Jenny (00:00)
If you've ever had trouble hiring employees, keeping employees, or maybe if you're thinking about hiring for the first time, this episode is for you. And today's episode is also a little bit different. I'm actually sharing a recording of a live presentation I gave for Cornell Cooperative Extension all about hiring, onboarding, and managing employees on a small farm. So if you're someone who's ever thought something like,
I know I need help, but hiring feels terrifying, or why does managing people feel harder than farming, or why does everything still fall apart when I'm not there? I really think that this episode will be helpful for you. In the session, I'm gonna break down when it's actually time to hire, how to think about employees as revenue generators, not expenses, why systems matter more than talent, and how to build a team without burning yourself out.
This was originally delivered live to farmers. So it's practical, straightforward, and focus on implementation. I've cleaned up the recording slightly for podcast format, but you'll still get the full training and all the good stuff inside. I really hope that this helps.
So here it is.
Jenny (01:16)
My name is Jenny Marks and I'm the owner of Trademarks Flower Farm and Trademark Flower Farming. They sound very similar but different businesses. I've been farming my whole entire life. I grew up milking cows, throwing hay every summer, selling tomato plants and pumpkins and I've been running my cut flower farm for the past decade. I have grown my flower farm to multiple six-figure flower farm growing on less than an acre without doing weddings and I'm located in Clifton Springs, New York which is
Kind of like between the Finger Lakes region and Rochester, New York.
So today we're going to be talking
about farm management, employee management, employee retention, and some lessons I've learned about having team members, as I like to call them, and been managing people for the past probably seven-ish years, six or seven years or so. And I know that this can be kind of hard topic because we started farming because we love to farm, not because we like to manage people.
but we need to see people and people management in a new light if we want to be able to scale our businesses and have successful and sustainable businesses that we don't get burnt out from. Because we all know that farming, pretty much you just associate farming with burnout, but it doesn't have to be that way. And the way we do that is by leaning on people, team members, and employees.
people, you can have huge opportunities with your business if you take the right approach. And so today, I'm hopefully gonna give you guys some practical, easy to implement advice for small teams. So first off, I just wanted to touch on actually hiring. So Jacob asked me to talk about.
maybe your first hires are signs that it might be time to start hiring in your farm business. And I want you to feel confident with your first hires because hiring people is definitely super scary, especially with all the like, you know, legal things and insurances you have to get in order to do that appropriately. However, it's so worth it because it can really help grow your business. Signs that it's time to start hiring might be that
you are the bottleneck or the constraint in your business, meaning you are doing so much all the time, you don't have the capacity to take on more work or to get more clients or, you know, get more of whatever you're selling and being able to sell it. So that's like stopping you from being able to grow your business. Another sign is that your work quality is slipping if there's simply not enough hours in the day and just the quality of your product is not as good as you want it to be.
if you find yourself stuck working in the business all the time instead of on the business. So if you're only just doing the day-to-day stuff, but you're not having any time or space to think about like big picture strategy with like marketing and sales or expansion or operations, ⁓ that's really important as a business owner to be able to do that to move the needle forward. And if you...
just can't fill demand. Like I know some of us have more demand than we can fill others. We're trying to create demand for our products. So no matter where you are, but if you find that you're not able to fill all the demand, that's a sign that it's time to start hiring. And I would say even from the very beginning, just hiring any help at all is gonna be huge in allowing you to take steps forward with your business.
Jenny (04:44)
Real quick, I made something special for you for being a loyal listener of the podcast. I've spent the last few years analyzing a lot of flower farmers' journeys, including my own, and created a profitable flower farm roadmap. It breaks the business growth into several different stages across five different areas of business, including product, production systems, marketing and sales, operations, and infrastructure. It shows the problems that emerge
at every level, what to focus on and what to ignore to move your business forward. All you do is answer a few quick questions and we will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's free, it's fast and it'll probably give you more clarity in five minutes than five more hours of research. So if that sounds helpful to you at all, go to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
You can also grab this link in the show notes.
