Jenny (00:28)
You can learn how to calculate a profit margin, like I promise you.
It's really not that hard. But what it is is intimidating. Cause when you do anything for the first time, I know for me, things that are new and I know that they're skills I need to learn, like I my instinct is to avoid it. My instinct is to kind of just like keep pushing it off, keep up avoiding it, not really want to face it. But then when I actually sit down and do the work, and usually I have somebody walk me through how to do it step by step or, you know, hire a mentor or
take a program or a course or something like that. When I just do that and everything's spelled out for me, the first time you do it is hard. But after that, with practice, every time it's easier, you gain the skill. And then it just becomes second nature to you. And that's just the way it is when you're acquiring all these skills when you have a flower farm and a business. So to learn your numbers, you have to understand things like what's making money, what's costing money, what products are actually profitable.
What are you paying yourself? Where's your time going? Where's the biggest financial opportunity? So like I said, you don't have to be a numbers person. You need to be willing to take a look at the numbers and don't wait until the business is bigger.
Because your numbers are probably the biggest tool that will help you make better decisions while you're building it. Number five, stop trying to be affordable. This is something I think almost every flower farmer struggles with. We worry, will anyone pay this price? So what if people think I'm expensive? What does the farm down the road charge? Like I personally wouldn't pay that much, or I don't want to price people out. Like I understand all of these, but.
Your responsibility is not to make your products affordable to everyone. Your responsibility is to charge enough so that your business actually works. Okay. Nobody's getting wealthy off of flower farming here. Let's just say that fr first and foremost, right? But you have to be able to charge enough to have a sustainable business that can keep going and to pay yourself for the long run. Because the alternative is you're going to keep doing this for years and years and years. You're going to keep losing money.
You're gonna eventually gonna get burnt out and resentful of the business and you're gonna stop and then it's not gonna exist anymore. And that is doing the world a disservice because the world deserves flowers and beauty in you to be able to do it inside of it.
Your prices need to help cover the costs, pay for your labor, pay yourself, invest back into the farm, and keep the business healthy. There will always be people who think that what you do is too expensive, no matter what you price it. That's okay. People are allowed to think that. You can't build your pricing around being accessible to every single customer or every single person. You can't underprice your way into a sustainable business. It just doesn't work. And if the numbers say something needs to cost,
Whatever amount of dollars in order for it to make sense, that's information you have to take seriously and you can make decisions based off of that. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't have affordable options inside of your business or you don't have low cost options available for people, but it does mean that the business as a whole needs to exist to serve people and serve you as the business owner, not just be affordable to everybody.
Number six, your time is not free. I think this one takes people a while, especially when you're doing everything yourself in the beginning. It's easy to think, well, it doesn't really cost anything because I'm doing it. No. Your time is one of the most finite resources in your entire business. If you save a hundred dollars by doing something yourself, but it takes you eight hours when somebody else could do it in two, what did you actually save?
Right. If one product generates ten thousand dollars but requires four hundred hours, and another one generates ten thousand dollars in a hundred hours, those are not equivalent things.
Doing things yourself doesn't make it free. And eventually your time becomes one of the biggest constraints on growth. You only have so many hours in a day. So the question stops being, can I just do this myself? And it becomes, what is the best use of my time? Like I find myself telling myself now over and over and over again, is this the best use of my time right now?
And the other piece is if you consider your time free when you're just starting out, by the time you get to a place where you're ready to hire people, you're not going to be able to afford to hire somebody if your pricing and how you've run your business has not accounted you as appropriate labor inside of it. So your time is not free. It has to be taken into account. Number seven is invest in your skills earlier.
And then actually use them. This is probably one of the biggest things I'd change because flower farmers will spend tens of thousands of dollars without blinking on high tunnels and greenhouses and seeds and tubers and perennials and coolers and tractors and tools and irrigation and whatever. And those things can absolutely be good investments and absolutely make you money back. But what I eventually realized was.
The asset itself doesn't create a return. The operator does, like you as the business owner, do. Like I can invest in a greenhouse. That greenhouse can produce thousands of dollars worth of plant starts. But if I don't know how to price them, market them, create demand for them, and sell them, then I basically bought myself a very expensive building full of plants. And so the skills are what allow me to turn that physical asset into a return.
And when I look back at the investments I've made in learning things like business skills and marketing and sales and financial management and leadership and business strategy, the skills don't disappear when the season ends. I get to use them again year after year after year, and I strengthen them year after year after year. compound, right?
But this important caveat here is that buying information doesn't automatically create return on investment. Implementation does. Like I have bought things that I haven't implemented onto. Simply purchasing a course or reading a book doesn't change your business. The return comes from learning it, then implementing it, and then improving it. I wish I had invested.
as seriously in the person running the farm as I did in the farm itself in the beginning.
Because the return I've made in investing in my skills as a business owner has hands down outpaced any investment, physical investment I've made in the business, like a high tunnel or a tractor or something like that. And so I, if I could go back in time, I would invest in my own business skill set above anything else. Number eight, revenue isn't the score.
