Jenny (00:29)
Happy new year and happy 2026. Now most flower farmers enter the new year with really big hopes, but not always a very real plan. And that is why the vast majority often repeat the same struggles of burnout and unpredictable revenue in a farm that feels like it runs them instead of the other way around. But I'm here to tell you that 2026 can be dramatically different and it does not require
more land or flowers or more chaos, just five strategic shifts that will change everything. And so today I'm breaking down five focal points or things to focus on to make 2026 your most profitable, efficient and focused year yet. And in case we haven't met yet, my name is Jenny and I have been farming for my entire life and have been focused on flower farming for the past decade.
I've built a multiple six-figure flower farm business on less than an acre. And it is my mission to help small scale flower farmers like you build wildly profitable and sustainable businesses through strategy, simplicity, and focus. And so let's dive in. Now, the first focal point I want you to think about going into 2026 is to plan your outcomes, not just tasks.
The worst plan is built around what you think you should do instead of the business you actually want. And so when I say plan your outcomes, not your tasks, I mean, I want you to really define the kind of year you want, because if you don't, you're just going to recreate last year by default. You need to get ruthlessly clear on your 2026 vision. The more I'm in business, the more I realize
how important clarity is in moving forward quickly and in not like a really efficient matter. Like everything comes back to clarity and having a super clear plan and vision. And now having a vision is something that actually now comes very easy to me. I'm definitely a visionary kind of person. Like I know what I want my business to look like three years from now and five years from now for the most part, right? But when I first started my business though,
It really wasn't like that. I just knew I wanted to have this flower farm business and I didn't want to work for the government anymore.
And what would have really helped me back then was understanding exactly what I wanted my lifestyle to look like, what I wanted my day to day to feel like, like how much I wanted to work and exactly what I wanted to get from the business. Like exactly what I wanted to get paid, what the top line revenue would have to be, what the profit would look like so I could earn it. And that would help me shape exactly how it would sell those flowers and basically what.
outcomes I wanted from the business instead of just the tasks. So getting really clear and focusing on one thing each year, instead of just trying to like do everything and be everything to everyone. And now a lot of flower farmers will just kind of plan like what they're going to plant, you know, all the regular crop planning stuff, like when they're seeding and transplanting and harvesting and all that. And some might go on to write down.
when you need to order your seeds or your plugs or that kind of stuff, because you know, those ordering dates are not super flexible for most of us. And then maybe some people who are a little bit more advanced might put in some of their marketing calendar, like when you're going to do a product launch or promotions, or when you're going to sit down and negotiate products with your buyers or any of that kind of stuff. Now, those are all definitely things that we have to plan. They're all great activities and they're definitely things you need to do.
but it's not really outlining the progress you need to make to achieve a certain goal. It's just putting tasks in place. So what you want to do first is really consider the outcome that you want, whatever your big goals are for the farm, and then start prioritizing your tasks and scheduling them throughout the year based on what is going to help you reach that goal first. So many people confuse activity
with progress in a full calendar with a big farm with lots of flowers doesn't actually mean a profitable season. And when you start with this like outcome based planning first, it forces alignment. So if a task doesn't support your income or your lifestyle or your capacity goals, it becomes optional instead of mandatory. So you can think about this with like different sales outlets or different kinds of customers or even flowers or products or services that you offer.
So planning outcomes first gives you permission to say no to things that you don't need that don't align before the season starts, which is really when no actually sticks. So
Busy is not the goal, intentional is. So in order to plan for outcomes instead of just tasks, I want you to decide on setting three things. The first one, a revenue target. So whatever you want your total sales to be this season. A lifestyle target. So hours, workload, any boundaries you need to have in place for like work-life balance or anything like that. And a strategic focus.
So this means one sales outlet or one crop category or something in your business that you know you need to focus on that will get you to the next level, something that you need to maximize. Okay, so just to re-say that again, a revenue target and even a profit goal here would also be very, very applicable. But if you're not quite ready for that yet, just start with that. A lifestyle target and a strategic focus that will get you to the next level.
And so speaking of strategic focus, my next point, my next focal point to plan a great 2026 is.
to choose your big focus. And so for most people, this is gonna be a sales outlet. If you're chaotic and overwhelmed and short on time, for other people it might be different, but choose one big focus for the season. Your farm does not need more irons in the fire. It needs one fire burning way hotter. The problem I see so many people getting themselves into is that they try to scale everything up.
and they end up scaling nothing. And the 80-20 rule almost always reveals the most profitable, highest leverage outlet.
