Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers.
Speaker: This podcast is hosted by Barn to Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person. Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer podcast.
Speaker: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Brianna Kapelian, one of the onboarding managers here at Barn to Door and your host for today's episode. Barn to Door helps independent farmers get a system in place to easily manage orders, payments, deliveries, and marketing so they can skip the middleman and sell local food directly. Serving thousands of farmers across all 50 states, our goal is to give farmers the tools, information, and opportunities to maximize profits at any stage, whether you're a hobby farmer transitioning to full-time farming or are already a seven-figure farm.
Speaker: In today's conversation, we'll get into making more money with poultry. Today, I'm happy to welcome Rachel from Schenck Family Farm, who's part of our Farm Advisory Network and who has worked with us for a number of years. I'm excited to talk to Rachel about the best ways to price, package, fulfill, and market your poultry products in order to maximize your farm's profits. Welcome, Rachel. so Hi, thank you for having me. Yeah. Before we dive in today, would you mind telling us just a little bit about your farm, your products, where you're located, your customers, and all that good stuff? Absolutely. Happy to. So I'm Rachel Schenck, and my husband's Joe Schenck, and we started our farm back in 2017, almost years
Speaker: ago and We've got three kiddos. Mason is eight. Daisy is almost five. And Lucy is a year old. And we homeschool. So balancing that with the farm has been quite the challenge. Never a dull moment. um But when we started, we just started with chicken. So meat chickens. And we just did whole birds for the first few years. And then we also did eggs. And we started subscriptions from the very beginning. We did...
Speaker: How many whole birds do you want per month and how many dozen eggs do you want per month? So it was very simple when we started and it was just on the side. We both had other jobs at the time. And then in 2020, we added pork and beef from a partner farm because we knew we were going to start our own beef herd eventually. And we wanted to go ahead and learn how to market beef, learn about the cuts, then start yeah learning how to build a profitable beef enterprise. So we did that. We just added our own beef last fall.
Speaker: But we still work with a partner farm as well because we can't raise enough of our own beef just yet. But we do we set up in two local spots to sell in person throughout the week. And then we have three other pickup locations for online orders only.
Speaker: We do about 30% of our sales through subscriptions. We have a chicken only subscription and then a meat subscription. package, so chicken, pork, and beef, so a variety pack. And those are both monthly. And that's been a huge yeah part of our farm, the backbone of it, really, that income that you can count on. Most of our customers are just within 30 minutes of us. We're in rural North Carolina. It's a little town called Newport. We're 30 minutes from the beach. Our community, I guess I should say, is definitely growing because the beach is kind of moving closer. moving inland. um so So I would say are our area is growing a bit. But I mean, the biggest town around us is maybe 10,000 people. so still pretty small towns. Most of our customers are within half an hour from us. So pick up locations works well for us. We haven't gotten into home delivery quite yet. But yeah, we're excited to be farming and we love helping other farmers get started because we need more small local farmers because people are wanting to know where the food comes from more and more. That's for sure. Awesome. I hope you guys do something fun for the 10-year farm anniversary. Yeah, I'm starting to plan that.
Speaker: Yeah, bet. Awesome. Okay, so into products and packaging, you said you started with Wholebirds and you jumped right into subscriptions, which is not something I hear every day, but that's great. For inventory consistency right now, what are your like core staple products that you offer? And how do you sort of take your customers into consideration when planning that out?
Speaker: Yeah. So most of our packages, we try and hit like four or roughly four servings for package. So yes, we do have older customers or single people, but we just tell them, you know, cook it and then you can eat off of it all week or, or you can, you know,
Speaker: Fresh chicken can last like over a week in the fridge. So, you know, you can cook it one day and then wait another two days and cook the rest of it. But for the most part, most of our people are feeding families or at least a family of two. And so like that four servings has been pretty a good standard for us to keep. So we do two boneless breasts or two bone in breasts per pack, four chicken thighs, two leg quarters, eight drumsticks, eight wings, eight eight tenders. And then we also do like bone broth kits as well, which just has like bones and feet. And then the whole chickens, we really just do like our smaller birds. So we try and keep our whole chickens like three to five pounds max. And the chickens that are bigger than five pounds, we usually cut those into the pieces and everything's vacuum sealed and frozen. because we want everything to be, you know, to be able to put it in the freezer for a year if we needed to, because for chicken specifically, we really only raise it April through November. So we have eight months to raise a year's worth of chicken. So yeah, we need it to last a long time in the freezer because whenever we're packaging it in July, they might not actually be receiving it until the following February, you know.
