Jenny (00:29)
Most flower farmers don't even realize that they're losing money every single week.
Not because they're doing something wrong, but because small little things go unnoticed. Like little profit leaks that don't feel like a big deal until you add them up over an entire season. And the tricky part is these profit leaks often hide inside things that just feel normal. They just feel like part of farming. And we're going to dive into five silent profit leaks that I see all the time. In case we haven't met, my name is Jenny Marks. I own a multiple six-fix
flower farm growing flowers on less than an acre. I've been farming for my entire life but have been operating this cut flower business I have today for about 11 years and I now help other flower farmers stop guessing and actually make money from their flower farms because flower farming is way too hard to not actually earn a profit from it. So today I'm gonna walk you through those five silent profit leaks I see all the time and how to fix them without working more or growing more.
So the first profit leak I see on a lot of flower farms is growing way, way, way too many varieties and not growing enough of what sells. More variety doesn't usually mean more money. It usually means more chaos. And of course, before I go any further, there are exceptions to this, which I'll come back to in just a second. But...
for the majority of flower farmers. It's so easy to want to grow everything because you love flowers and they're your passion and they're beautiful. But when you spread out your space, your acreage or lack of acreage, your time and your energy across too many crops,
A lot of times you end up with small quantities of everything and not enough of anything to sell efficiently. And that leads to waste, extra labor, and inconsistent sales. Now, the exception to this is if you maybe sell to florists or wholesale.
And a lot of times those types of customers want a lot of variety. They buy a ton of foliage. They buy filler flowers and focal flowers. They want all the different things. And plus if you already have existing customers that are buying like, I call it like piecemeal flowers, know, like retail customers, if you're selling to the general public, they just want pretty flowers, right? So you're just selling them something that looks pretty in a mixed bouquet. But if you're selling to flower professionals,
like florists or a wholesaler, if you kind of like maximized out what you're selling to them, the way to make more money is to offer them more things or more variety so they can buy more of the things they're already buying, but buy it from you instead of somebody else.
So I would say that is the exception to this. However, like I said, most flower farmers are just trying to grow way, way, way too much. So I would identify your top three to five revenue generating crops. And this looks like things that are constantly selling out things that you actually earn a really good profit on and then scale those instead of constantly adding new varieties. Um, I know some people have this angle where they want to be the person like at the farmer's market with the most
variety and I think if that works for you cool keep doing that like definitely don't stop but for me when I used to go to the farmers market
And I'm just using the farmer's market as an example. And like in the springtime, we would have so many different kinds of crops, so many different kinds of flowers, but like people just wanted vernunculus. Like they didn't want the tulips. Some people bought the anemones. Like, I mean, we still grow anemones, but a very, very small amount of them. And I was just like, man, like everybody just wants these vernunculus. So I'm just going to grow way more of those. And so the reason I'm telling that story is because
because I don't want you to copy what I'm doing, because it might not work for you, but I want you to recognize patterns in your sales motions. Like, what are people consistently buying? What are you consistently selling out of? What do people always ask you for? And then grow more of that. If someone never asks you for Scabiosa, or if it's one person out of like your thousands of customers, like maybe consider cutting back on that, you know?
You know, just cut and reduce anything that doesn't sell well, that takes too long to harvest or that complicates your system. Like we earn 50 % of our total revenue from our flower farm from two crops, from Ranunculus and Dahlia.
Now that may not be everybody's cup of tea, but it makes our systems extremely streamlined and very efficient because we just plant a ton of vernaculous and we plant a ton of dahlias and we just try to sell even more of them than we're already selling. And of course we balance this out with other flowers, other crops, but
We have found that it's just been incredibly efficient and streamlined to have kind of like this set crop mix that we know sells well, that we know our customers like, and to stick with that. And of course we still test things from time to time. We try things out. But when you try to grow too many things, you really are spread thin and you a lot of times end up not even harvesting stuff in your field, which is literally just wasted time and money.
Jenny (06:09)
Hey, real quick, I made something special for you for being a loyal listener of the podcast. Because one of the things I find most frustrating about the education available to farmers out there is that it's just random information without any context as to what you should be focusing on in your specific situation and your stage of business. So I've spent the past several years analyzing a lot of different flower farmers' journeys, including my own, and created a way to give you a personalized
Profitable Flower Farm Roadmap. It's all free. All you have to do is answer a few questions and we will send you a personalized roadmap that tells you exactly where you're at in your business and what you need to focus on to grow and most importantly, what you can ignore for now because it's not gonna move the needle. So if that sounds interesting or helpful to you at all, go to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. Again, that's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
I'll also drop the link in the show notes.
