Increasing Profitability in Tough Times

Unusual economic conditions are putting new pressure on flower farmers and floral businesses. Join Jenny Marks from Trademarks Flower Farm as she provides practical guidance on how to track profitability—and how to make smart operational adjustments when the numbers call for change. You’ll learn straightforward methods for monitoring key financial metrics, spotting trends, and identifying which parts of your business drive (or drain) profit. We’ll also cover strategies for improving efficiency, adjusting plans or product lines, and making informed decisions that build financial resilience.

Designed for growers watching the bottom line, this session offers clear, actionable tools to help your business stay adaptable and sustainable in a shifting economic landscape. This one-hour Zoom-based webinar will offer a Q and A session with Jenny and is complimentary for ASCFG Members.

About the Instructor: Jenny Marks is a flower farmer and educator based in Clifton Springs, New York, where she owns and operates Trademarks Flower Farm, a productive and profitable one-acre flower farm known for its early spring blooms and efficient growing practices. Growing up immersed in agriculture, Jenny worked in various farming roles before starting her own farm. She now specializes in cut flowers like ranunculus and dahlias, selling through markets, CSAs, and other channels, and focuses on building sustainable, profitable farming systems. In addition to running her farm, Jenny founded Trademark Farmer, where she teaches and mentors small-scale flower growers through online courses and coaching, and serves as the Northeast Regional Director for the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome everyone. I hope you're doing well today. My name is Rebecca, and I'm the education director for the association. You are joining us for the last of our Navigating Uncertain Times webinar series. And this is really about, you know, finding, you know, new ways, new ideas, new strategies to pivot when things are when we live in interesting times. And so I'm really excited that we got to put together this series. I'm also excited that we got to share it with the public. Today we have a kind of a combined audience, current members and non-members. And for folks who are non-members, I just want to reiterate that we have a code here, the QR code. You can stand on and join today for a discounted week. The ASCFT offers webinars, an incredible trade magazine that's been going on for decades with articles, advice, all kinds of things. And that's just scratching our service. We have a wealth of resources to share. We hope you'll join us. Yeah, okay, I think I'll segue into what we're here today for. So for some context, you know, we have the series is about how to pivot, what strategies to adopt in an uncertain economic times. And so this is the last of the series. We've talked about the state of the industry, we've talked about looking at how to sell the florist and wholesaler. And now we're looking, you know, we're finalizing this series with an emphasis on profitability. And so, you know, you've made some changes, you know, how are you gonna increase the profitability on your farm? And with that, we're really lucky to have Jenny Marks from Trademarks Flower Farm with us today. And she's gonna talk a little bit about pricing and all of the variables that go into that. So, Jenny, are you ready to take it away?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I am. Thanks so much, Rebecca. I am gonna share my screen here. I think we're replaced current share. Here we go. And get my desktop up. Okay, hopefully you guys can see my screen here.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yes, it looks perfect.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Awesome. Thanks. I'll get all the Zoom things out of my organized on my screen, and we'll start talking about profit and profitability today. So I have been flower farming for well over a decade. I've been farming for my entire life, grew up doing it, and I can tell you this. I have noticed that most flower farmers don't struggle with their businesses because they're bad growers. They usually struggle because they don't have clarity around what actually matters in the business. So when it feels like you have a profit problem, oftentimes it's a lack of clarity around what is really making a difference in your business. You probably don't have a super clear visibility into what's actually creating profit within side your business and what might be quietly sort of draining it or pulling at it. So today, my goal is about getting you more clear with some tools to make better decisions. Because here is the truth hard work does not guarantee profit. A lot of people think if I just work harder, if I just keep going, eventually I'll get there. And the sad truth is that's not always true. Of course, hard work is 100% necessary, but hard work alone won't get you to a more profitable farm, especially in some uncertain times when you know the economy does funny things as it always does, and you know, unexpected road bumps that come up. So the thing that does guarantee profit, or maybe I shouldn't say guarantee, but makes profit more likely, is good decisions. And so today I want to show you how you can make better decisions using your own numbers. And so now this is not about like spreadsheets today or being good at math. And that's what a lot of people think about when we talk about finances and profitability, but it's really about learning how to understand your business and your numbers in a way that helps you make calm, confident decisions, even when things are uncertain or unpredictable. And when you do this, when you have data to support the decisions you make towards profitability, your business can actually support your life instead of the other way around. So before we jump into it, just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Jenny Marks, like Rebecca said, and I own Trademarks Flower Farm in rural New York State. It's a one-acre flower farm that I've been operating for over a decade. I also help other flower farmers scale their businesses through Trademark Farmer. I've now worked with and helped hundreds of small-scale flower growers in more than eight countries scale their farms and build profitable businesses that actually pay the owners well. And I feel very, very passionate about the work that I do because I grew up farming around a lot of people who did not make money. And it's sort of become like a lifelong passion prop passion project of mine. So, first let's define what profitability is and is not. So, just to like clear the air with like what does profit even mean? Revenue is not profit. So, all the money that your business brings in all of your sales for the whole season, that is not profit. Okay. It is also not cash in the bank. A lot of people think like, oh, well, if I have money in my bank account, then I must be profitable. Not necessarily true. A lot of people may think that if I'm busy and I'm moving a lot of flowers, if I'm like selling a lot, then I'm profitable. Pretty is not profitable. So the most beautiful flowers in the world, they may not be profitable. And famous flower farms that have millions of followers on Instagram may or may not be profitable. You do not know their finances, you do not know the inside story of their business. So don't make assumptions. Just because something looks great doesn't mean on the inside it necessarily is. Okay, so here is what profit actually is. It is a simple, super simple formula. Profit equals revenue minus expenses. This is all it is. This is the formula for profit. So, in the simplest terms, in like today's the presentation we're going to talk about today, this is all I want you to think about is that at the end of the season, if you look and you earned $100,000 for easy math and you spent $50,000 during that same time period, you were profitable. On the flip side, if you earned $50,000, but you spent $100,000, you were not profitable. Okay, so clean, we're making it black and white today. And part of this that I want to talk about is that in order to increase profit, you have to know the numbers of what your revenue and what your expenses are. If you don't know those numbers, you're gonna make making a profit a lot harder. So we're gonna talk about that today. And it's about knowing what matters. Now, before we jump into all the things, I just want to say that if you are not profitable in your business right now or you're not as profitable as you would like to be, it's probably because of one of these reasons. One, you are not pricing for profit. So you may be priced far too low, which means you might be losing money every time you sell something. You may need better financial management, meaning you may be overspending. You might be someone who has shiny object syndrome and buys