Speaker: So the vacuum seal definitely helps keep everything fresh and and nice in the freezer. Awesome. Yeah. And do you ever get any feedback from your customers on the products that you are offering? Like not everybody knows what to do with like drumsticks or bone in or anything. How do you handle that?
Speaker: Yeah, we we have recipes. So we have an email list. We're always sending out recipes there. We have a blog we share recipes on. And then specifically for our subscription people that are getting all of the cuts, we allow them access to our recipe index, which is basically just a hidden page on our website with links to every recipe we've ever shared organized by cut.
Speaker: So like all the chuck roast recipes, all the breast recipes, all the drumstick recipes kind of all organized on there. So they are never left wondering what to do with something. And then I know not every farmer does this, but I just, we really know most of our customers by name. And so everyone has my phone number and they, i'm like, just text me if you're confused about what to do. And I've only ever had like three people that have abused that to privilege and I've just kind of stopped responding to those people. But for the most part, people are genuinely like, hey, sorry to bother you. What in the world do I do with this? I bought it thinking I know knew what to do with it and I didn't. Can you just send me a recipe? And then, you know, if it's a bad time, I'm just like, hey, I got your message.
Speaker: Tomorrow when I'm by my computer, I'll respond to your message. So I do try and keep good boundaries, even though they do have my cell phone number. And that might not be forever. I might switch to a Google number eventually. But for right now, at our scale, it works for us. um And I like having that relationship with our people. I like equipping them and making sure they have what they need to to use our products well and to make sure they're not going to overcook the steaks and all that. So selling pastured meat outside of the bundle boxes in cuts requires capturing the full value of every pound. So how are you guys utilizing selling by weight to protect your margins while still keeping checkout simple for your buyers?
Speaker: Yeah, well, really, Barn to Door is the only solution that we've found for that because the way y'all have it set up is that I can put my full inventory online. I can put a price per pound. I can do like a minimum weight per package, maximum weight. So they kind of know roughly how much each package is going to cost. So, for instance, chicken breast.
Speaker: They pay 10 bucks to reserve their pack chicken breast for pickup on whatever day at whatever location. And then once I pack their order, I plug in their final weight through Vondredor and it automatically charges their card, like the the remaining balance after they had paid the deposit. And then they get an email receipt. So then I don't even have to do any paper receipts also at pickup or at the market. It just comes to their email, which makes fulfilling orders really simple. And then, yeah, I get to recoup all of that revenue from that chicken breast, whether it's a tiny pack or a huge pack. So the selling by weight feature has definitely been a blessing to us because I've seen other farms, you know, chicken breast, they sell them for 20 bucks a pack, regardless of size. Our weights are all over the place because in the heat of summer, the chickens are small because they're not eating as much. And in the winter, the chicken breasts are huge because they're eating more. And so it's it's been hard for us to pinpoint, you know, like an average weight because they're always fluctuating. So the sell by the pounds feature has has really been huge for us to make sure we're getting all the revenue from that piece of meat.
Speaker: Awesome. Yeah. And still really easy for customers to understand too. Now, I want to dive in a little bit more to subscriptions. You mentioned earlier that about 30% of your sales are from subscriptions, and it sounds like you started them super early on. How was it getting your customers to sort of adopt to subscriptions, and how has it helped with the just predictability of your cash flow?
Speaker: Yeah, so we did the whole chicken subscriptions for the first few years. And then once we started doing cuts and then adding pork and the partner farm beef, we started, we kept the whole chicken subscription. And then we also added 10 pound chicken cut subscription. So that's roughly two packs of chicken breast, a pack of thighs,
Speaker: a pack of drumsticks or wings and then a pack of broth bones. And then we also did the 12 pound, which is four pounds of chicken, four pounds of pork, four pounds of beef. And the way that we kind of made that transition was we just set what it was going to be. Like the chicken one is pretty predictable, but with the 12 pound, you know, we just gave people a list of cuts that they could expect. We said that there would be a few surprises thrown in here and there. From the beginning, we said we were not able to customize just because we knew we wanted to grow this and we wanted to scale this. And we knew we were not going to be able to do that if we were making custom orders. Some people are really organized and can do it. We knew that we're not that good at organizing to keep up with that for so many people. So from the get-go, we just did farmer's choice. And then, yeah, we just talked about it everywhere. We talked about it on our email list, on social media. We shared videos, pictures of what they get in their monthly box. Whenever we're packing them, we will talk about it at the market. And I think because we started our farm with that subscription model, we always had that monthly subscription. I think people were just from the beginning, if they were a customer of our farm, they knew that we offered monthly subscriptions. So for us, when we did transition to those different kinds of subscriptions, it was an easier transition because people were already used to that model. Like I'm going to get charged automatically every month. This is my pickup schedule that I can count on.