Jenny (05:46)
My first hires were just...
five, 10 hours a week of extra help around, whether that was admin work or with like social media and marketing, or just help around the farm. So your first hire doesn't have to be like a full-time salaried leadership role. It can literally just be someone that can help you just get through the stuff day to day. So.
Most common fields or most common first hires for small-scale flower farm or whatever other kind of small-scale businesses include farm help or field help. So, you know, doing the harvesting, the transplanting, seeding, weeding, all that kind of stuff.
Then help with harvesting or processing your product. So on my farm, well, I have a lot of help with harvesting, processing the flowers, making bouquets and selling them. So actually delivering them to clients and going to our farmer's market, stuff like that. And then one that I think is hugely underrated is marketing and admin help. Specifically, if you are a farm that sells direct to consumer where you are doing a ton of marketing yourself, if you can have somebody help you with the office work, the
end of your website, any administrative stuff, and usually these are things that farmers don't love doing and so you should delegate it to somebody who loves doing it and would be happy to help you. That is extremely underrated in my opinion. So that being said, know, hiring doesn't instantly reduce your workload.
you may be able to trade some hours of field time, but you're sort of trading that physical labor for mental labor. And now you're managing people. So I think of myself and my business now is I don't really do a lot of the day-to-day farm work anymore, but I am like the orchestrator of it. I feel like I orchestrate all the moving pieces of the farm. And I actually really like doing it, which I never thought that I would. I thought I'd always just want to be like harvesting and bouquet making and stuff, but.
I've actually gotten a lot of, ⁓ I don't know, a pleasure out of learning how to be a better leader and taking on that leadership role with confidence. So here are some things that I want to tell you about your first hires. These are things that I wish I knew when I first started hiring people for my business.
that whenever you hire somebody, hire help, you need to get help that generates revenue for the business. You should never think about hiring somebody that is just like...
Extra hands for weeding. Of course, we might need that, but part of this is creating help that our revenue multipliers. Every single helper or role on your team should be designed to make the business money and generate revenue. Like, who here would like more help if it didn't cost them anything? Right? Everyone. Because a lot of people look at
employees as expenses, but they're not they're an investment into making more money for your business. Every time you hire somebody think of them as an asset to your farm. Every single one of my employees makes my business money either directly or indirectly. My field crew leader who is pictured here holding those beautiful Hanoi Ranunculus, ⁓ she generates over hundred and forty thousand dollars in revenue a year for my business.
Just her.
I don't do anything. She executes and is responsible for major pieces of our CSA, our farmers market, our Dalia tuber sale. So I do not harvest, process, flowers for, deliver or attend our farmers market or flower CSA. She does. Which leaves me to do other things that make the business money like working on getting more customers or marketing and sales or whatever other high level work that I want to do. Creating efficiency, better systems and operations throughout the farm so we can
be more profitable. And so if you are thinking about hiring on your farm, think about how that person you're hiring can generate revenue for the business by directly creating value so you can go and do other things that also make the business money. Because of course we got into farming because we love it and we're passionate about it, but we're also businesses that exist to create financial stability for our families. And this is how we do that by creating help.
that generates revenue for the business. So this kind of starts at the beginning before you ever even hire somebody onto your team. It really starts with the idea and the inception of hiring somebody. So in the beginning, you're gonna start with a job description. It sounds very boring, but...
When you write your job description, it is so important that you clearly articulate exactly what this person will do, what outcomes they will be responsible for, how, I mean, you don't have to directly say like how they're gonna make money, but in your head, you should be thinking about that when you write it down in the job description. And that job description should be honest and upfront about the work. Obviously you never wanna...
like mislead people, but you also need to market this position just like you would your products or your services. Because in the job market today, you have to stand out from the other people, the other thousands of other people that are trying to hire people, especially in sort of this, I hate to call farming like low skilled labor, but the truth is when you're hiring people like admin or, you know, part-time field workers or farm workers,
They could go down the street and get a job as a dishwasher or at Burger King making $20 an hour right now. And so you're competing with that. So you need to really market your position and make it so it would be a job someone out there would actually love to do.