that new Dahlia variety every time it pops up. And like we're all guilty of that from time to time, myself included. But you might be overspending without knowing it. You may be, you may not just have enough revenue. So this means that you may not just have enough cash coming in to cover bare bones basic expenses. And this is a marketing and sales skill gap here. So gotta work on marketing and sales if this is your issue. You may not be selling profitable products or services. And this is actually like a strategy and resource allocation issue. So this basically means like what you sell is taking more time and effort than it's worth. So this is also closely tied to pricing for profit, but kind of comes down to like strategy around like, are you actually in selling things that are making money or losing money? And finally, you may have poor efficiency or lack of systems, which just means that you could be draining profit through inefficient processes. So these are if you're not profitable on your farm, chances are it's one of these things. It's probably not all of them, it's probably one or two of these things that is contributing to the problem, which is great news because it means you can fix it. So here's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk through how to fix these things. So we're kind of going over four or five facets of profitability that you got to keep in check in order to have financial stability, provide for your families, and have a more resilient farm. So, first thing we're gonna talk about is actually pricing. It's not on this side, but I put it in this presentation and didn't change this one. Financial management, knowing money in and out, prioritizing profitable products and efficient farm operations. So, this is like we're going very broad today. We're not going super deep into one of these topics because I could talk for days about just one of these. So we're going broad to hopefully get you to recognize like where you can focus on the most to make the biggest difference in your business at this point of time. So let's just jump right in and talk about profitable pricing. Because as your farm, as it stands right now, if you want to become more profitable, you basically have two choices. You can one increase your prices, or two, cut your costs. So if you don't have the capacity to sell more, to scale up your business, those are the only two choices to increase profitability prices or cutting your costs. So we'll talk about cutting costs later, but we're starting with profitable pricing, aka not losing money on flowers. So at its most basic, basic level, profitable pricing coming comes down to understanding what it costs you to produce flowers and adding a margin on top of that to price to earn a profit. So if it costs you $5 to grow a bunch of Snapdragons, so that's between all the time, the labor, materials, your overhead. So all the things that it costs you to run your business that doesn't actually have to do with growing flowers, like your general liability insurance, your mortgage, your auto insurance, all that stuff. You have to charge more than that in order to earn a profit. And how you figure this out is through a process called crop costing or enterprise budget analysis. You'll see, we're gonna touch on this a couple of times throughout here. Unfortunately, today I can't go through how to do that exactly, but the basic gist of it is you need to list all of the expenses it costs to grow a bunch of Snapdragons and then put money on top of that so you earn a profit. When everybody asks about pricing all the time, how do I price this? How do I price that? This is what it comes down to to make sure you are profitable. Everything else is kind of just noise, okay. While we're talking about pricing, this is the biggest profit lever you can pull in your business. If you don't have this down, you will never be profitable. It is so important because if you have meaningful revenue, like if you're earning lots of money every year from your flower farm, but you're not seeing a profit and you're not like chronic overspender, you probably have a pricing issue. So let's just look at all the ways that you can increase profits in your business right now. You can get more customers, right? You can get customers to buy more often, you can increase your prices, and of course you can cut your cost, but we'll talk about that later. So if you could only improve one of these things by 20%, which one do you think would help the most? I don't have my chat up, but I would love to see later. Like put in the chat which one do you think would help the most? You're you guys are probably gonna guess what it is. Let's talk about it. So let's just go through an example. Let's say you sell a hundred bouquets at $20 each. That means your revenue is $2,000. And we're gonna talk about numbers here for a second. Don't let it overwhelm you. Just like listen to the lesson at the end. But let's say it costs you $1,000 to produce those bouquets and the profit is a thousand bucks. These are just easy numbers for sake of this. Now let's improve each of these options by 20% and see what happens. So option one, you could get 20% more customers in an effort to be more profitable. That means you're gonna sell 120 bouquets, same price. Your revenue is 2400. Your costs are going to increase because you have to plant more flowers, you have to harvest more, you have to bunch more, you have to deliver more, sell more, right? So your costs are gonna increase. Here in this example, that means that's an extra $200 in profit. So yay, but you had to do some more work to go with it. Fine. Option two, customers, you get the same customers you have now to buy 20% more often. Same result, right? You're still selling 120 bouquets. That means your costs are also going to increase. So again, you earn an extra $200 in profit. Helpful for sure, but it's directly tied to capacity and time because again, it requires more planting, more harvesting, delivery, materials, labor. Now, option three, pricing. If you increase your prices by just 20%, your bouquet price goes from $20 to $24. You sell the same 100 bouquets, your revenue is $2,400, costs stay the same, and your profit is $1,400. That is double the profit of these past two examples without doing anything else, without increasing workload, time, cost, or complexity. Okay. If you do nothing else, just increasing your prices or at least getting them to a point where they're profitable, adds in double the profit. Now, over the course of a season, you know, just multiply that over 2,000 bouquets sold over a season and you'd add $8,000 in pure profit to your bottom line without doing anything else differently. And this is extremely conservative because if your growing season is 30 weeks long, that's only 67 bouquets a week. And this is the hidden leverage and pricing. Very, very small, reasonable price changes affect every sale that you make. And honestly, most of your customers are not even going to notice. Now, in some situations, sure, they will notice and they'll be like, whoa, why did this jump? Like if you're selling to Florists, they'll be more price sensitive than like, you know, your farmer's market customers. My farmers market's customers, they never even realize when I raise the prices. Other customers may be more price sensitive. And of course, there's things you need to, you know, talk to them about it. But honestly, most of the time it's more in your head than what's actually going to happen in those conversations. So, of course, customer and volume-based growth does increase profit, but it also pulls on your time, your energy, and your systems. So, this doesn't mean that pricing is the only thing that matters. And it doesn't mean that you should just raise prices carelessly. It just means that when your capacity is tight, like if you don't have the capacity to grow more flowers, to market more, to sell more, pricing is often the fastest and least exhausting lever available to increase your profit. Now, I just really wanted to give you this example so you can see how powerful it is to dial in your pricing inside of your business. And this is something I see almost nobody doing. You gotta know your cost to produce your flowers so you can price to earn a profit. And if you're not doing this, when times get tough, when people don't have as much money to spend, they're buying less, your business is gonna take way more of a hit than somebody else who has this dialed in. Okay, time to move on. I feel like I have so much to talk about today. It's already 1219. Pricing alone is not enough. We also want to prioritize profitable products, aka selling stuff that doesn't lose you money. So of course, we got to get the pricing under control. But it sounds obvious that you don't want to sell things that lose you money, but this doesn't always happen. Not all flowers are profitable, not all sales channels are