Speaker: So it's good for them. I mean, it was good for us because we had the peace of mind. We could count on that revenue, but it was also good for them because especially in the beginning, we were selling out all the time. So the perk of the subscription was, your meat gets set aside. And if we sell out of something, like you're still going to get product, you know, because we set stuff aside for you. So that was huge for people. And especially the the young families that are so so busy, they don't want to go on their computer and order by the cut. They just want something automatic. They didn't have to think about And they're like, okay, we'll get the box and then I'll figure out what I'm gonna cook later. So people that do the subscriptions really like that. They make this decision one time, they put in their info and then they don't have to think about it again until they get their email that it's pickup week, you know? So people have really loved that subscription model. Totally. One less thing to think about for the customer, peace of mind, knowing that no matter what, they at least, even if they don't get to the grocery store, they at least have your meat coming. That's great.
Speaker: Now you've expanded into quite a bit of add-ons. Also, you've mentioned the broth making kits and things like that. How has that helped bump up your average order size? And just as far as like using the whole bird, how was that process for you?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. So um I'll just kind of go through all of like the the extra things we've added as we have really just been convicted like, hey, we don't want to throw anything away. We don't want to waste anything. And maybe this could be something that can kind of cushion and add a little bit of extra revenue, even if it's not a huge portion, you know. So we did, we do the the broth kits, but we also, for those extra bones, we have started grinding those into pet grind So it's ground chicken meat, skin and bone. People have loved that, especially the people that do like feeding raw. And then we do the livers and hearts. We always have sold those by the pound. um But if we have extra, ah really not extra hearts, those kind of sell out. But we do have extra livers. We've started freeze drying those. And those have sold extremely well because it's room temperature, it's shelf stable.
Speaker: It's not as messy to feed them. They can, you know, they can pick it out with their hand and feed it and not feel like they have to wash their hands immediately. You know, it's not as juicy as like raw liver. What else? We've we've done the feet. We've done those freeze dried as like a dog chew. People have really liked that. Yeah, those are pretty much it. Oh, one other one. The necks. We do freeze dry the necks. Those haven't sold as well. yet, but it's still like that's been within the last year. We're still kind of growing that.
Speaker: But yeah, people people love their animals and sometimes they're willing to spend more on their animals than they are on themselves. The people that buy this stuff the most from us don't buy anything else from us. They just buy stuff for the but for their pets. So yeah, it's kind of opens up a new customer base for you. We've been talking about that a lot here and what you're saying has been repeated from many, many farmers. It's, I think, like a low...
Speaker: price point for people who can't necessarily buy everything for themselves at the farmer's market. They can at least buy some dog treats, which is really fun. Awesome. Okay. Well, what I want to talk about next is some things around pricing. As a onboarding manager, I get questions around pricing a lot. So with you guys, you know, feed, labor, processing costs,
Speaker: commodities, things are constantly changing and usually moving up. And there comes a point where at some point you have to raise prices, right? So what do you guys kind of take into consideration when you talk about raising your prices? How do you calculate everything out? And how do you communicate that out to your buyers too?
Speaker: Yeah, so we... have like a spreadsheet and we have split our business into two businesses really. So we have like the farm side um that produces an eight week live chicken ready to butcher. So that's my husband's side of the business. And then he sells that live chicken to me And then I have all of the processing costs and marketing costs and and freezer overheads, all that built into my side, like the sales side of the business. So we split it into two just so we can, you know, if we're not profitable, we can look at the numbers and be like, okay, is it that Joe is not charging me enough? Or am I not like adding enough profit margin to my side? um So we've split it up. And so for the farm care side, yeah feed, baby chicks, any kind of supplies, overhead, like do they require yeah electricity for the brooder? Is there a water cost? Is there a vet cost? Any of that, all of the labor costs to raise them. Obviously, if you're small scale, That labor per bird is going to be less. If you scale up, the labor per bird goes down. And then he also adds a loss percentage because things happen, weather, flooding, like whatever, extreme heat, extreme cold, when we're not expecting it. So we do add a loss percentage. We add a 10% loss percentage. And then we also add a 10% profit percentage. And then he sells the bird to me.
