So for that disappointment, I assigned a system improvement category. And the way I did this was I just assigned each one of those improvement categories a highlighter color, so I would just highlight in yellow, not keeping good enough sales records, and then I know I need to come up with a system for it because system is yellow. Okay, maybe I'm not explaining that good, but if you download the workbook, it'll make a lot more sense. So basically, not keeping good enough sales records.
I knew in order to solve that or to improve that frustration and disappointment, I needed to put a system in place. So I put an alarm on my phone that went off every single day at 5 p.m. And so every single day at end of my day, which I ended at five, I would take five minutes and just write down things that I needed to record from that day. So a simple system, right? I just made an alarm for a reminder that went off every single day. So I made sure I was always keeping those records.
The next disappointment I had was tarnished plant bugs and dahlias. This has always been a very big frustration and disappointment for us, but, this year in particular, I think it was really bad. My solution for that was also a system to scout weekly for pests and research. So this was kind of a twofold one to research ways to prevent this pest. Right. Then my next one was also a pest issue, spider mites on cilicia. This was in our hoop house.
This also was solved with research. So I assigned that improvement category of research to it. And I knew that in order to solve that problem or to improve it, I needed to do research on how to find organic rated products for preventing spider mites. Now we just missed our high tunnels and it helps a lot. So ⁓ I think you guys get the idea, but I am going to go over just, I think one more with you guys.
My next disappointment was pulling up fabric. So much work, super heavy lifting, really hard to do by hand. My improvement or solution was actually in the form of equipment. It was to invest in a tractor with a bucket. And I had next to it, I wrote three year plan. Now, since then, we've actually had a different solution for this. We don't really use fabric anymore. ⁓ Instead, we use other methods, but ⁓ that would be an example of that equipment improvement category.
Okay,
You get the idea. Basically, when you have your list of disappointments, you're going to come up with an improvement category, either research, infrastructure, equipment, systems, or help to brainstorm ways to improve or solve each problem for future seasons. This has been so powerful for me. One, it just removes the shame because it's like, this was a disappointment, this happened, but we're gonna do something about it, right?
You turn mistakes or disappointments into solvable problems in this way. And it makes it actionable things that you can do to improve. It also creates clarity for what you need to invest in or change. Right? So like, if you are not really sure like what investments you should make for your flower farm, like this will help you figure it out really quickly. It will be directly correlated to the disappointments list here in this exercise. So.
I just really love this and I'm so thankful to Taylor Mendel for introducing me to this concept and I've made it part of my end of year business audit for as long as I can remember. So I highly recommend that you do it too. So that is the six steps of this end of year business review process. After doing this, you will really have so much more clarity and direction, just where you wanna push your business in the future.
This process really gives you that clear direction for next season, real data to base your decisions on, a simplified list of changes to make, and permission to build a business you actually love. So I just wanna remind you that improvement is a process. It's not a sprint. We're on a marathon here by improving our businesses, but after you go through each one of these steps, go back and read through.
everything that you've discovered, go back and read through your answers and your journaling for all these steps. And it'll really help you get a bigger picture of what went awesome this season and what didn't and what to make improvements on and what to focus on for the season ahead. I just cannot recommend it enough. So please actually do this audit. And you know, you could just use this as inspiration to create your own audit. You could have your own system in place if you find something that works better for you.
as a starting point if you want to. like I said, I have a workbook that I made for you guys with examples. Download it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash audit. You just gotta put your email in. It'll sign you up for our email list and then it will send you the workbook. You can print it out, do it right on your computer, go through the whole process without even listening to this podcast again.
So trademarkfarmer.com forward slash audit. And as you're doing this, I would love to hear your biggest aha moment. DM me on social media. I'm on social at trademarkfarmer. Would love to see what you come up with if you have any big aha moments. And I just want you to know that your dreams with your flower farms are absolutely possible, but clarity is the very first step you need to make them happen. And this will help you get there.
If you enjoyed this podcast, if you found any value in it at all, please do me a favor and share it with another flower farmer. Share it with a friend, share it in a group, just share it with somebody because you can help me on my mission to help as many small scale flower farms as possible build profitable and sustainable businesses that they love. Please just share it with someone. It would mean a lot to me and I know to the other flower farmers of the world.
So that's it for today. Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget we publish new episodes every single Monday, so we'll see you next week. Same time, same place. Bye for now.