Now, revenue milestones feel very important when you're building a business, like your first $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000. And obviously revenue matters. It matters a lot, right? But I wish I had stopped being so impressed with revenue and started asking What did that take to create? And what am I getting paid? What is the profit margin?
And I will say probably the biggest, most important revenue milestone for me and my business was just getting my business to earn that first $100,000 in a year. Like that was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. And it was the most important thing I've ever done because once I got there, I really felt like, holy cow, this was such a huge revenue milestone for me. And I finally did it. And I was like, what else can I do? If I can do this, like I feel like I can do so much more.
And so that is why this podcast is called Six Figure Flower Farming and why my business program is called Six Figure Flower Farming, because that revenue milestone was so important for me. But when I got there, I realized like, this revenue, like, yes, it's meaningful, but like it's really not that important. The profit is what matters the most. Because if your farm makes $100,000 a year.
But you spend $90,000 of it and you work 70 hours a week and you don't pay yourself and you're exhausted. You know, $100,000 doesn't tell me very much about the health of your business. And I see this all the time. And maybe you listening, maybe you're one of these people, it's nothing to be ashamed of because there are things that we can do to fix it. But I want to know what is left over? What did you pay yourself? How much time did it require? What did you have to invest? Is it sustainable? Is it worth doing?
Because a bigger business isn't automatically a better business. I'd rather own a simpler, smaller business that pays me well and supports my life and what I want in my lifestyle than chase some like obscure bigger revenue number just so I can say that I hit it.
So, yes, revenue matters, but it is not the core thing to be going for. It isn't the score. The more important thing is the health of the business, what the profit is and what you're paying yourself. Number nine, working harder isn't a business strategy. An overwhelm isn't proof you're doing it right. And I have to admit, this is something I have to continually tell myself and try to learn over and over and over again.
Because farming will give you an unlimited amount of work to do. There's always something that you could do. Always. There's always gonna be another bed to weed, another potential market to attend, another thing to fix on the farm, another email to send, another campaign to map out, another reel to make, another project to finish. Like it's endless, right? So if your solution to every problem is I
Just need to work harder, you're eventually gonna hit a wall. And I think this happens to most business owners at some point. But for farmers, there seems to be this sort of almost like badge of honor around this sometimes where we say we're exhausted, we're overwhelmed, I'm working constantly, therefore I must be doing everything I can.
But the goal isn't to become capable of doing an infinite amount of work. The goal is to become better at identifying which work actually matters. Okay. And overwhelm a lot of times can be like information overwhelm. Maybe you're doing too many things. You're growing too many crops. you don't have systems, you need help, you're whatever it is.
The fact of the matter is that you can't outwork a business model that doesn't work. And you can't just work harder and continue to scale your business. Cause at some point, working harder doesn't scale. In the beginning, absolutely, you're gonna have to work hard. You're gonna be working your butt off for a while. Okay. Everybody's different, but at some point that's not gonna scale anymore. And so from the very beginning, I would go back and tell myself, like,
Just know that this is going to happen and better prepare yourself for it by thinking about systems and thinking about what work actually matters and produces the result that I'm looking for. Number 10, stress is part of entrepreneurship. And you have to decide whether the trade-off is worth it.
I started a business because I wanted to have total freedom and I thought I would never be stressed again, which is ridiculous to say now. But I wanted to start a business to just be in charge of my own time, to do something that was fulfilling and to not be stressed.
And I will say I got maybe two out of those three. I do feel like I have a lot of control and freedom over my time now. Like I do things every day that I genuinely want to do, you know, for the most part. Obviously, we all have to do things that we don't want to do sometimes. Like yesterday I had to pay my New York State disability and paid family leave bill and
That took me way longer than it should. And I I digress, but you know, we all have to do things we don't want to. But for the most part, I genuinely love doing what I do. And I feel in control of my time every day. So I feel like I've got the freedom. I feel fulfilled by my work for the most part. There are periods of time where I don't like what I do. I want to throw in the towel. And I think that there are just periods like that in every business, no matter what you're doing.
But for the vast majority of the time, like I'm very fulfilled by what I do. I take a lot of joy and feel a huge sense of reward by what I do every day. But I definitely feel stressed. Not all the time, but there are periods of time where there is very significant stress. Owning a business can be incredibly stressful. There is a lot of uncertainty that comes with being.
A business owner and an entrepreneur, and particularly a farmer. There's uncertainty around the weather, your crops, pests and disease, money, payroll, cash flow, employees, customers, decisions. Every single year there's a new problem that you've never encountered before that you have to figure out what to do about it. I promise you, that is a thing.
And a lot of this stress just comes from the unknown. And when you have a traditional job, there can be a lot of comfort in. I show up, I do my job, I receive my paycheck. Now I traded some of that certainty, but I got something else in exchange. I gained significantly more control over my time, what I work on, who I work with, how much I can potentially earn, how I structure my days, the life that I'm building. Like there is so much flexibility.