profitable. Some of your flowers and your sales channels are working for you, and some of you may not be like, you know, holding their own. So what you want to do, and this is like more in terms of like overall strategy of your business, is to identify your most profitable sales outlets. So if you're a farm that you sell through like eight different sales outlets, figure out the ones that are actually earning you the most amount of money, not revenue, profit. Okay. And then double down on them. Because every sales outlet that you have, it requires its own, you know, basically its own marketing channel and its own supplies. Like if you sell at the farmer's market, you have a tent, table, tablecloth, succor, delivery van, staffing, okay, great. But if you also do weddings, you need vases, design supplies, floral tape, floral wire, tissue paper, packaging, different transport devices. And every time you're doing weddings and you're not at the farmer's market, those farmer's market supplies sit unused and it's a waste of time and money. Same thing, like vice versa. Not to mention managing all of it is a lot. So when you double down on trying to scale your most profitable sales outlets, it reduces complexity, it reduces management, it reduces your costs, and it increases your profit. So to figure this out, it's really not that hard, you guys. Just look at what your cost to deliver on a certain sales outlet is. So the labor, materials, marketing, what your annual revenue is from it, and find the difference to for your profit. Like you can pretty easily figure out if you go to a farmer's market, how many miles do you drive there every week? How many tolls do you pay? What do you pay in gas? How many hours does it cost you to, you know, harvest and prep and go sit there all day? Like it's you can figure it out pretty easily. So do that for all of your sales outlets. And when you find ones that are actually earning profit, true profit, the most profitable ones, double down on them and try to scale those ones to the moon. It will make your farm more profitable. And I'm not saying this through theory because I have done this. I have done this. So, like this is just what I do. You don't have to do what I say, obviously, but this is what I've done and it's made a huge difference in my business. We also want to do this with your most profitable crops, right? Identify which flowers are bringing in the most profit, not just revenue, and double down on them. Try market the hell out of them, try to sell them to everybody. Like we do this with our Snapdragons. They cost us almost nothing to grow, and we get a huge profit margin on them. So we try to grow them all year round. We try to stuff them into every single mixed bouquet we make. We try to sell them straight bunches at our farmer's market, and it makes a huge difference. So here's an example of this looking at like your whole farm. And this is what I did on my farm and really had amazing results from. So here's a simplified example just to give you an ideal. Let's say farmer Jill has 10 growing beds on her farm. So these are just random numbers. This is not like accurate from a bed or whatever, but let's say 10 beds in their profit. She's growing a bed of Xinia's, where she profits $10,000 a year from a bed of Lycianthus, she profits $10,000 a year from Dahlia's $8,000, PE seven, Renunculus $6.5, Erlum's $3,000, Adratum $350, stock $300, Scabiosa, and then she's losing money on tulips. From these 10 beds, she's earning about $47,000, sorry, $45,000 in profit. She decides to just cut the least profitable flowers and replace them with the most profitable ones. So this is what I did on my farm. I took my big list of 100 different varieties I was growing, looked at the most profitable ones, the least profitable ones, ranked them from number one to whatever a hundred, cut the bottom half of the list. You just take out the ones that are not that profitable and replace them with the ones that are. So in Farmer Jill's situation, she just grew another bed of Xinnias, another bed of Lysianthus, another bed of Dahlias, another bed of Renunculus. So now she's still only growing 10 beds of flowers, but instead of earning $40 something thousand dollars in profit, she's earning almost $80,000 in profit. So again, simplified example, but this is exactly how it works in real life. Okay, she did not grow any more flowers, put in any more effort, make any big investments, chase new customers, or start new sales outlets. She simply focused on growing what was the most profitable and was rewarded at tens of thousands of dollars more. And you can do this on your farm. Okay. And of course, there are nuances here. Don't get me wrong, but like I said, we're going broad today. I can't go too deep onto any one of these. But the simple exercise to figure this out is again that crop costing or enterprise budget analysis process where you list all the expenses it costs you to grow a bed of daffodils or zinnias or dahlias, and you subtract that from your annual revenue for that crop. You can find your break even prices this way and you can price for profit. So again, have to know your costs so you can price for profit here and to understand what flowers are actually making you money and which ones are not. So, and before you move on from this, when you are doing some of these things, you're trying to figure out what it's actually costing you, your biggest cost is labor, whether you pay for it or not. This is the number one blind spot I see for most farmers. A lot of them don't take their own farming time into account. But when you do that, you're essentially working for free. Plus, if you ever want to hire people or if you have employees right now, you don't, if you don't account for your time, you're not going to have funds available to pay for somebody else. And you have to have that if you want a real business. Your time has a dollar value. So don't ignore your labor costs because it's going to prevent hiring and it's going to prevent business growth. So when you figure all this out, or you know, when you sit down to look at your costs and like which flowers and which sales outlets are most profitable, ask yourselves like, is this actually making money? Is this taking up too much of my time or my energy? Does this support my core sales outlets? Would I choose this again today, knowing what I know now? Ask yourself these things. And it's okay to let go of stuff. It's okay to not grow every single thing out there. It's okay not to do everything. Focus on what's making you money, what you can sell well, what sells easily, and that is gonna help your business grow. Okay, so enough about profitable. We're gonna kind of switch gears a little bit here. We've talked about pricing and we've talked about focusing on growing and selling profitable crops through profitable outlets. Now we're gonna kind of switch into talking about overall like whole farm financial visibility. This is kind of a boring topic, but it's very important. Okay. This is knowing money in versus money out. Okay. Now, a lot of people are like, I want to be more profitable. I want to be more profitable. When I ask them, like, okay, what's your profit margin? They're like, Well, I don't know. It's like, well, you have to know your margins, and that will tell you whether you're profitable or not. So a lot of farmers don't actually know these numbers, and it's okay if you don't know. I didn't know for a few years. It's fine. But you need to know numbers around where your money is coming into the business from and where you are spending money so you can make better decisions around, you know, how to manage that. So this is important because you want clarity into what's working and what is not working inside of your business. That's how you can make better decisions so you can better fuel profits inside of it. It helps you be more resilient and it helps you make data-driven decisions. This matters because it replaces guessing with knowing. Like when I cut my bottom 50 flowers that I was growing my farm that weren't making that much money, I knew it because I had the data in front of me. So it was not hard to make that decision. But you can't make good decisions with incomplete information. And when you don't track some of this data, you're forced to rely on your feelings, your habits, or what you've just always done, or what you see other farmers doing. And those are not reliable in a changing market. Data doesn't make the decisions for you, but it gives you clarity so you can make different or better ones. And farming already has enough uncertainty, right? Like weather is unpredictable, markets change, inputs are costing more than ever. So the biggest favor you can do yourself as a business owner is just having visibility into the numbers of your business. Now, this doesn't mean you have to be looking at it every single day. You don't have to have them all