Jenny (00:29)
When flower farmers tell me that they're overwhelmed, they often assume the problem is time. Like I just don't have enough hours. And sometimes that is absolutely true. But I think that there's another huge case of overwhelm that we don't talk about enough, which is we don't actually know what we should be doing. Like we don't know what deserves our attention, what crops are actually worth growing, which sales outlets are worth pursuing, what you should be doing for marketing.
What needs to be fixed first, or which of the 97 things on your to-do list actually matters. And when you don't know what the priority is, everything becomes a priority. And that is exhausting. And sometimes the solution to overwhelm isn't becoming more productive or efficient. It's getting more clarity. Now just imagine you're standing in your field and you're thinking, I need to weed. I need to harvest. I should probably post something on Instagram. I haven't sent an email newsletter in three weeks.
Should I start doing weddings? Maybe I need a CSA. I should do one of those workshops I saw on Instagram. my website looks terrible. It needs updating. I think I need to plant another succession of sunflowers. I should really start tracking my numbers on those. Haven't been able to do that yet. Should I be on TikTok? Maybe I need to do another farmer's market. I should probably grow more dahlias next year. I think dahlias are the answer. Okay. I'll stop, but I could keep going. That's our brains all the time, right? I know.
If you're listening to this, you probably relate to that. There is never a shortage of things a flower farmer could be doing at any given moment. And that's the problem because there will always be more work to do. The question is what deserves my attention right now?
And I truly think that that's the key to eliminating a lot of overwhelm. Obviously, there's other pieces to it as well, but overwhelm's often a clarity problem. It's when you feel like you could go in a million different directions and you're just not sure which direction to go in. And so for me, I know one of the biggest sources of mental exhaustion is constantly trying to decide what should I do next?
Because if you don't have a clear plan, you kind of just spend your days reacting and you do whatever is loudest or the most urgent or what's right in front of you, what's showing up on Instagram or what another farmer says you should do that gets your attention. And when you reach the end of your week or the end of your season exhausted, but you're not even really sure you're moving the business forward, the thing that matters.
In that situation is clarity because clarity removes the decisions. It helps you make the decisions. And if you've already decided that these are the three priorities for my business this quarter, I don't have to reconsider that every Tuesday morning. And of course, that doesn't mean that unexpected things don't happen. It's farming, it's business. Of course they do, but you have something to come back to. And
So marketing overwhelm is a perfect example of this where people I think get overwhelmed with choices or with not knowing exactly what to do in their marketing.
And so they kind of just don't do anything at all. And I've been here before, you guys, and I hear this all the time. Like I struggle with marketing, I struggle with marketing consistently. This is probably one of the biggest problems that flower farmers have. But what does that actually mean? And I think a lot of people interpret it as I should be doing more marketing. So now you think you need like everything, right? Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, stories.
Email, SEO, Google, flyers, partnerships, events, markets. Yeah, of course we're overwhelmed when you think about that. So instead, we have to get very, very clear on what the objective is and what exact things we have to do to make that happen. So your marketing plan should literally be for the next 90 days, my primary customer acquisition strategy is X, and my primary customer retention strategy is
Why that's it. And when you have this very, very simple plan in place, it removes a lot of the overwhelm because you know what's actually important and what's gonna make that happen for you. So maybe you decide that you're gonna focus on growing your email list and emailing those people consistently for your customer retention strategy.
Now, every shiny new marketing idea doesn't require a decision. Like TikTok, no, not the plan right now. New market? No, not the plan right now. Random collaboration? Maybe later. But if that is not going to fix my customer retention problem that I have in my business, then it's something I can safely kind of ignore for now and maybe come back to later. So a good plan doesn't just tell you what to do, it gives you permission to ignore a whole bunch of things that you
could be doing. And that is incredibly freeing because there are a million different ways that we can market our business. But when we get very, very clear on what is working and what to do to move forward, there's basically just steps to follow. And we just follow this one to two steps to be consistent and we can make it work. Now knowing what's working is a whole other topic that and this is something that we help our students inside of six figure flower farming do is figure out what
The actual marketing plan should be. But the whole point I'm trying to make here is when you get clarity on that and you have a actual solid plan on place, it eliminates a lot of the overwhelm of thinking like, maybe I should do this or I should do that, or I have this other new idea because that's always happening in our business. And the plan allows us to safely ignore that and eliminate all of that overwhelm of options. But the thing is with clarity is it requires information.
You can't just sit down and magically decide, like, okay, these are my priorities. This is what I'm gonna be doing. You need information, right? You have to decide what crops deserve more space. You have to know which crops are actually profitable. You have to decide whether to add another sales outlet. Like, in order to decide that, you need to understand how your existing ones are performing and which ones are actually earning profit inside of the business. You have to know where your time is going and what work could be delegated. And so when you
get this information inside of your business, you can actually make better decisions. And better decisions create clarity. And so this is why knowing your numbers matters. Not because spreadsheets are fun, because well, for some people they are, but the numbers actually help you answer the question of what should I actually do? Because when you have the numbers and the data,
You do become very clear on what is the priority and what isn't. And for me, that has really helped reduce the amount of overwhelm I feel my business.