In my work life right now, like I wake up and I see my kid every single morning. I take any time off I need to when I need to take him to the doctor's appointment or when I need a day off. I am I'd structure my business around the lifestyle that I want. So I traded some certainty for autonomy. And for me, that trade is so worth it. It's a personal decision and everyone has to make it for themselves. But I would tell myself if I was starting over.
Don't expect entrepreneurship to eliminate stress, but to build a business where the trade-off is worth the stress of it. And of course, there are ways that we can manage stress and we can try to minimize it and mitigate it. But the fact is, you're gonna have stress, but there's it's a trade-off, right? We're trading one thing for another. And for me, the trade-off is totally worth it. And finally, number 11, my last one here. You are allowed to build a business you actually want to own.
Because it's really easy to accidentally build a business you think you're supposed to have. Maybe every successful flower farmer you follow does weddings or offers workshops or grows dahlias or works every Saturday, whatever it is. That doesn't mean that you have to. I want you to ask: if this business works, do I actually want the job I'm creating for myself?
Because obviously it sounds very romantic and amazing to say, I'm a flower farmer. I grow flowers for a living. Like I just dance around in rose petals all day. But we all know that is not the reality of it. So I would ask yourself questions like, How much do you actually want to work? When do you want to work? What do you enjoy? What do you hate? What do you want to earn or what do you need to earn to feel comfortable?
It's your business. You get to decide what you want it to look like. And success really isn't building the biggest or the most impressive flower farm you possibly can. It's building a profitable business you actually want to own. Your business is supposed to support the life you're trying to create. So I want you to be careful that you don't accidentally build yourself a job that you hate as well. And you know what? If you do end up doing that, I want you to know you can always change it. There
is no absolutes in business. There's always ways to change and to move and to try to course correct back to the life that you actually want.
All right, this is the wrap-up of my brutally honest advice back to my beginning flower farmer self. And I would say beginning flower farmer self in like years one to six or seven, honestly. If I could actually sit across from the table from beginner Jenny after saying all of this, I think I would come back to that number one question that I kept asking myself way back in the beginning of can I actually do this?
Like, is this actually possible? Can I replace my income? Can I build a real business that supports my life growing flowers?
And I would tell her, you're asking the wrong question. And I want to tell you this too. I want you to stop to try to figure out whether you're inherently capable of doing this or not, or whether it's possible. Obviously it's possible. There's thousands of people doing it. And it is possible for you to do it if there's other people doing it as well. I want you to start asking, what do I need to learn in order to do it? Because I wasn't born knowing how to market flowers.
I wasn't born knowing how to read a profit and loss statement. I wasn't born knowing how to price things correctly or manage employees or build systems or figure out which parts of the business were actually working. I learned those things and I'm still learning all the time. So if there's a gap between the flower farm you have today and the one you want to build, I'm
Please do not automatically interpret that gap as evidence that you're not cut out for this. There may simply just be skills that you haven't acquired yet.
And honestly, that realization is a huge part of why my business program called Six Figure Flower Farming exists. There is so much incredible education available to help flower farmers become better growers and to learn how to farm. But I needed business skills to make this work. And that's why I eventually built six-figure flower farming to teach that, to teach how to understand your numbers, to identify what's actually profitable.
How to price intentionally and fairly, how to use your time more efficiently, and how to market and sell your flowers in a way that doesn't drain you. And how to look at your business and figure out what the biggest opportunities actually are. And so I wanna be very clear about something. Taking a course isn't going to magically build your business for you. You still have to implement it, you still have to make decisions, and you have to do the work.
But you don't have to spend years trying to independently figure out every single business skill that you don't currently have. That's the gap I'm trying to help you close with six-figure flower farming. You can learn these skills very, very quickly and in a short amount of time. Now, just in case you're interested in this program, enrollment for six-figure flower farming will be opening on October 13th for our big winter cohort. And before then,
I'm hosting a completely free training for Flower Farmers. So if you're listening to this episode and thinking, I know I know how to grow flowers, but I really need to become better at running the business. This training is for you. I will put all the details in the registration link in the show notes for you, but I would love for you to come and join me. You can also go to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash training to sign up for it. So after this episode ends, go and sign up for it. Like I said, it's completely free. We have a few different
Times that you can choose from. And again, it's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash training. Now, final thought here. I think that beginner me would probably be relieved to know that she didn't have to have some magical entrepreneurial gene or be a numbers person to make this work. She didn't need to know everything. She just needed to keep figuring out what she didn't know yet and be willing to.
To put the work in, invest in herself, and learn it. And honestly, I think that's still pretty good advice for me where I stand today. So thanks again for listening to another episode of the six figure flower farming podcast. I hope this advice was as useful to you as I wish it would have been for me when I had first started. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week, same time.
Same place. See ya done.