Speaker: And then I add in all my costs, all the processing costs, freezer costs, my overheads for our freezer trailer that we take to sell. And then I also add a 5% loss packages that get damaged and then 20% profit margin. So across the board, that's roughly 45% that's built in for loss and profit. And so that comes out to about 750 per pound per per bird for a cut up for us. So 650 a pound for whole bird. And so we keep that spreadsheet. And if we have a cost go up significantly, like like if gas goes up significantly or feed, one of those like major, you know, costs, then we immediately will go in and see if we need to raise our price. And then at least once a year, we try and go in and and just kind of fine tune those numbers based off of our expenses the previous year and see if we need to raise our price.
Speaker: If it becomes clear that we need to raise it. So our subscriptions we do on a yearly basis. So every May we do signups and it goes through the following April to give me that flexibility to raise my price if I need to, rather than just having it be ongoing and then being like, oh no, we need to raise our price, cancel everybody's subscription. Now you got to sign up again. So we just say like, hey, you if you do a subscription, your price is locked in for the year. And then the following May we'll do signups again.
Speaker: The price may go up, it might not. So obviously I will communicate if the price is going up, like, hey, your subscription's coming to an end. We're doing signups again. This is the new price to continue to serve you well and be sustainable for our family. This is this is the price. um And if I have to raise the prices for, like, by the cut in the middle of the year,
Speaker: I don't communicate that unless it's going to be like huge, like a 25% increase, you know, but usually I'm just doing like 10% at a time, maybe. And people don't really, that's maybe a dollar a pound. People don't even notice. I used to tell people that we were, especially when we just did whole birds, you know, if we had to go up,
Speaker: a little bit, I would tell people when it was just one product. But now that we have like 100 products in the store, usually I'm not having to raise every price. Usually if beef prices go up, I raise some steaks and I raise some ground beef. and But I usually don't raise roasts. I don't raise bones, um the things that don't move that well. and And for chicken, if I need to raise chicken prices, I'm usually only raising the price of the whole birds, the breasts and the thighs. And I usually kind of keep everything around the same, just because that's what we sell out of the most. So the last time we raised our price, literally no one noticed. I guess when we when we've raised egg prices, we do let people know um on that just because it's really noticeable when we raise our egg prices. But I've never lost a customer because we've raised our price. People, most of our customers, they want to support us. They want us to stay in business long term. If we can't pay ourselves, like we're going to not be able to provide food for them. So they understand that, you know, prices go up and, and yeah, we've never had anybody be upset about that.
Speaker: That's great. That will be comforting to hear for a lot of farmers. It's definitely, you know, a point of conversation in a lot of the meetings that we're having, especially as people are starting to scale. I imagine it took you guys a little bit to like the spreadsheet that you have sounds amazing, but it probably took a little bit to get there and kind of figure out exactly what you need to be doing and levers to pull and all of that.
Speaker: Yeah, we, in the beginning, we we were not good at tracking expenses. We had no spreadsheets. We were flying by the sea of our pants, just charging what we thought we should charge. We really didn't get a good grasp ah on our numbers probably until three or four years in. And that's around the time when like it became our full-time job. Like, okay, the farm has to pay for itself. And we have to turn a profit or else we're not going to be able to keep farming. So that's really when it was kind of like the kick in the butt that we needed to to get serious about our numbers. and And that spreadsheet has grown over time. And we did not create that by ourselves. like It's really a conglomeration of other farms that have kind of mentored us and shared things with us. And we've kind of tweaked it and adjusted it over time to fit like our farm's needs and our farm's scale. So yeah, that was not original to us. We didn't, we're not like super smart spreadsheet people. That's just, it's been, ah yeah, a little bit from this farm, a little bit from that farm, ah a little bit of learning, lots of lessons the hard way. And finally 10 years, almost 10 years in, we feel pretty confident in our numbers. Nice. Well, pretty confident works most of the time. Okay, awesome. Let's talk about fulfillments a little bit because you guys do quite a bit here. You turned your mobile farm store into an online pickup location during peak season. You're doing farmer's markets. How did you originally map out sort of your local loop to meet your buyers? It sounds like it's a relatively small town, but you still have a lot of different pockets of people.