memorized, but you want to track stuff. And we'll go over that in a second. But when you don't track, you usually end up working harder, not smarter. You keep doing things that lose you money, you wait way too long to make impactful decisions, and you probably are going to slowly leak profits until it's too late. You know, most farms don't fail out of all of a sudden, out of the blue. They slowly, year after year, just can't make it, just keep can't keep going on. And the farms that last are not the ones that guess better, they're the ones that measure and know. Okay. So once you have clarity around these things, then you can decide where to double down, what to cut, and how to adjust. So here are the things I suggest tracking in your business. And you do not have to start out tracking all these things. Like this, these are in order. So, first, track overall farm revenue and expenses. You can automate all of this seriously. Everybody needs to do this. You can also track your sales outlet revenue and expenses, your crop revenue and expenses, and there's other things too as you get more advanced. So everybody needs to track number one and you can layer on number two and three as your business gets you know more advanced. So, for overall farm revenue and expenses. If you are a beginner, you're just getting started with your business. Here's a super simple way to do it where you don't have to think about it. You get a business bank account and a debit card. All the money that moves through the business has to move through this bank account. And all you have to do is look at your bank statements to see money in, money out. There's like there's no excuses, guys. All you do is get a business bank account. Every money that comes in goes into that account, every money that you spend comes out of that account. All the transactions are there in your bank statements. Now, obviously, if you have a business or if you're more established, general ledgers and accounting software is recommended for more detail. So you can easily categorize spending. You can see what percentage of your expenses were spent on seed or labor, fertilizer. And at the very basic level, you guys like this will tell you whether your business is profitable or not. So this is a must for everybody. Obviously, accounting software I recommend for people who have real businesses. Now let's talk about tracking sales outlet revenue and expenses here. A lot of people are like, whoa, this seems like a lot of things to track. But if you just set up your website and your point of sale software to track through your sales outlets, like you don't have to think about it. It does it for you. You can also use like a simply weekly weekly tracking sheet if you don't do things like on the computer or you don't have like a point of sale software set up. Before we had our point of sales software set up, we had a single sheet of paper that every week we just wrote down all of our revenue that came in from every sales outlet. It took me less than five minutes a week to do. Super simple. For expenses, you want to kind of pick one, two, maybe three weeks a year where you just track your time and supply spent delivering on those sales outlets. So, like, for example, if you really want to know like how much it's costing you to sell through your farmers, I'm just gonna keep coming back to farmers markets because it's an easy example. But just track for that one week, how much time did you spent harvesting for it? How much time did you spend communicating with if you have to communicate with customers about it? How much time did you spend prepping for it? How much time driving there, sitting there? Like, and then track every supply that you've used, like every bouquet sleeve, every bucket, every fuel, tool. Like all you do it is for one week and you get a pretty general sense of what it's costing you every week of the season. So pretty simple to do. Then crop revenue and expenses is the next layer onto this to get extra advanced to have this data. And before I go into this, I want to say your data doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be directional. You kind of do the same thing here that we talked about with the sales outlets. Pick one to three weeks a year to kind of track these things and get an average. So tracking your revenue from crop revenue and sorry, tracking your revenue from your specific crops or products, simple tracking sheet or point of sale software, does it for you. Don't ever have to think about it. For expenses, it's a little bit tougher. And to be clear, I think I didn't explain this well. For revenue, I recommend tracking that throughout the whole season. But for your expenses, pick like a sampling of a crop. So, for example, if we want to track zinnias, how much it costs you to grow your zinnias, pick one bed or one succession. And every time you do anything with that one bed or one succession, either write it down somewhere or use an app to track it. Record the time you spent growing it and any supplies that you use while you, you know, your trays, your soil, fertilizer, whatever. You can have just a sheet of paper that you do this on, or you can use an app. There's one that we use called Toggle. It's T-O-G-G-L. It's really not that hard to do. That being said, tracking all of the expenses from all of the crops on your farm, especially if you grow a lot of different crops, can be really burdensome. So I recommend tracking expenses for like two to five flowers at work at first, just so you get a rough idea of like what your general costs are to actually grow your flowers. Choose things that are your top sellers or things that you're thinking, like, I might be losing money on this, I don't really know. So at my farm, we keep an expense record sheet in our crop journal to track these individual expenses. There's a picture of it there. And if you want a template, if you go to my website, it's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash free guides. I have a free template you can print out and use yourself. So I'm gonna move through a couple of these things because I have a lot more to talk about. So we'll move on to financial discipline next. And this is, I think, the final bucket. No, it's not. We have efficiency too. So this bucket, we're gonna talk about financial discipline, which basically means just being responsible with your business money. Because even if you know your numbers, it doesn't really matter if you don't manage them, right? Like if you saw, like, whoa, I spent $30,000 last year on plugs and I only sold $50,000 worth of flowers, like, but you don't change anything, like it's not really gonna do much for you. So if you are overspending, if this is your problem, the biggest thing is to make a budget because profit is not earned, it is protected. Okay. We need to avoid shiny object syndrome, be very disciplined about what you're buying, if your customers actually want that or not. And doing things that, you know, you can cut your costs, like buying things in bulk, growing more of fewer flowers. Like in the springtime, you can see in this picture, we grow like 10,000 ranunculus. We don't really grow many other things in the spring. It's like rununculus, maybe a few anemones in a very, very small amount of tulips. And that's because we can buy thousands of them and we get a much better price than we would growing like a third rununculus, a third anemones, and a third tulips. So that's just an example. Another thing is there is this thing called profit first. There's a profit first system. I did not make this up. A guy named Michael McAllowitz, Mike McAllowitz wrote a book on it. It's called Profit First. Highly recommend that book if you guys want to check it out. But this is basically a system that you put in place to make sure you're planning for profit first before anything else. Because here's what a lot of farmers do is they go throughout the season, they try to earn as much revenue as possible throughout the season, then they spend money on whatever expenses come up. And at the end of the year, when they sit down to do their taxes, they see, oh, I've made some money this year, or oh, wow, I lost a lot of money this year. It's not how you want to do things. What we do at our farm and what we teach our students is how to sit down at the beginning of the season and project what or you know, plan on what you want to earn for a profit and then make a sales plan on what you need to sell in order to make that happen. And you make a budget for your expenses. So everything is planned out ahead of time. And of course, there's hiccups that come up, that's always going to happen, but your profit is planned first. And the way that you can do this in a very simplified way is every single month or every single week, whatever you want, just automatically pay yourself or put money into a profit bank account every single month, non-negotiable. This