Jenny (07:11)
moving on to the next profit leak I see on flower farms is under pricing even slightly. And this probably should have been number one, but a $1 pricing mistake can literally cost you thousands of dollars over a season.
When I look around at the landscape of small scale local flower farming here in the US, I think that the vast majority of people are under pricing their flowers. And I think that this comes down to a confidence thing where people don't feel confident in their marketing and sales, or it's not, they haven't figured out their messaging yet. And so they're nervous to charge too much. And I get that.
I think that there's just like a skilled gap there or maybe like an experience gap where you need to really get confident with your numbers and your pricing. And that's definitely something I can help you with. But under pricing is the biggest thing that is causing a deficit in most flower farms.
Even small gaps can really add up fast and often pricing is kind of based on what feels fair, not on those actual costs or margins. And so what I would love for every flower farmer to do is to review your pricing against your time, your inputs, market demand, and just test small price increases. Like I wouldn't jump from like, you know, you're selling a $10 mixed bouquet to a hundred dollar mixed bouquet, you know, try.
some small price increases and see what happens. Like don't make that jump. You can adjust gradually and really focus on your margins, your profit margins, not just making the sale. For example, we did a very small price increase this year that we felt like we really needed to make with our vernunculus. We just increased the price by a dollar. So we went from charging $25 a bunch to $26 a bunch. And we
did not see a drop in our sales. I don't think anybody noticed. I don't think anybody said anything. But if we're selling thousands of bunches over the season, that $1 price increase is amounting to thousands of dollars of additional revenue for the farm.
And that's going to help us make up a lot of our rising costs that we've had over the past couple of years. Labor costs have increased. I've had people working for me for years that they're getting paid more. Brand new labor coming in is costing a lot more money. Even just like entry level field laborers were paying a lot, which I'm happy to pay people. just saying like, it is something on my mind when I'm looking at our profits kind of condensing a little bit.
and having to adjust our pricing for that. It's gonna help adjust for the increase in seeds and plugs and potting soil, for the increase in our propane and like everything has just been going up lately, but a lot of farmers just never ever raise their prices to accommodate for that and so their margins compress more and more over time. So just taking a look at your pricing is definitely a big profit leak.
Moving on to profit leak number three is overproduction or wasted stems and poor harvest timing.
Every single stem that is left out in the field that you don't sell or even that you harvest and don't sell was still paid for with your time and money. Overharvesting.
Under-harvesting and poor timing leads to flowers that don't get sold or they don't last long enough to sell. And this is probably one of the most overlooked leaks because it feels like a production issue, but it's a profit issue. So you want to harvest your flowers kind of based on your actual sales plan, not just guesswork. You want to track what's actually selling every week
And you want to use that data to make your crop plan for the upcoming season. So you're not overproducing or under producing based on your sales goals. So when we do our crop plan, everything is based off of our sales projections. And sometimes we overshoot. Sometimes we undershoot. It's really, it's probably impossible to make your whole flower season perfect.
At least in my experience, but you can get really, really close with keeping records on what's selling well for you. Who's buying what through what sales outlets you're selling stuff to. then based off that data, making projections for the upcoming season. So you can make your crop plan. So you're not overproducing flowers or under producing. Cause when you overproduce, you're spending a time and money and energy.
producing those flowers that aren't selling. And so you're not going to make a profit. But when you under produce.
If you have demand, but you can't sell flowers because you don't have enough, that's also a problem because you're leaving money on the table. Now you can always buy in flowers in that situation. ⁓ but it's, it is a cost and there are ways to solve these things like on the fly, but you'd really rather not. So it comes down to precision planning for your season that can help patch some of those profit leaks from overproduction or under production. then.
This is sort of like a side note, but it's related. It's harvesting things at the correct time, their peak time to harvest them
and proper post-harvest management to make sure that the flowers that you're harvesting actually last a long time.
Now profit league number four, spending money without a plan. Random spending is one of the fastest ways to kill profit. And I did this when I first started my business, but you just kind of like buy tools and supplies and whatever without a clear plan. ⁓ when you don't have a budget in place, it creates bloated expenses. And a lot of the time those purchases don't directly increase revenue. This is how farms can be really busy and growing, but still not profitable.