Talk about the perks. Talk about how beautiful your farm is, how you get to work outside all day, how it's an amazing company culture or whatever it is. And then when you're doing your interviews, you want to screen for attitude first, willingness to learn, and alignment with your company values more than anything else. And obviously this depends on the role. I'm assuming most people listening to this aren't hiring like leadership roles yet. It's kind of your first few hires. And so I have never really hired anyone for my
business that had farming experience. A lot of them didn't even have gardening experience, but they had a positive attitude. They aligned with our company values and they had a willingness and excitement to learn. And if they are coachable and teachable and they want to learn, they can become some of your best employees. My best employees were art teachers and a chemist. it's like anybody could be a great worker.
But it really all starts with that job description. So today, I'm hopefully going to convince you to...
step away from like the doer in your business doing everything being everything to being a leader in your business and in order to do this ⁓ your responsibilities become developing positive company culture like really becoming a place to work that people want to work at and where people feel good going to work and where everybody likes each other ⁓ that's a positive company culture that all starts with you as the leader because whatever you do and whatever you show up as at work it's going
to leak down to everyone else below you. So if you show up to meetings and you complain about your customers or the weather or whatever, guess what all of your employees are going to do? They're going to complain about your customers and the weather and you are mirror and it's your responsibility to help them change their behavior. And through that it means giving clear feedback in a kind way. So very clear direction and being kind with giving them any kind of feedback. ⁓
people say to me like, ⁓ I'm just not like a people person. I don't want to work with anyone. And I want to say that like, don't honestly not really either. Like I really like to work by myself. I don't thrive in like a group setting naturally. But leadership is a learned skill that you can learn how to become a better leader. It's not just like a natural thing that happens.
So here are some ⁓ quick tips for you when you do hire and you have people on your team. Don't assume that people just know.
you are going to have to repeat yourself over and over and over and over and over and you're gonna feel like you're being annoying and repetitive but sometimes for things to click people have to hear them multiple times and you have to remember that a lot of times we're training people on our systems and we're maybe training them on how to farm maybe a lot of them haven't even farmed before
And so this is all brand new to them and we have to be understanding of that and just not assume that people just know. And this means having systems into place, but that's like a whole other thing. think, actually, I think I do have a slide on that next, so I'll save that for a second. ⁓
you wanna make sure that you are training and onboarding properly, not just like first day on the farm, hey, here's our greenhouse, here's how you seed, go seed 10 trays, I'll be back in 20 minutes. That's not how you properly train and onboard people. ⁓ I will say that we have a whole system for onboarding and training people. I think I do talk about that in a minute, so I'll come back to that as well.
Something that I personally have to work on all the time and I'm still working on getting better at is having hard conversations. You don't wanna avoid hard conversations. You don't wanna avoid feedback. Even if it feels really painful to have conflict, it can be a positive conflict. It doesn't have to be like, you suck at this, you need to do a better job. That's not constructive. But it does need to be kind feedback that helps both you, the person,
that you're giving that feedback to and helps the company altogether. So being careful not to just kind of let things slip because if you see somebody not doing something quite right and you just think, it's not that big of a deal, I'm gonna let it go, and you do that over and over and over again, it's gonna snowball into your product not being what you want it to be. And so just making quick, direct, and fast feedback.
can help avoid that situation. these customers, not customers, these people that you hire on your team, generally most people want to do a good job. If you did well during that interview screening, you hired somebody who has that willingness to learn, that positive attitude. Most people really want to do a good job. They just need clear direction from you as a leader.
And then finally, changing expectations without communicating them. If you decide all of a sudden that you need to do something differently in your business or your expectations of that person or that process is different, make sure you communicate it and have communication be built into your culture. We do this through weekly meetings, which like, I always like threw up when I heard the word meetings before I was a business owner. I hated meetings. I thought they were so awful and stupid and a waste of time. But honestly,
It is the, if you do them right, it opens up this opportunity for open communication, open feedback, and allows you to develop positive relationships with your employees, and having that communication cadence, and just always talking about the goals, where you're headed, what you wanna do, can be super helpful.