way, the money that's there, you can only spend that on expenses, and it really helps to limit the spending. So I recommend that. There's also a more advanced option for those of you who have more established and more advanced businesses. Um, I'll go through this really quickly, but basically, you'll set up five bank accounts. I know that sounds like a lot, but stick with me. And you'll basically funnel money into each of these bank accounts. They act as holding accounts. So they have an income or holding account where money comes into all the money from the business. And then you'll automatically send money out to your profit account every month, to your owner's compensation account. That's your pay, to your tax account. So when income tax time comes, you'll have money ready to pay for it. And your OpEx account, this is operating expenses. So this is basically like when you need to spend money in your business, it can only come out of that account. You can't touch anything else. It forces you to get really creative and running your business on a budget so you actually stay profitable. And recently I saw like it was like a reel on Instagram or something silly like that, but somebody said profit is unnatural, and you have to fight tooth and nail to just keep squashing your expenses down. As soon as they go up, you just squash them back down, and then they're gonna go up again. You squash them back down. It is your job as a business owner to keep doing that to ensure you keep earning profit. And it was so true. So, again, if that feels too advanced too much, you can always just do this simple system, just automatically every two weeks, money goes into your profit account or to your pay, like your owner's compensation. One last thing here is an emergency savings fund. I think a lot of people think about this for their own like personal families or their own personal self, but your business also needs one too. Think about saving up three to six months of operating expenses. So when weird economic things happen, or if we have another COVID, your business can carry through for a little while. Now, if you look at your actual operating expenses month to month, it's gonna be like, oh, that's a lot of money. You don't have to have it all saved up at first. I started saving just a little bit at a time, put a little bit every month in. And after like a couple of years, for me, honestly, I finally built that up and I was like, okay, we're good now. That money goes somewhere else. And if there's an emergency or if we have a month where I'm not gonna make payroll, which that doesn't happen to me anymore, but well, never really did. I you could take money from there when you get into a buying. So emergency savings fun. All right. So that was okay, money stuff. I know kind of boring. Everyone's like, yeah, yeah, I know. I need to manage my finances better. Boring business owner things, but very important business owner things, right? For the last few minutes here, we're gonna talk about efficient farm operations. And this seems to be everybody's favorite topic to talk about because we actually talk about farming. So I'm gonna take a quick sip of water and then we'll talk about actual like operations on the farm. Because I don't want to lose my voice. So sorry, I know I talk fast also. But in the beginning of this presentation, I said there was, you know, if you don't change anything else about your business, you don't want to grow more, you don't want to, you know, get more customers, as your business stands right now today, you basically only have two options to make your business more profitable. You can increase your prices, which we talked about, or you can cut your costs. Now, of course, like you can dig into your budget and try to like get those down, but one of the simplest ways to cut your costs is just to improve efficiency in your farm operations. Because even if you know you choose the right profits or sorry, the right products, you can still lose profit through inefficient systems. And on a flower farm, a lot of our costs are sort of invisible because us as the farmers are always doing like a lot inside of the business. But when you put more efficient systems in place, like profit can increase without you doing more or increasing prices. And according to IDC research, this statistic is 30% of small businesses lose or sorry, 30% of business revenue is lost to inefficiencies. And a lot of times this is like this can be from you just trying to do way too much. So nothing actually gets really efficient or optimized. It can also just be because like we've never really thought about how to do things better or how to do things well. But if you can minimize your inputs, you can maximize your profits. So we want to find ways to grow more efficiently to make our crops more profitable. So one of the ways we can do that is to sell more efficiently. It doesn't mean selling more, it means reducing the time steps and costs it takes to make the same dollar. So cutting costs to deliver through sales outlets, putting more efficient systems in place. A really simple and silly example of this is when I first started my business, we had a CSA delivery day on Thursdays and a florist delivery route on Wednesdays. So I was driving to the city of Rochester, which is about 45 minutes away, to sell flowers two days a week. So twice a week, I was paying someone to drive 60 miles, you know, there and back twice a week. And then one day I was like, hmm, why don't we just do it on the same day? Sounds obvious, right? But when you're so close to your business, when you're like, well, you know, florists want flowers earlier in the week, and you know, these CSA customers want them later in the week. Like at the time it didn't, it didn't click. But then I was like, well, just do it on the same day. And I cut my labor costs in half, my fuel costs in half, my toll costs in half. And all I had to do was get a slightly bigger van to fit all of it, which was a minimal cost compared to the savings that I had. So really simple changes can literally cut costs in half. Other things, other ideas, these are just ideas for you guys to think about, you know, combining delivery days, using delivery zones instead of stops, minimum order thresholds, fewer sales outlets sometimes, fixed order windows, standardizing things and taking non-custom orders. That was a big one for me. Maybe that's your deal, cool, but now we're gonna talk more about cutting crop costs with efficient production techniques because the way that you grow things on your farm can make or break the profitability of your business. So we want to start by analyzing your production system. So literally just how you grow things. And I'll give you an example of this. We used to grow our ranunculus in 50 cell trays. We would take all the little corms, the little legs, place them in each cell with the legs pointed down. We'd grow them in our greenhouse for four weeks, and then we'd wait till they were nice and green and lush and beautiful, and we'd transplant them out as large plugs. This took about 20 labor hours per bed of ranunculus, plus a lot of tray costs, soil cost, and greenhouse propane cost. Now we just dump the corms into a flat 1020 tray, cover them with soil, pre-sprout them for 10 days instead of four weeks, and we transplant them as pre-sprouted corms, no plugs. And I know there's a million ways to do this. This is just what works for us. This takes less than four labor hours per bed of ranunculus. So, old way, you can see our pretty plugs, new way, we just throw them in a tray, we dump some soil on top, we transplant them out looking like this. Now, if our labor rate is $30 an hour, which is what I calculated at between my time and my employees' time, which obviously get paid less than me. The first way cost me $600 in labor per bed. The second way cost me $120 per labor per bed. So we save almost $500 in 16 hours with this little growing technique tweak. Okay. And we grow six beds of these on our farm. So this was saving me almost $3,000 in almost a hundred labor hours. A hundred labor hours. This is not even counting the material. So we use a fraction of the soil, a fraction of the trays, a fraction of the greenhouse heat. And this can be applied to every single thing you do on your farm. The farms that are making big profits are the ones who are paying attention to this. Profit is lost in very, very small inefficiencies every single day. So, some other ways that you can think about this, like obviously look at your processes and think like, how can I do this faster? How can I do this smarter? How can I skip steps without obviously without affecting the overall quality of your flowers? But some ideas for you is you can produce more and less space to be more efficient with your space. We use something called biointensive spacing on my farm, where you basically plant flowers close enough so their canopy shades