Jenny (07:38)
If you're incredibly excited about what your flower farm could become, but right now you're working like crazy, your bank account isn't reflecting how hard you're working, and you aren't totally sure how to get from here to the profitable business you want, I made something just for you. This October 2026, I'm teaching a free live time and profit training for flower farmers where I'm gonna show you the three areas to focus on if you want to make more profit.
Get some of your time back and consistently sell the flowers you're growing without just working harder or growing more. And if you already know how to grow beautiful flowers, but you're ready to get better at the business side of flower farming, this training is for you. Now I'm teaching it live only three times in October 2026, and there will not be a recorded replay sent out. So you have to be there with me live.
Go and grab your free C at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash training. That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash training. And I'll put the link for you in the show notes. Go ahead and pause this episode and save your free spot now. And then come right back. I'll see you there.
Jenny (08:56)
And so all this kind of comes back to knowing the numbers so you can make decisions and create a concrete plan of action. Clarity isn't just like, I need to make more money in my business next year or I want to, you know, pay myself. Like that's a goal. The
Clarity is my goal is to increase profit by $20,000 next year. Based on what I know about my own business, my three biggest opportunities are X, Y, and Z. Therefore, over the next 90 days, I'm doing A, B, and C. Right now you have a plan. So you go from the vague, I need to improve my marketing. Very vague. That's where overwhelm comes in because you're like, what do I even do to?
being very clear about how you're going to do that. So I need an examples of this would be I need 50 additional CSA customers or I'm going to generate 200 new leads through Facebook or I'm going to grow my email list by a hundred every month. Or I'm going to run this marketing campaign within this time frame. So the more concrete plan of action we have,
That's based on the numbers, the more we can eliminate overwhelm. So here's another example of the vague, I need to make more money, right? And then you're like, well, I could do that a million different ways. But when you look at the numbers and you get very, very clear on what sales outlets and what flowers are making the most money, you can make a very, very clear plan for them from that. So you can go from, okay, I need to make more money to my biggest opportunity is actually.
improving my profit margins on my subscription service and I will do that by doing X, Y, and Z. Right. Or I need to become more efficient becomes harvest is consuming 12 hours a week. I'm gonna redesign that whole workflow and get it under eight hours a week. So as you can see, having the clarity turns anxiety into action and that is what reduces overwhelm. And a lot of times overwhelm is just a too much problem because
The uncomfortable part of being a flower farmer in this day and age is that we have unlimited opportunities to sell things and we have an unlimited list of things to grow and sell, right? There are so many different ways that you can take your business. There's so many different ways you can sell flowers, or so many different things that you can grow. And it becomes almost like this analysis paralysis of like, well, what do I even do? And the fact is that sometimes people just try to do
too much and that is what is creating overwhelm. And so sometimes some things just need to grow. You have to cut some things, cut the fat, in order to focus on what's actually going to get you to your goal. So maybe you're growing too many crops or you're offering too many sales outlets or you're saying yes to too many things or you're doing work that maybe someone else should be doing or continuing doing something because you've always done it, even though it's no longer serving you.
Or maybe you're literally somebody who's just like, I'm just getting started and I don't know which way to go in my business. I don't know which sales outlets to focus on.
Sometimes you don't need a better system or more efficiency. I mean, you can always be a little bit more efficient, but sometimes you just need fewer things to do. And that comes from having clarity in your decision making. When you're like, okay, I see now that there's a bigger opportunity in my area for doing, I don't know, weddings and events versus going to the f local farmers market. When you we look at the numbers, we sit down and we compare those two different sales outlets.
When you get very clear where the biggest opportunities are, it becomes a lot easier to focus on them and to just sort of eliminate a lot of that noise and overwhelm. So working harder isn't always the strategy. Choosing better is.
And once you have the numbers and you become very clear on an action plan to take, that's when systems and delegation can come in to really take things off of your plate and to free you up as the business owner to be able to actually take a deep breath, like have some space in your life instead of running around like a headless chicken from tas to task to task and never feeling caught up. And for a lot of business owners, they never even really reach this place.
Because they haven't gotten super clear on what the priorities are inside the business. So once you are clear on what needs to happen, then you can ask, how can we make this easier? Can it be systematized? Can it be automated? Can I delegate it to somebody else? Can we batch it? Can it be simplified? Maybe we can even eliminate it. Who knows, right? So there's no real point to becoming incredibly efficient at something that doesn't even need to happen in the first place.
And sometimes I see people trying to like optimize their systems and try to get really efficient at things before stepping back and asking the question of is this something we even really need to be doing right now?
So, this is the order. First, you get clarity on what's important, and you do that by understanding your numbers. Then you set your priorities. Then you put a concrete plan in action. And from there, you can put systems and delegation in place so it can be executed. So that's the order we want to move in to systematically reduce overwhelm inside of the business. And the caveat to this is yes.