Also, setting them up for success is really important. It's your job as the leader to set up your employees for success, which means having some core systems in place in terms of your hiring, management, and operations of the farm. This means whoever is on your team should clearly understand what their roles and responsibilities are.
Like very clearly they know exactly when they come in every day, what they should be doing, what they should be executing, what they're responsible for and what they need to report onto you. This also means onboarding. So I mentioned before we have a clear onboarding process. We basically look at it as like a roughly like 30, 60 and 90 day onboarding process where generally in the first 30 days, they're watching you. They're just shadowing you. Just like getting an idea of the...
what they should be doing, ⁓ just literally watching you. Then in the next phase, after the 30 days, between 30 and 60, you are having them do it, but you're right there watching them. And as questions come up, you're there to answer, you can make that feedback, those little corrections as they go. And by the end of those 30 days, chances are they should be able to independently execute on tasks and outcomes.
generally without you being there all the time. And of course you should always be available if they have questions or wanna check on you with something, but that's basically our onboarding strategy in a nutshell. Very simple, 30, 60, 90. First you watch them, then they, I'm sorry, they watch you, then you watch them, then they can do it independently. ⁓
Part of people doing work independently means you have to have written processes in place for them. So it doesn't have to be anything fancy, just simple checklists or what we call standard operating procedures, which all it is is written set of instructions. And when you have that, you also need to have defined standards. Like what does done look like? What does clean look like? For example, I told one of my employees to clean our barn one time and she like swept the floor and...
wiped down the tables and like, that was it. And in her mind, she was like, yes, I'm doing a great job because I'm cleaning the barn, but I didn't fully communicate what clean looked like.
by my standards, because things needed to be put away back in their homes, stuff needed to be organized, we needed to like wipe down the whiteboards, all this stuff. So what I did was I created just a written process with a little check mark, like have you cleaned the whiteboards, have you swept the floor and wiped down the tables, have you put every tool back in their home, X, Y, and Z, and then take a picture of the barn in the state you want it to look like when they're done and say, this task is done when it looks like this. So these things are not hard, it's just most
about communication and being very, very clear about the expectations around the job. And so many people get this wrong as business owners because you don't feel like you have the time to do it. You don't feel like you have the capacity to create these systems or train people on it, but this is what creates freedom for you. So because of our standard operating procedures, it removes, like I am not the bottleneck in my business anymore.
Before I had standard operating procedures or these written instructions for people, I could never get anything done because every time somebody had a question about something, if they weren't sure if they were doing it right, if they didn't know what the next step was, they would come and interrupt me. And I was pulling my hair out because I was like, I have all these people working for me, but I still can't get anything done. And so now that we have this in place, that rarely happens anymore because they can check this book.
for answers before they come to me. Now, obviously I'm still available if things come up, but this is essential if you want to create any kind of freedom for yourself and your business. It sounds boring. It sounds like corporatey, but I'm telling you, this is what your employees want. And this is what's going to free you up to do whatever the hell you want as a business owner.
When I finally created this, my employees were like, thank God, this is the best thing ever. They felt so empowered. And I was like, really? And they were like, yes, we don't have to come to you. All the answers are right here. Like we can do our job without, you know, like we can do it without you. And that makes us feel good. And I was like freaking awesome, which I was super surprised by. And every year we improve it, we add systems to it. It's great.