out weeds, but obviously balance that with disease management. But the more you grow in a smaller space, the higher your yields per square foot will be and the more profitable the space on your farm will be. So it decreases weed pressure, increases yields per bed, and creates less area to manage. You can also move more efficiently. Now, this sounds obvious, but the faster you harvest, transplant, and weed, the quicker it will get done, and the less labor time it will make, the more time and money. You will save. So here's just some metrics that we go by on our farm. For flowers that are stripped in the field, like zinnias and dahlias, dahlias are the worst, by the way. They take forever to harvest. We shoot for minimum 20 bunches an hour. For flowers not stripped in the field, like rununculus anemones, because they don't have a lot of leaves that you gotta like pull off. We shoot for 35 bunches an hour minimum. We're usually much closer to 40. Okay. So figuring out ways that you can make your harvesting faster. Because harvesting is the number one time suck. That's the thing you're gonna spend the most amount of time on your farm doing. Harvesting, weeding, transplanting are usually the top three, but harvesting for sure. Planning for efficient harvest. So this comes down to your crop planning systems. You want to plant crops that you'll harvest together at or that you'll harvest at the same time together. So, like what we do on our farm, all the flowers that are gonna bloom in May get planted in right together in the rows next to each other. All the flowers are gonna be harvested in August get planted right next to each other. Obviously, if you have perennials, they're gonna be in a permanent place, but this seems insignificant. But if it takes you five minutes to walk from one side of the farm to the other and you do it four times a day while harvesting, that's 20 minutes a day. Doesn't seem like a big deal. Over the course of the season, that's 4,800 minutes or 80 hours of time. That's $2,400. Okay. Same thing with like planting mixes instead of making mix-colored bunches later. So I actually won't go get into this too much, but because this won't apply to a lot of people. So let me just kind of skip over this. But you know, you can save a lot of money by just making little tweaks. Meet weeding is another huge one. So, like if you're hand weeding, like literally taking weeds and pulling them up out of the ground, please try to minimize that as much as possible. It's such a huge time waste. Even if you love it, do it on Saturday on your day off to make your brain happy. Like, just don't do it for your business. Try to use efficient weed management techniques instead of hand pulling. So here's one more example. If it takes about an hour to hand weed one bed, which is like about what it would take us, versus wire weeding. So we wire weed like shallow cultivation, takes us less than 10 minutes per bed. If we do this three times over the course of the season and you have 50 beds on your farm, hand weeding is gonna take 150 hours of labor time. Wire weeding is probably gonna take around 50 hours. That's a hundred hours of labor time at $30 an hour. That's 3,000 bucks. Okay. So I'm gonna kind of wrap up here. Sorry, I know I talk fast, but in a nutshell, if you do these things, you'll probably be okay. All right. We talked about pricing, knowing money in, money out, financial management, prioritizing your most profitable products and services and efficient farm operations. You know, this not all of these things will apply to everybody, but I want you guys to take away from this today at least some things. And I know that these things work because I worked with Krissa and I've worked with hundreds of flower farmers, but a great example is Chrissa and Bill from Daybreak Farm in New Jersey. We went through this kind of stuff with them, increased their efficiency, and took a really hard look at their budget. And right away, they realized they were overspending on plugs by over $10,000 a year, didn't even realize it. They ended up cutting 20 hours from their work week every week of the season and increased profits at the same time. Okay, cutting 20 hours of work each week that saved them 37 and a half days of work or $18,000 a year. That's at $20 an hour. Okay. So this stuff, it's see it's really important. It may seem small, it may seem minimal, but it makes a massive, massive difference. Okay. So I want you to pay attention to it. Now, the very last thing I guess I want to talk about is extreme cases of market volatility. This is out of your control. But if you do all these things we talked about today, you're going to be so much better set up to handle market volatility. And if you don't have these things in place, it's going to be a lot harder to make it through this. So, like COVID, you know, you in those cases, you just got to survive sometimes. And in the moment, it can feel really scary, like everything is failing and you might have to shut down. But having an emotion reaction, an emotional reaction is not really going to help. This is why having the data comes in handy. Because when you have the data, you can look at your past sales, you can know your profit, you can put a finger on levers that you can pull to increase profit, to decrease your costs. It's a lot easier to make calm, rational decisions about what to do next in these situations. And like, I hate to break it to you guys, but like the economy is gonna go up and down. Always has, always will. So we have to be prepared for it. There's no need to panic about it when it happens. So again, these are the things we talked about. Now I want you to figure out, walk away from this today, knowing what your next step is on your farm. We talked about a lot of things. I know we went really broad. I like to go really deep, but we wanted to cover a lot of topics today. So, like I said, to bring it full circle, if you're not profitable, it's probably because of one of these reasons. You're not pricing for profit, you need better financial management, you don't have enough revenue, you aren't selling enough profitable products, or you have a lack of systems. Now, I have noticed something from working with a lot of different flower farmers over the years and from my own journey as well, is that every stage of flower farming, there will be something specific holding you back from being profitable. It's usually just one thing at a time. In the beginning, you know, it's probably cash flow, just getting revenue. But 10 years in, it might be that you have poor hiring or team management systems, or you have poor strategy around your resource allocation. And so it can be different at every stage of business. And so I don't think that you need to like go home and panic and worry about implementing everything we talked about today. I want you to figure out what is the one thing that's going to make the biggest difference for you today. And to help you determine what that is, I can create a personalized profit roadmap for you. It's all free. All you do is answer a few questions and I'll send you a roadmap that tells you exactly where you're at in your business right now and which one of these things you have to focus on to, you know, kind of get unlocked and grow. And most importantly, like what you can kind of ignore for now because it's not going to move the needle for your stage in business at this time. So if that sounds interesting or helpful at all to you guys, head to my website, it's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap dash site, and I can send that over to you. Here's a little QR code if you want to scan it. Cause you know, before you like lower your prices to move inventory or you try to differentiate yourself by adding 20 more varieties, you need to know where profit is actually being created or lost in your farm in your own specific stage of business. And this can help with that. So let me wrap up. If anyone wants to learn more about this stuff, ASCFG has so many videos, like hundreds of, I don't know, hundreds of hours of videos probably on these kinds of things. I also teach a business acceleration pro program and I have a free podcast. It's called Six Figure Flower Farming. We have over our 355-star reviews, which is pretty cool. And yeah, last thing I want to mention is I'm hosting free profit strategy sessions regularly to go deep on some of this stuff. I'm actually hosting one on Monday. You can email me if you want to come. But my name's Jenny, and here's my contact information if you want to get in contact with me, and I'm happy to take some questions.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Jenny, thank you so much. This is a wealth of wonderful information. We do have a couple questions if you're ready to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the first question is can Jenny can Jenny share a handful of which crops she dropped?