So the trick to this is not really a trick at all. It's making a budget at the beginning of the season and checking in frequently throughout the season and make sure you're really sticking with it. And now your budget is going to be based off of your past data and your goals. And everyone's situation is a little bit unique. This is what we bring people through inside of our program, our business program, six figure flower farming is to really show you what you should be spending, what your margins are going to look like.
and you can figure out a budget that you can stick to so you know you can earn a profit instead of just ordering stuff last minute on Amazon every time you need some more Hortonova netting or your snips break or whatever. Obviously, there are situations like that. But we do the opposite as much as possible.
We make a plan as to all of the things, this big long list of all of the things we think we're gonna need throughout the season. And we do one big bulk order through our wholesaler. And we do it at a time when they have low sales, so we get an 8 % discount. And that way, we are able to get in the supplies that we need, they're inside of our budget. And then when unexpected expenses come up, because they will, a lot of it is mitigated by that plan.
process but as they come up we have a line item in the budget for unexpected expenses so we don't overspend accidentally.
Last but not least, the final profit leak we're going to talk about is having way too many sales channels. I hear this advice all the time that you need to diversify, diversify, diversify. And I just.
Do not agree with it in most situations. I think that having more sales channels can actually mean less profit in certain situations. When you try to do farmers markets, weddings, wholesale, subscriptions, events, one-off custom orders, ⁓ on farm.
experiences and workshops, like all of that at once spreads you super, super thin. Like each sales outlet, each channel has its own systems. It has its own time demands. It has its own tools, its own costs. It has its own customer. And when you try to do all of them, it seems like none of them are really performing it.
to their highest potential. Now I'm not saying that you need to just have one sales channel and only that. In fact, I don't recommend that. I think you should absolutely have multiple, but.
starting those multiple sales channels and finding ones that are stabilized and that bring in consistent revenue and then optimizing them so you can increase the revenue you're getting from them. You increase the profit that you're getting from them with better systems in place and better efficiencies. And then when you hit a ceiling, figuring out how you can maximize it even more. And then eventually you might get to a place where like, all right, I feel like I have completely maxed out my, you one to
four main sales channels. Now I have the people, the team, you know, I mean like the team members or the capacity to hire people to help you with that. The profit to invest in it and the time capacity to take on another sales channel. So for me personally, I think that that is the way I like to operate. And when you spread yourself thin trying to do so many different things,
You're not actually really known for something either, and you're having to buy and market to all these different people and use all these different tools which compresses your profit margins and makes things really complex. And it makes you so you don't really have the capacity to get really, really good at those things before adding more. So I would love for you to figure out what your most profitable sales channels are, and if you need help doing that, I can help you just reach out. ⁓
and then trying to scale those ones before you start adding in a thousand other sales outlets.
So those are the five silent profit leaks I see most often on flower farms. And I wanted to talk about this because if you can find ways to kind of plug these profit leaks, it's going to make you more money, it's gonna make it so you can pay yourself more. And these are all just things to think about.
If you feel like your farm should be more profitable than it is, it's probably not because you need to do more. It's likely because there are profit leaks adding up behind the scenes and all of these little things add up to a lot.
So here's a quick action step that you can do today if you want to write down your current crops, pricing, sales channels, and recent purchases and circle anything that feels unclear, unintentional, or like you may be losing money here. If you can identify where your profit is leaking from, whether that's let's go through them again,
whether that's just growing way too many varieties and not enough of what sells, if it's under pricing, if it's over production or maybe under production, and it's just randomly spending money without a plan, just over spending, or that you have too many sales channels and you're spread so thin and trying to do so much that your margins are compressing, if you can find where the profit is leaking and stop that from happening, you're gonna make more money on your flower farm.
So if this episode gave you a light bulb moment or a few of them, I would love it if you took a minute to just leave us a review on Apple podcasts. It really helps more flower farmers find the show and helps all of us grow more profitable and sustainable flower farm businesses. A rising tide lifts all ships
Jenny (19:21)
Hey, real quick, I made something special for you for being a loyal listener of the podcast. Because one of the things I find most frustrating about the education available to farmers out there is that it's just random information without any context as to what you should be focusing on in your specific situation and your stage of business. So I've spent the past several years analyzing a lot of different flower farmers' journeys, including my own, and created a way to give you a personalized
Profitable Flower Farm Roadmap. It's all free. All you have to do is answer a few questions and we will send you a personalized roadmap that tells you exactly where you're at in your business and what you need to focus on to grow and most importantly, what you can ignore for now because it's not gonna move the needle. So if that sounds interesting or helpful to you at all, go to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. Again, that's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
I'll also drop the link in the show notes.
Jenny (20:23)
thanks for being here for another episode of the six figure flower farming podcast. Don't forget. We publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