Sometimes you actually don't have enough time. There are legitimate seasons where the your capacity and your time is the constraint of the business because chances are for a lot of people when they're just starting out, you might be working another full-time job like I was when I started my flower farm on the side. You might have young children like I do, and you're trying to raise a family, or maybe you have family members that you're caring for, or maybe
You're just dealing with something personally difficult and you're juggling a lot of balls right now. And sometimes not right now is an okay decision. So I want you to be able to clearly distinguish between I genuinely don't have the capacity from I feel like I don't have capacity because my business doesn't have clear priorities and everything feels urgent. Because these
Require different solutions. And I would say that the vast amount of time people think it's the first one that they genuinely don't have the capacity, but it's actually they just think that they don't have the capacity because the business doesn't have clear priorities in place. And then everything feels urgent and everything feels like overwhelm. But like I said, there definitely are times where you, as the business owner,
are the bottleneck because you genuinely don't have the time and the space and the capacity right now. And that is okay. There are solutions for both of these. There are just they're just different solutions or different ways that we approach those problems.
Now there is this like uncomfortable catch 22 here that the people often, I'll say often, the people who most need time to work on their businesses are often the people who feel least capable of taking that time. Because you feel like you're too busy harvesting to improve the harvest process, or you're too busy answering questions to create a standard operating procedure.
Or you're too busy marketing randomly to actually create a marketing plan. Or you you're too busy just trying to get cash in the door and selling everything to sit down and actually figure out what is most profitable in your business. Or you're too busy doing everything yourself to train somebody else. Like I hear this all the time. Like it's just easier if I just do it, or if it's just faster if I just do it. Right? That happens a lot. And so what happens is
We have these thoughts over and over and over again. And then another season goes by and another season goes by and another. And so sometimes stepping away from the work long enough to figure out how to do the work better is what actually gives you your time back and eliminates a lot of this overwhelm. And I think that work is pushed off a lot of times. But it's it shouldn't be viewed as another task on your to-do list.
It's an investment in making your list smaller and more achievable. And I think that this is what winter is for. Unless you're a farmer who is like a winter farmer or tulip farmer or whatever, or you force tulips in winter and that's your busiest time of the year. Whenever your slower season of the year is, that's when we should be stepping back to work on this. And for most people, that's the winter time, right? So I have a quick exercise for you to wrap up this.
Episode today. And that is, I want you to ask yourself if I could only accomplish three things in my business over the next 90 days, what three would create the greatest impact? And then ask why those threes. What information supports that decision? What specifically needs to happen? And then you want to turn.
Those three priorities into a concrete plan of action.
So you'll go from having clarity on what that is, what those priorities are, to making a plan and putting the systems in place so you can execute on it.
And this whole idea, this whole process is a huge part of what I want our students to walk away from when they take six figure flower farming, which is my business program. I don't want students to finish six figure flower farming with a hundred new ideas and an even longer to-do list. It's the opposite of that. We walk you through understanding your business well enough so you can say, I know.
What my biggest opportunities are. I know what the priorities are in my business right now. And here is my concrete plan of action and what I'm doing next. We look at your numbers, we look at profitability, we look at your efficiency and your time. We talk about time management skills as well. And we look at your marketing and sales. And ultimately, we put all that together into a concrete plan of action for your farm because information.
without clarity just creates more overwhelm. Like you literally walk away with a one page plan of action for the season. Cause the goal for me isn't to get you to just know more. The goal is to know what to do in your business that actually makes a difference. The goal is to know what to do with what you know.
And I think this is worth saying because one of the reasons sometimes people hesitate to join our program is because they say, I just don't think I have enough time. And so, yes, it does require some time. I'm not gonna pretend that it's not going to. You have to show up, you have to do the work, look at your business. But the goal isn't to add six-figure flower farming to your already full plate. The goal is to intentionally step back, understand what's happening in your business, and build a clearer plan.
For how you're going to move forward. So that hopefully you'll be spending less time spinning your wheels afterwards. And so if any of this is resonating with you, if you do feel like you're somebody who's constantly busy but aren't always confident that you're working on the right things, I would really love for you to come to my free training that I'm doing in October. We're gonna start looking at your business through exactly this lens: like, what are your biggest opportunities? What deserves your attention?
And what should you actually focus on next? Now, six-figure flower farming enrollment opens on October 13th, but this training is completely free for anybody who wants to get started with these concepts. I'll put the registration link in the show notes. I would love for you to come and join me. But after this episode ends, please go to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash training to save your seat. We have a couple of times for you to choose from in case you're busy that week, but it's trademarkfarmer.com.
Forward slash training. I would love to see you there. So if you're overwhelmed right now, I don't necessarily want you to just like go out and try to buy another planner or optimize your to-do list or something like that. And I definitely don't want you to try to wake up earlier or stay up later to try to get it all done. Instead, I want you to ask yourself, do I actually know what my priorities are and what's going to change inside of my business? Because when everything is important.
Everything competes for your time. But when you're clear about what matters, you can make a plan and you can say no to everything else. And you can finally put your energy towards the work that's actually going to move your business forward. And this is how we start to eliminate overwhelm. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget to go sign up for my free training where I walk you through some of this stuff a little bit deeper. It's at trademarkfarmer.com.
forward slash training
And also don't forget that we publish new episodes every single Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