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Yeah. Gomfrina, Scabiosa, Adiratum, Flowering Tobacco. A lot. I we only we grow less than 20 now. We started out with like close to 100. So those were like the main ones that come to mind where I was like, oh, I hate you. Now that doesn't mean that they're not profitable for some people because they are. There are definitely people out there who grow scabiosa and gumfrina profitably and they do it well. I was just not one of those people. It was not for my customers. So that's one of the ones that I dropped.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

No, that's perfect. I like that you've identified that as unique to you and that there's variability for all farmers. All right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the next question is I would love for Jenny to take a moment to explain the mixed bunch planting. I'm intrigued.

SPEAKER_01 52:58

Okay, yeah. So, real quickly in a nutshell, what I what I used to do, and what I also see a lot of farmers doing is like for my customers, they loved mixed bunches. So, like if you have zinnias, they want all the colors in a bunch. But a lot of times we plant zinnias like a little block of orange, a little block of white, a little block of purple and pink. So you would harvest all the orange, then you'd harvest all the white and all the purple, and then you'd take them into your studio, and then you'd make a mixed bunch where you take some purple and white and pink and you put it into a bouquet, then you band it and sleeve it and sell it. But all you have to do is take all the zinnia seeds of all the different colors, put them in one packet, shake it up, you know, seed them that way, plant them out in mixes and harvest them in mixes. So we do this with rununculus, zinnias, snapdragons. You know, obviously it depends on your customer type. The only thing we don't do it with is dahlias because we also sell our dahlia tubers and we don't want to mix up the varieties.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

Now that makes a lot of sense. The next question is how do you recommend tracking labor costs spent per sales outlet when staff harvest crops for multiple sales outlets at a time?