Speaker: Yeah, we have five local pickups and they're all in different small towns, 15 to 30 minutes away from us. So for our Thursday Mobile Farm still location, we just set up for two hours in a gym parking lot that we we know the owners, they let us set up there. And then the other one is a farmer's market on Saturday. We used to do three markets every week. And for us, it was just too much. and We got burnout. So we ended up taking a whole year off of markets. And then we added added the other one back. So yeah, we have those two. And then we have a self-serve pickup from our garage.
Speaker: It's a self-serve freezer and we just put people's order names on there. But that's actually our biggest pickup because it's it's time flexible. They can literally come in within three days, anytime during daylight hours and get their order. So that's that's our biggest pickup. And then we do a pickup at a local market. So they they sell like local food inside their shops.
Speaker: um And they let us use their parking lot as a pickup. So we'll just go and meet people in the parking lot there. And then we have one other shop that lets us do that as well. So I just I kind of chose those pickups based off of what we used to do farmers markets in both of those towns. So I wanted to continue to keep a presence there because we had built that customer base and I wanted to keep making it easy for them to get our product. So that's why we chose those. And we we used to have a third pickup, but um once we started raising more chickens, that was like our processing day and it was hard to do both in the same day. So we actually took a step back from that. But our sales have continued to grow regardless of us taking a step back from from that because we keep we still do the pickup location there. We just don't do in-person sales. but So that's been cool to see like people continue to support you even though you have to change your schedule around a little bit to make it more sustainable for your family. Because we just have one part-time person that helps us fulfill orders and
Speaker: He manages our poultry processing team. So Joe and I can kind of just show up as workers and not have to be in charge, which has been awesome. But we don't have any help like on the farm or any like in-person market help other than a friend covers every now and then, but it's it's nothing like official. So yeah, we kind of have to work with what we got for now. So we needed to kind of scale back. But even though we scaled back, the sales continued to grow, which was a huge blessing because of that email marketing.
Speaker: Nice. That's next on my list here. So good transition. So for email marketing, um I subscribe to your newsletter. I love seeing what you guys have going on. How do you use email? email marketing, whether it's the weekly emails, the newsletters, recipes to actually drive traffic to your online store?
Speaker: Yeah. So in the beginning, we sent a monthly email, then it became biweekly. And now the last, since we went full time, I have sent an email every week, if not more than one email. So I always send an email every Tuesday morning because that's our order deadline for our Thursday pickups, which are four of our five locations. And then if I have to send another random email, like, hey, just a reminder about this, or hey, there's reminder about our farm tours coming up. Don't forget to sign up. Like I usually do those as like another email. I try and keep those Tuesday emails as like a relational trust building email, whether I share a farm story, a recipe, a blog post, um explain ah about a new product and build excitement for that, whatever it is. But I try and do 75% of my emails purely relational, like connection, building trust, and then the other 25% like strictly sales related, like promoting a specific subscription or specific product or a farm tour, Thanksgiving turkeys, whatever it might be.
Speaker: Because I have found that when we have done too many sales emails back to back, the open rates go down and the order rates go down. Just because people start, they get so many sales emails already, you know, and so they they just kind of start to ignore them subconsciously.
Speaker: is is what I found in in our experience. So I try and do more of like the relational emails and I try and keep them being able to be read within two minutes, if not one minute, because people's attention span is not great these days because people are so busy and they need to be able to read it quickly. So I try and keep them short and sweet and to the point and and just focus on one thing, you know, But I know other farms that do it differently. This is just what works for us um and what has got got us the best open rates and click rate. Because probably 70% of our orders come through on Tuesdays because I send those emails. So um they're definitely working, but it took time. It took time to get there. And ah yeah, I always say at um markets too, when I'm getting people on our email list, I always tell myself relationships over sales. I would rather... connect with this person, get them on my email list so that we can stay in touch because that means sales for years versus like, Hey, buy this thing right now. You know, like I would rather them get on my email list and then just walk away and buy nothing than like spend a hundred dollars. That's great. But then walk away and I can never be in touch with them again. You know, because some people that come to the markets, they're not coming all the time. That might be your only opportunity to meet somebody. So I try and yeah, connect with them, get them on my email list. or give them a card with a QR code to get on the email list. And we also offer a free gift. When they sign up, they get a recipe book download. It just comes in a link in their welcome email of 10 of our favorite recipes. So I don't feel like, I don't feel gross, like asking for their email, like, Hey, you're, you're getting something in return. You're getting this free gift. And especially if they're your ideal customer, they're going to be excited to be on it anyway. They're not going to think, Oh, Another email. Some people will think that and they're probably not your ideal customer and that's okay. But yeah, email, the emails have been huge for us.