And another reason why this is so important is because nine out of 10 cases, the reason your farm is not growing or scaling is usually because of you. It's usually because you're the bottleneck. You are the constraint. And you have to multiply yourself as a business owner by hiring people who are also revenue generators for the business and who are also gonna be able to follow these procedures and systems because
I know this is not common, but you as the farm business owner should be able to step away from some point at your business and things shouldn't fall apart. The harvesting, the processing, the selling should keep happening easily without you. Now I will say, this does not happen overnight. In my position, this was years in the making of getting people on the team, training them, developing these systems. Like it's not gonna happen overnight, but this is the goal you wanna work towards. So systems,
don't have to be complicated, they don't have to be perfect, they can just be simple checklist or written instructions. So, you know, before I go into that, this is a picture of...
our whiteboard. This is where we just track all of our harvest yields and I don't do any of it. My employees do and it's just, you can make super simple things like just put your harvest numbers on the whiteboard and at the end of the week, they all go into a spreadsheet that one of your employees does. They do that data entry for you and it's great.
So next one, comes to managing performance. I kind of already covered this a little bit, but if you have people who are not performing that well or they're not doing things the way you want to, a lot of times it just comes back to clear expectations and boundaries and clear communication. know, obviously people have things that happen in their life, personal things that can affect them at work, but try to be understanding about that and try to differentiate between a skill gap and absolute
So like maybe someone just literally doesn't have the skill to do what you're asking them to do yet and you just have to train them on that some more. And then always, you know, correcting mistakes without crushing morale, being very, very kind about it. Then when it comes to employee retention, this is really hard.
with farming, I'm not gonna lie, labor management, getting good employees, keeping good employees is probably one of the most challenging things when it comes to owning a farming business. But because the nature of it, like my business is basically a seasonal business. It's really hard to pay someone a salary when you only have income like nine months of the year. But.
This is so possible. I have had employees come back for, I think Rebecca has been with us for like six, this will be your sixth season with us now. And ⁓ you don't need to pay them a million dollars a year. You don't need to promise them the world, but they want clarity.
Clarity, clarity, clarity. That's not a typo that it's on there three times. People want to know what is their purpose in the business? Are they contributing to something bigger than themselves? Are they growing every year? Are they learning? Are they important? Do you value them? Do you appreciate them? Do they enjoy the work? Do you make it enjoyable for them? Now, of course, you're going to always have
a bad hire here and there, somebody who just isn't a good fit or somebody's not right for the work, but for the most part, this is what it comes down to. So employee retention. And in order to do that, you need to help them reach their potential. You need to build up their skills by training them. You need to give them ownership over areas of your business. At first, obviously very, very small things like...
data entry or just harvesting one thing the right way. But eventually you want to give them ownership over certain outcomes, not just like checking off tasks. Because of course there are people who want to be those like people who just you come in, you give them some tasks and they check them off. in order to have somebody stay and retain them, they have to feel like what they do is important and they have to feel like they have some ownership over it. And of course you
trust and responsibility and that sometimes takes time. Okay? I realize ⁓ I want to leave some plenty of time at the end for questions and stuff so I might kind of like...
go a little bit faster over the next few slides, but I wanted to touch on company culture because this is another huge thing that comes down to retention. ⁓ I recently had interviewed a person to work here at my farm who came from another flower farm and they paid her, I don't remember exactly what they paid her, but let's just say it was like $20 an hour, but with the expectation that she worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week from
April through Christmas, no time off, no breaks, no sick time, and they hammered on her every time something wasn't perfect. And there was all these bad, toxic things happening in the workplace. And she was like, she had been doing it for like 15 years and she was like, I'm done, I'm not doing this anymore. And that's because they didn't have a good company culture. And so this is incredibly important to develop as a leader.
And this sounds sort of like a lofty idea or whatever, but ⁓ you want to have clear core values that your business stands behind, repeat them often, make them a part of everyday life on the farm, have a mission statement that everyone in your company knows and understands and lives by, make systems a part of daily life, and your language that you use really matters as well. We don't say employees here at my farm, they are team members. We are equal, we are team members. No matter if
I'm the leader and they are like, you know, coming in as minimum wage, we're all a team. They're not my employees. And that's a big differentiator when it comes to company culture.
