Jenny (00:29)
The number one thing that flower farmers tell me they need the most help with is marketing and sales. And while that may be true, I think that it is the first instinct when flower farmers want to grow their business or make more money. They just always think immediately, I need more customers. I need to sell more. I need to grow more flowers. And a lot of times that is true. Like if you're just starting out, you probably do just need more customers and you probably do just need to work on your marketing and sales.
But if you are a few years in or you're established or you have meaningful revenue, if you're wanting to grow your flower farm, sometimes the answer is not getting more customers. If your margins are compressing or they're low, More often than not, there is a much easier, much faster lever sitting right in front of you and it's pricing.
In case we haven't met, my name is Jenny Marks. I have built a multiple six-figure flower farm growing flowers on less than an acre. I have been farming for my entire life, but I've been operating my current cut flower farm for about 11 years now. And I now help other flower farmers stop guessing and actually make money doing this because flower farming is way too hard to not earn a profit. But there is an issue of chronic under pricing in our industry.
So in today's episode, I'm gonna walk you through why pricing is so powerful, why most flower farmers avoid it, and an example of how raising your prices can make a significant impact on your bottom line, even if you only raise them a tiny, tiny bit. Because we wanna make sure that you raise your prices in a way that actually feels good and works for both you and your customers. There are technically only really three ways to grow
your business. And most people are pulling the hardest lever, not the smartest one. And at the end of the day, you can really get more customers. You can get your same customers to buy more often, or you can increase your prices. Now most follower farmers, like I said, try to focus on the first two. They try to get more customers and they try to get their existing customers
to come back and buy more often, which obviously both of those are great and you should absolutely do that, but they both require more time, more labor, more flowers, more complexity, but pricing is different. Pricing doesn't actually require more capacity. We need to start viewing pricing as a strategic tool.
not something to be dreaded and not a last resort. But it is actually one of the highest leverage moves that you can make. A very, very small price change can outperform a big increase in effort, a big marketing campaign, a big push to grow more flowers and increase production and hire more employees.
And if your time and energy is limited, which they usually are, it's worth asking if you could just improve one of these things, getting more customers, getting customers to buy more or increasing prices, which would help the most. So let's just walk through a super realistic example. Let's take each of these.
getting more customers, getting them to buy more often and increasing prices and increasing each of those by 20 % and see what happens. So let's just say you sell 100 bouquets at $20 each for easy math. That means your revenue would be $2,000 and let's just say that with all your costs, you're like labor, supplies, you're overhead, you're earning about a 50 % margin on those. Again, just doing easy math here. That means your profit is $1,000.
So you sell 100 bouquets and you profit $1,000. Now, let's try to improve each of these options by 20 % to see which would help the most. So the first way to grow your business would be to get 20 % more customers. This means that you would do more marketing and sales, you would have to grow some more flowers to meet that demand, but you would increase your customer base by 20%, which means that you would sell 120 bouquets.
at $20. This means that your revenue would increase to $2,400, but your costs are also increasing because you need to increase your marketing. You need to increase the amount of flowers that you're actually delivering. There's 20 more bouquets of flowers that you need to harvest, that you need to make the bouquet, that you need to sleeve, so there's extra time and materials there that are costs. So let's just say that your cost increase
probably to about $1,200, meaning that you're going to profit $1,200. That means that by increasing your customer base by 20%, that's an extra $200 in profit. So yay, you profit more, but it comes with more harvesting, bunching, bouquet making, delivery, more labor,
which is great, but it is a lot more work. And sorry, this is a numbers heavy episode today. So don't glaze over on me, just stick with me because I promise this is gonna be a really eye-opening point that I'm going to make. Now, let's say that you don't wanna do that, you don't wanna market more, you don't wanna get more customers that way. You wanna grow your business by just getting your existing customers to come back and buy.
you wanna retain them, and so you want your current customers to buy 20 % more often. That would definitely grow your business, but it's the same result. You're still selling 120 bouquets total. So we're in the same situation as we were before. We're earning more revenue, about $2,400 in revenue, but our costs are about $1,200, so our profit is $1,200. So again, we are earning an extra $200 in profit than we were in the very beginning.
helpful for sure, but still tied to capacity and time because it requires more harvesting, delivery, time, materials, labor, all that stuff. So the third option is if you want to grow your business, you could increase your prices by 20%. This means that the bouquet price would go from 20 to $24. So you will sell the same 100 bouquets to your same existing customers. You don't change
anything except for the number on the board. Your revenue goes up to $2,400, but your costs stay the same at $1,000, meaning that you will profit $1,400, whereas in the first two scenarios, we only profited $1,200. That's an extra $400 in profit from the very beginning. That is $2,400.
twice the profit increase of option one, getting 20 % more customers, or option two, getting your customers to buy 20 % more often. So you get double the profit increase without increasing your workload, your time, your costs, or complexity. Now, let's just look over the entire season. Let's say you increase your prices 20 % over the season.
Let's say that you move 2000 bouquets over a growing season. Now my growing season is roughly 35 weeks. That would mean that's only 60 bouquets a week. So pretty, pretty manageable. Um, but 2000 bouquets sold over a growing season would mean that you would add $8,000 in pure profit to your bottom line without doing anything else differently.