SPEAKER_01 54:10

Oh, yeah, good question. So I think like to the easiest way to do this is to not overcomplicate it. So if harvesting basically takes the same amount of time to harvest like a bunch of snapdragons, whether it's going to a florist or a farmer's market, like maybe not depending on your systems, but instead of tracking harvest time, just track all the things that are different between them. So you would track like sleeving versus I don't know, maybe you sleeve them different for your farmer's market and you don't sleeve them to sell to florists. Look at the delivery time, any labor time spent communicating with florists versus like maybe there's no communication with a farmer's market. So, like just looking at the differences and any everything that's the same is the same. So if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

I don't see any other questions as uh right this minute. I didn't uh see a thank you from the person who just asked the question or answered. I've seen the letters thank yous, excellent session, thank yous again, folks. So if there's one thing I will want to reiterate for folks that uh as Jenny went through her presentation, I tried to find all the resources that she mentioned and drop them in the chat. So double check, look for the links that I dropped, you'll have those immediately available. I can also link to them, you know, like a yeah, I can get I can get a hold of them for you. Thank you. Of course.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

I was like panicking that I was gonna run out of time for questions, so I'm glad.

SPEAKER_00 55:46

I don't see any more questions, but I really do see a lot of thank yous. So take it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Well, we've got a minute left, you know. If there are no more questions, uh Jenny, do you have anything on the final words of wisdom for us?

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Yeah, I would say that you know, if people are feeling squeezed for profits, there there are a lot of options out there for you. Like there's a lot of different things that you can do to increase your profitability. We talked about a lot of different options today. And I I don't want people to feel like it's like hopeless or it's it's just not gonna happen. It's like there's always things that you can do to tweak your marketing and sales to like get new customers, even when you know the economy is not great. There's always things you can do to like squeeze more profit out of your business, even when times are tough. So like I think it's just there's always an option for you to improve. And it's a never-ending cycle. Like the the problems you deal with in year one, like we're always fighting for profitability, whether in year one or you're in year 20. There's always things that are gonna happen that you're gonna be battling for profitability. This is just like our job as business owners is to continually be like fighting to be able to earn a profit. So, you know, don't think that every that like somebody has it all figured out, because that's usually not the case.

SPEAKER_00 57:26

No, I appreciate that. I we can all do hard things and we can all get more practice at doing those hard things if the hard things never go away. So I saw in a comment that I wanted to somebody wanted to access to the QR code for discounted membership. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and make sure folks get that. Yeah. And so if you are looking for to join the ASCFG at a discounted rate today, here's the code. And if the code's not showing up on your phone or your device for some reason, you can email me at education atascfg.org and I'll get you connected with that. Goodness. Thank you, Jenny. This has been marvelous. We really appreciate your time and your generosity in sharing your knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

Yeah, of course. I don't know if we have time, but I think in the chat I saw one or two more questions pop up.

SPEAKER_00 58:22

Yeah, you've got the time, absolutely. Okay. Well, yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

I think I saw Susan ask any changes in the use of fabric or netting regarding profitability and efficiency. Yes. So we have found, like, for example, with our dahlias, we don't use fabric anymore. We just use bare ground. We found that it was cheaper for us to manage it that way than the labor to lay down the fabric and pull it up. Plus, it was just a pain. But the important thing to do is to track your time with these things. Like, if you're wondering if it'll be faster or I guess more efficient and more profitable to do something a different way, track your time and just trial it. Like, we just did a trial with our dahlies one year. We're like, we'll just try it. And I tracked before and after all of our labor hours, and we're like, great, this actually was more profitable to not use fabric here. And obviously, that's going to be different in everybody's soil and climate and situation. So you really need to like do trials on your farm to see. And then I saw Candace asked, Do you recommend revisiting profitability after so many years? For example, does profitability differ for a crop over a longer period of time? Yes, absolutely. So, like in terms of like overall farm profitability, like that's something I'm looking at every single month, every single quarter, obviously every single year. But for specific crops, if your systems don't change, you know, the your profit kind of stays the same, but your costs will vary. Like, for example, the cost of labor in my materials from four years ago was lower than it is now. So your costs are always going to increase, they're always going to go up for specific crops. And if you change your systems, it will change as well the way you do things. So it is important to revisit them. Like, I don't necessarily recommend like tracking your exact profitability on like your Xinnias, your dahlias, your Snapdragons, like every single year. Like that's just a lot to keep track of, but I do recommend like coming back to it and revisiting it every so often for sure. Yeah, yeah, of course. So yeah. Okay, one more last minute question. Hey, Kelly, do you have suggestions for more profitable spring flowers to plant in the field instead of tulips here in the northeast? I'm trying some ranunculus in the field, but it was challenging last year. So if you want my really honest opinion, I don't recommend doing any spring crops out in the field ever in the northeast. I think it's a waste of time and money. Just get a high tunnel. You'll make your money back. I shouldn't make promises like that. You'll probably make your money back the first year, and the quality is gonna be a hundred times better. You're like, it's just the yields are gonna be a hundred times better. So, like, get yourself a high tunnel. Otherwise, yeah, tulips are okay. Anytime I tried to grow Rununculus out in the field, yield and the quality was so bad it wasn't even worth it for me doing it. But that's just me personally.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

That's wonderful. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

All right. I think, yeah, I think that's it. Uh, Jenny, I want to thank you again. I really am so grateful that we got to feature you in this series. Your knowledge, your generosity, and sharing all those resources. It's just lovely. And just it's a joy to work with you. So thank you so much. I think that's yeah. So I saw some folks asking questions about when this will be when the short recording will be available. I'm going to work on optimizing it and uploading it today. And you'll get an email when it's available. So uh stay tuned. So all right, thank you all for joining us today. Uh we appreciate your time and your attention. And if you have any questions about the series, you can always reach out to me. So have a wonderful day, have a wonderful week, and yeah, take care. Bye everybody.