I also think that you should share your goals with your employees. Tell them how many CSAs you want to sell. Tell them, you may not want to share all your revenue goals and everything, but tell them where you're headed because they will help you get there. But they can only do that if they understand where you are going. There's a great book about company culture. It's called Delivering Happiness by Tony Shay, and it's spelled weird. think it's ⁓ H-S-E-I-H, but if you're interested in company culture, great book about that.
So again, retention comes down to predictability, communication, feeling valued, not just paid, a job that they love, being appreciated, and working towards a shared goal together. So I'm gonna wrap up now with just some hard truths that I have learned from managing people from the past six or seven years or so is that number one, not everyone works out, and that's okay.
⁓ This is a part of life, this is part of owning a business. If you have a couple of people where it doesn't work out, don't get discouraged. You can always find somebody that really does work out and they could change your entire business for you. ⁓ Firing.
or letting people go is a part of leadership. I struggle with this so much. It is so hard. But if there's somebody that your business is outgrowing or they're not right for your business, it's okay to let them go and it's okay to do it kindly. And you just have to remember that this is for the best for both of you because chances are that person is not going to end up thriving in your business anyways and they can go on to find something that's in better alignment with their skills and their talents and what they're looking for.
⁓ Another hard truth is that good employees don't fix broken systems. A lot of people are looking for that one person that can change it all for their business, but you have to start with great systems on your business. If you don't have good systems in place, good documentation, good leadership, people are never gonna fix that. You have to build those systems so when you get somebody good, they can amplify that even more.
Really looking at your systems and processes on the farm, are they efficient? Are you doing it in a way that is simple and makes sense, that is streamlined and effective in a way that anybody can do it? Because if it's not, you need to rethink the way that system is happening. And your business can only grow as fast as your leadership.
You will be able to grow your business to a certain point and you'll probably be able to do the majority of it by yourself. But at some point, the only way to scale is by welcoming in new team members and hiring and onboarding and training and leading and becoming a leader. It is the only way to keep scaling your business. ⁓ This is a truth that I, for a long time, resisted. I was like, I don't need more people. I can do this. But it's simply not
true.
Just some few takeaways, key takeaways for you guys is that you don't need to be a perfect employer or a perfect leader. You just need to be clear and kind. And a lot of this comes back to clarity, like being very, very clear on your business, your mission, your values, what you stand for, where you're going, and what exactly you need to do to get there and who can help you do it. There's another great book out there called Who Not How. ⁓ It's another good one if you guys want another recommendation or resource.
My second key takeaway that I want you guys to take from this is that systems create freedom in your business. If you're a busy business owner who is burnt out, you are overwhelmed all the time, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, more tasks than you'll ever be able to execute on, systems is what it all comes down to. And then delegating those systems to other people, that's what gives you freedom as a business owner. And finally, that leadership is a learned skill, not a personality.
And lastly, if you guys want to learn more about this kind of stuff, I do teach a course ⁓ all about it. It's a business program where I teach operations and ⁓ marketing, sales, financials, all that kind of stuff. I have a bunch of free guides all about business and I mini courses and stuff on my website if you want to check it out, it's all free.
So with that, ⁓ here's my contact information. If you have any questions ever, feel free to reach out. Email is definitely the best way to reach
Jenny (32:35)
I hope that was helpful. If you are in a season where you're overwhelmed or stretched thin or realizing that you are actually the bottleneck in your business right now, I want you to know something. That's not failure. It's simply a growth edge. It just means that you're growing and that's a good thing. And leadership is definitely a learned skill. It's something that I am always, always working on. You do not have to be born a quote unquote people person.
to build a strong team that can help you. You just need clarity, systems, and the willingness to grow. So if this episode resonated with you, I have something for you. It is a free personalized profit roadmap. All you have to do is answer a few questions and I will send you a custom roadmap. It will help you identify exactly where the constraint is in your business right now, whether that's production or marketing, operations or leadership.
and it'll help you understand what you need to focus on next. You can grab that for free at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap, or you can grab it from the link in the show notes. And as always, thanks for being here and for doing the hard work of running a farm business on purpose. Don't forget, we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you then, same place, same time. Bye for now.