Now, if the 80-20 rule or Pareto's law is something that you're unfamiliar with, basically it's this kind of like law of the universe that says 80 % of your outcomes will come from 20 % of your efforts. So when applied to business, means, simply just means the majority of your revenue will come from a small amount of customers or sales outlets or products or efforts. So.
A lot of times in business, our outcomes are outsized by small efforts that we put in. So it's important to identify what is really truly moving the needle for your business. Like what is actually earning the most amount of profit for your business without draining your energy and your time and your focus. And every single sales channel has hidden costs between time and packaging, communication,
emotional labor, supplies, and that kind of stuff doesn't always show up on a spreadsheet. So you need to take that into account as well. And I honestly think of every sales outlet as its own little mini business, because if you're selling to different kinds of customers, like if you're selling to Flores and you're selling retail and you're selling wholesale, like those are three very, very different customer avatars.
who are all going to buy from your business very differently and you're going to market to them all very differently. And so just know that you will likely have multiple sales outlets with your flower farm, but you have to carefully pick the one to focus on the most and make that your number one priority that's going to move your business forward. The other sales outlets can help support the farm and maybe even support that focused, that number one focused sales outlet, but
When you just try to scale everything, every sales outlet up, you end up with mismatch crop timing, inconsistent pricing, sometimes constant context switching, which is exhausting. And it's not to say that having multiple outlets is bad because it's not, it's just that nothing gets optimized when everything is treated equally. And so I want you to just get really clear again, this comes back to clarity because.
that actually reduces your risk if you are able to plan deeply instead of shallowly. And I was recently coaching some students in my business program about this. And when I say pick your one big main sales outlet that you're going to focus on, maybe for you and your unique business, that looks like each quarter you're focusing on a different sales outlet. Like maybe in the spring you're focusing on selling.
bunches and bouquets through your farmer's market. And then maybe in the summer, you're focused on selling workshop tickets to your fall workshops. And then maybe in the fall or the winter, you're focused on selling wedding packages. Like it doesn't have to be super like cut and dry. You only focus on one thing for the entire year if that doesn't apply to your unique business. But I will tell you that it's really helped me a lot to do that.
I think I've talked about this on the podcast recently, but you know, this past year in 2025 on my farm, we've really leaned into our CSA program as our number one focus and just made all of our other sales outlets kind of support that. And so we've always had this sort of ascension model where people come and find us at the farmer's market and they get to try us out by buying a bunch or a bouquet. And you know, that's like a low tier product of anywhere from like 15 to $45, like
Not that hard to spend, right? But then a percentage of those customers, hopefully we can upsell to our CSA or subscription program. And we also do a small amount of like bulk buckets and stuff. ⁓ you know, but we start with a small offering like 20 to $45 and then try to upsell those customers into a higher tier product where they're spending a few hundred dollars or many hundreds of dollars.
And we really decided to focus on that middle tier with our CSA and get those numbers up by upselling more directly at our farmer's market this year. And so all of our key performance indicators or KPIs, that's just a fancy term for metrics. All of our, all the things that we were measuring and focusing on and talking about every week during our weekly meetings, all focused around increasing our CSA numbers. And what do know, we succeeded at it.
And I truly don't think that would have happened if we didn't fully focus on that one specific goal of increasing our subscription numbers for the entirety of the year. What it did was force us to sit down and really think about that marketing funnel, how it works, and test out specific offers and incentives to get people to sign up and experiment with different messaging to the point where we found what really works and now we're just gonna like.
toss fuel on the fire for 2026. And the same thing can happen in your business, but you have to pick one thing to focus on at a time because you don't want to be spread super, super thin trying to scale up everything at once. And another point of this is just like avoiding shiny object syndrome too, which like I could talk for hours about that as well, but focus doesn't limit you. It actually protects you. So in order for you to
do this on your farm, I want you to run a simple sales outlet analysis, like even if it's a super quick one. Just think about which outlet generated the most profit per hour, even if you have to estimate, that's totally fine. Think about which sales outlet brought in the most predictable customers and which one aligns best with your 2026 goals. Just by asking these simple questions is going to get you started off on
the right path here. All right, next focal point here is to forecast your crops based on profit, not preference. And this means planning backwards from your projected farm revenue, not from Pinterest and Instagram. Your favorite crop is not necessarily your most profitable crop, and 2026 depends on knowing the difference.