So $8,000 that goes into your pocket as the business owner, or $8,000 to just go buy whatever you need, a new flower cooler, part of a new greenhouse, whatever you need, I don't know. But a 20 % price increase would result in $8,000 in pure profit.
Not bad. That is the leverage hidden in pricing. A very small, very reasonable price change affects every sale that you already make. And honestly, most of your customers are not even gonna notice. Some of them might, some of them will, and you may lose a certain percentage of customers if you do a big price increase. That may happen. However,
nine times out of 10, you are going to earn more revenue from that price crease, even with losing a handful of customers. So obviously we don't want to price gouge, we don't want to just make our bouquets like super, super high for no reason. And obviously there's a lot of other things that come with this as well. If you're going to do a significant price change, your positioning and your offers have to match that. Your marketing.
and your messaging all have to match it in order for it to work. But a lot of times you could do a 5 % or a 10 % price increase and your customers won't even notice most of the time, especially with seasonal flower farming because your product is changing all the time. Like we don't have Ranunculus all year round. We don't have peonies all year round. And so you're gonna have flowers for a few weeks of the season and then your price is gonna change and they're not even gonna notice.
and it can have a significant impact on your bottom line. I mean, this could be life changing for your business. This could be the difference between your business failing and your business succeeding. It could be the difference between you paying yourself this year or you're not paying yourself yet again.
And I wanna be clear that I think getting more customers and getting them to come back more is absolutely something that you should be focusing on doing, but it pulls on your time, your energy and your systems. And these small little price increases can make a huge difference in your business without you really having to change anything at all. And this does not mean that pricing is the only thing that matters and it does not mean that prices should be raised carelessly.
It just means that when your capacity is tight, when you are tired and things are hard, pricing is often the fastest and least exhausting lever available when it comes to earning a profit from your flower farm. So I want you to ask yourself this question this week. If I sold the same amount of flowers I sell right now, but at slightly different prices,
How different would this season feel for me? Now you don't need perfect cost data to start thinking this way. You just need to notice where leverage might exist in your business.
Jenny (11:44)
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 (12:47)
Think about what a 10 to 20 price increase would look like and do some rough math for yourself. you guys, if you sell,
Let's just say that if your season is only 20 weeks long, this would be like with no shoulder seasons, you live in the North, you have a very short growing season. It's 20 weeks long. And let's say you sell, you know, 1500 bouquets over that time.
That's 75 bouquets a week. That's totally achievable. Very easily achievable.
If you just add five bucks onto your mixed bouquet prices, that would be $7,500 in pure profit. It, these little price increases multiplied across your season add up super, super, super fast. So I would love it for you if you could do this on your farm. Now we last year raised our Zinnia prices from like $12 very quickly the next year to $15.
Then in one season, raise them to 17 and then to 20, $20 for a bunch of 10-stem Zinnias, like the big Zinnias, the giant binaries. And I'm telling you, we sold more of them. I cannot explain it. I don't know why it happened. I don't know the sales psychology behind it. Maybe it was just pure luck, but I was so worried. And I was like, man, we just got to raise our prices on these things. They've been at this price for way too long. Our margins are compressing and we sold more of them.
And it was crazy, but I think the real reason that farmers don't raise prices is because of fear. They avoid raising prices because they haven't run the math. They don't know the real numbers and they're afraid of losing customers. They're afraid of comparing themselves to other farms. They want to feel fair and they don't trust their value yet. But the truth is that their pricing needs to support your business, not your comfort level. So I want you to notice where your pricing is based on feelings versus data.
remember, not every customer is your customer. And that's OK. Some people will not want to pay for a price increase. And that's OK. It really, really is.
Now you don't need to raise prices across everything overnight. There are smart places to start where risk is low. The return is high. Take a look at where you have really low prices and think, maybe I could just increase that a dollar. And honestly, if you just increase it a dollar and you sell a few hundred bunches, that's a few hundred dollars of profit back in your pocket. And a lot of the times what you're worried about when you raise your prices, a lot of times it doesn't even happen.
and often higher prices can actually position your product as more valuable.
If you're feeling maxed out on time and you want to increase your profit, things are tight. This is one of the simplest places to look. So just pick one product, just one and increase the price slightly this week, just slightly. And just watch what happens. Not what you feel will happen, but what actually happens. Take note and make adjustments from there. That's how you start building confidence in your pricing. Besides knowing the numbers behind it, because I know there's so many people listening to this right now.
and you don't actually know your cost to produce flowers, I can definitely, definitely help you with that. It will make you so much more confident, so much faster. Come and join our business program. It will make a world of difference in your confidence with your business and your flower farm. But anyhow.
if you know another flower farmer, a friend or somebody else, or maybe somebody in a Facebook group with you who's working really hard, but not seeing the profit they want to yet, share this episode with them because this is one of those shifts that can make a huge difference. So share this episode. And if you want, if you got value out of this,
please, please, please leave us a review on Apple, podcasts or Spotify. It will help other flower farmers find this information. You've heard this before, a rising tide lifts all shifts. If we as a collective industry can get over this under pricing dilemma that we have, all of us are going to thrive. We're all going to do better. We're all gonna be able to support each other and make small scale flower farming
a more likely legitimate career for more people, which I want for the world. And I bet if you're listening to this, you do as well.
Jenny (17:13)
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 (18:15)
Thanks again for listening to the Six Figure Flower Farming podcast and for your reviews. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