Most farmers plan based on what they enjoy growing or they hope will sell, but profitability comes from data driven crop selection. If you have a beautiful crop that's hard to harvest, takes a super long time to harvest and process, is difficult to store or difficult to sell, it will quietly completely destroy your margins. And this is just so underestimated. It blows my mind. Like I...
I just want to drill this into every single person's because most farmers overestimate how much variety their customers actually want and underestimate how much consistency matters overall. And obviously everyone's customers are different. So I'm generalizing here, but revenue based crop planning removes emotion.
from decisions and replaces it with evidence. And you know that I'm all about data-driven decision-making in business, but this means planning with that first. So your crop plan should start with the financial planning. So this is how we do it. We start with the financials. We ask, what is our revenue goal this year? What is our profit goal this year? What do we need to sell to make that happen? Like exactly how much of what? And exactly what kinds of flowers do we need to sell? And when?
Are they gonna be available to harvest to sell in order to make that happen and so on and so forth. So your data doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. Even just rough numbers of your sales from last year looking at what was in demand, what wasn't, that's enough to reveal patterns that you can see in the moment. And when you do this, when you choose your crops strategically, everything downstream improves. Your harvest flow.
pricing with confidence, your labor efficiency, all of that. And so a lot of people think that this is like taking the creativity out of business, but I think it's the opposite. I think that profit is not anti-creativity, it funds it. Because imagine if you did this and you had the funds to be more creative in your marketing and in your offers and think of how much more fun that could be in business instead of just like throwing some seeds in the ground and hoping you can sell them later.
So in order to do this, I want you to identify your top three most profitable crops and then reduce or eliminate low profit crops. And then build your crop plan around that, around the numbers, not just like nostalgia. You can always grow small patches of things you love just for yourself. Like I always have, or almost always, I didn't last year, but almost always have a little patch, like a handful of.
Sahara, Rubeckia plants somewhere on the farm just because I love them. My customers don't. So that's something that I just grow for myself, but in a very, very small amount. with the understanding that like I'm not gonna be trying to push those or make a lot of money.
Moving on to point number four is to focus on building lean, repeatable systems before spring hits. You may have heard this saying before, but I love it. It's you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Okay, let me say that again. I'm going to repeat it. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Now, when people feel chaos in the spring and the growing season, it usually comes from a lack of very simple documented processes. Lean systems remove overwhelm and they can help protect your profit margins.
because if you feel chaotic during the season, it may be one because you're just new at this and you just don't have the experience yet, which is fine. But if you can accept that and just try to like absorb as much as possible in your first few seasons, it will hugely set you up for success in the future. But after your first few seasons, if your norm is still chaos, it's not like a personality flaw or not just the way it is.
it's probably a systems gap. Even the most motivated farmers burn up when huge decisions pile up daily because you haven't put systems in place. And most profit leaks really happen in the season through inefficiencies. So this is extra labor hours, forgotten tasks, rushed harvests, last minute scrambling.
last minute marketing. And so you have to really think about what systems you want to put in place to create consistency. And consistency is what allows you to delegate to hire help or to just simply take a day off without the wheels completely falling off from time to time.
And all a system is is just a documented process. That's it. It's just a checklist or a written 10 step of instructions or a video or whatever it is. It's just a process that you document it so you don't have to scramble or it doesn't have to be forgotten or you can delegate it to somebody else. Like there are certain things that are done on our farm every single week and we have systems for all of it. Like harvesting every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
processing the bouquets every Wednesday and delivering them for our CSA. Weeding every Thursday, prepping for our farmers market every Friday, sending out email newsletters through our farmers market every Thursday and sending out our regular email newsletters. And we do recording of our harvest data all in one place, recording of our sales data all in one place. Like I could go on and on, but each one of these processes has a written system or set of instructions.
So anybody can do it at any time. And when people look at the farm calendar, they know exactly what to expect every day of the week, because we have a routine every single week and we have a calendar for, so we know what's coming up next month, next week. And everyone on the farm is on the same page. So in this aspect, systems don't restrict freedom. They actually create it. And I believe in this.
100 % because I used to be like, ⁓ I just want a business where I can like, you know, go sit on the beach and sip a cocktail and have the most amount of freedom, do whatever I want, whenever I want. This is when I was very young before the flower farm. And now I realized that there's no way that would have ever been possible back then, because I did not know how to create systems. Whereas now I understand the importance of them and how to create them.
and it has created so much more freedom in my life than I've really ever had before. So systems equal freedom. So what I want you to do to focus on this is to choose just maybe two to three systems to build before April. And my suggestion is to focus on things that either get forgotten a lot about or things that you need to delegate to someone else. So this could be harvesting or bed prep or weekly
task assignments like I mentioned with our email newsletter or some other kind of marketing system, or maybe your bouquet making system, like document this once and then you can use that system over and over and over again. And here's the truth, systems and marketing work together. When your systems are dialed, you can actually deliver on what you market and when your marketing is consistent,
your systems don't get stressed by panic selling, which brings me to my final focal point to plan a profitable and sustainable 2026, which is establish your marketing and your sales engine now. Now in the winter time, not in the midst of the busy season. A lot of people wait until they have product, have flowers before they start marketing, which is why sales
always feel reactive, always feel scattered and chaotic and stressed. The thing you need to focus on is that consistency in your marketing builds trust, which leads to conversions or sales. So if you want to have a profitable season, you have to start by working on your marketing in the winter time. And you know, if you're somebody who only sells winter flowers, then just flip-flop this, right? Wherever you have downtime during the season,
You need to focus on your marketing and sales because the nature of our business makes it so it is so hard to do this during the busy season. You know, there's just no time during the season to really focus on your marketing strategy a ton, at least in the beginning before you have a big team. Um, you know, obviously if you have a dedicated admin or a marketing team member, this is different, but I'm guessing most people listening to this aren't quite there yet.
Again, most farmers treat marketing as something to do after production, but in reality, marketing is what you need to do first because that's what makes production profitable. Because,
I don't think that you need to be everywhere with marketing. You just need to be consistent, super, super consistent somewhere to start. A simple, repeatable marketing rhythm removes decision fatigue during the season and it really helps keep sales from feeling like a last minute scramble. And so I recently took one morning and I wrote almost all of our marketing emails.
for the entire year, okay? And
I've put frameworks and systems in a place for how we write things like our email newsletters now. So we just use the same frameworks for every single one pretty much. And I'm actually gonna be talking more about this in the next episode actually. So if you wanna tune into episode number 85, I'm gonna dive in deeper into winter. Excuse me.
So if you wanna tune into episode number 85, we will talk more about winter marketing plans to have a profitable season. But this isn't like something that needs to take you months and months and months to do. You just need to have some really focused time during winter now, and it can make a huge difference for the rest of the season. Demand is built quietly, long before harvest day, okay? So in order to do this, I want you to focus on
just one weekly marketing action at first. So this could be a social post or real or email newsletter or, ⁓ you know, talking to a partner or a collaboration, whatever it is for your business, just one weekly marketing action that you will commit to plus a quarterly promotion or conversion event or like product launch. So a quarterly thing that you do to promote a product or service you offer.
and then putting those things on your calendar to make sure that they actually happen every single week. Because when you market earlier and you do the work ahead of the busy season, you're gonna have a much smoother, more predictable revenue coming in later. So again, like I said, I'm diving more into this, into winter marketing plans to make your most profitable season yet in the next episode. So tune in to episode number 85 when it releases. New episodes are released every Monday. So to wrap this up,
To make 2026 your best year yet, just remember it's not about trying to do more, it's about trying to do the right things better. So get really clear on your vision for the business, really think about those outcomes you wanna get out of this year, not just tasks. Choose your big focus for the year, plan based on profit, build some systems, and start marketing now long before you actually need those customers handing over cash, okay?
Now, if you found this episode helpful, I would really appreciate it if you could please leave a review on either Spotify or Apple podcasts. This really helps other flower farmers find this valuable information. It takes less than 30 seconds. So if you just go to our profile on Spotify or Apple, you should see a place to leave a review in Spotify on our profile. If you click the three little dots, just hit rate podcast. And in Apple, when you're on our
podcast profile, you just have to like scroll all the way down to the bottom and you'll see an area to leave a review. And if you've left a review, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Just know that I read them when I'm having a bad day or I'm feeling bad about myself and it always keeps me going and inspired to publish new episodes. ⁓ And in fact, if you thought this was really valuable, send it to a flower farming friend who could use it. Help me on my mission to help all small scale flower farmers build those profitable and sustainable businesses.
So thanks for being here and listening to another six-figure flower farming podcast episode. Let's go build a wildly profitable 2026. And I will see you next week, same time, same place. Bye for now.