Speaker: Yeah. 70% of your orders coming in from an email send is is huge. When do you find the time? Are these emails that you're writing weekly or do you plan them out further in advance? How do you dedicate time to marketing? Yeah. In an ideal world, i would love to like the month before plan out all of my...
Speaker: next month's emails. In this season of life with three kids, it has not happened yet. I've tried my best. Even when I was pregnant, I think I planned three emails. So like three weeks postpartum, like, I got to write an email because I didn't plan ahead well enough. So in an ideal world, I would love to plan ahead. But right now it really looks like writing them on Mondays.
Speaker: and sending them and scheduling them to go out Tuesday morning first thing. But that's better than it used to be. It used to be literally writing it and sending it immediately. But now at least I write them like half a day in advance. But that's that's what works for us. And I do have that time set aside every Monday morning to write those emails. So...
Speaker: Awesome. Okay. And then what about social media? Because you guys do a good job on Facebook and Instagram as well. Has that been successful for you? So yes, in the beginning, as we were growing our business, it was good to like connect with people and engage with people. You know, people could go on there and read our previous posts, see our stories and kind of feel like they were getting to know us a bit. As far as getting orders, we don't get a ton of orders through social media. It's really, i try and point people to the website, to the online store and to our email list from social media. And we're kind of at the point I used to be really intentional trying to do three posts a week and be in stories every day and lots of videos. If this season of our life just at full capacity, I really have just been focusing on the email marketing because I know that that works and we're not trying to grow. super big right now. So we're kind of like just kind of coasting a bit. And so really, I've just been showing up in stories like I'll i'll just take videos as I think about it.
Speaker: And then every couple days, I'll have a have a chance to to put those videos up. So I really haven't been as consistent as I used to be on there. But I would say especially if you're just starting out, social media is a great companion to equal email marketing to to kind of build that trust with people. They can see your face. They can hear your voice. They can get to know your family, your farm, why you do what you do, what needs your farm are going to meet for them, because that's really what they... care about the most. Most people are busy and there are some people that really do care about your farming practices, but for the most part, customers just want to know that that farm is going to meet their need of healthy food, that they can feel good about feeding their family, and they want to know where it's coming from. And that's really what's important to them.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great advice. Awesome. Okay, well, with the last few minutes we have left, are there any bits of advice for farmers looking to start offering poultry or maybe they're already offering poultry and just want to start making more money off of it? Anything you got for those farmers?
Speaker: Just track your numbers as best as you can, as soon as possible. So like when we were first just starting out winging it, we're like, oh, we don't really need to track anything because we're so inefficient. It doesn't matter. Like,
Speaker: We're just going to get more efficient and we'll be able to make up these costs later. Well, that didn't really happen for a while. So I would say even if you're just starting out, it might feel silly to write like track all of your time, all of your expenses might feel silly, but it's going to give you really good information and it's going to give you a baseline. So as you do get more efficient and you do grow and and you figure out how to do things better, then you you can continue to track and kind of see like how far you've come and then you can adjust your prices as you go. But I would just I would have if I could do it again, i would have tracked stuff from the beginning. So we could have started out with a profitable price instead of just guessing for the first couple of years and and not and really making negative money, to be honest. um
Speaker: we We were working to lose money because we were just not charging enough. So definitely make sure your price is good and profitable before you even think about scaling up, because there's just going to be more work and more lost money if you're not charging the right price. And then get really good at marketing, whether it's just listening to Barnador podcast. They have amazing resources. They have an academy. on how to do email marketing. There's blogs, podcasts, all that stuff. Or maybe a paid course. There's lots of paid marketing courses out there. Maybe choose one that really connects with you or speaks to you and go in on that. That's what we did in the beginning. Like, I guess it was year two. I started doing that to learn marketing, to start building my email list and start figuring out how to serve my customer well, who my ideal customer even is. How do I find them? How do I um connect with them? All those things. Because as
Speaker: Yeah, a small local farm people. They're not just buying a product. They're buying the whole package like they they want to. Yeah, they want to support your family, really. So once you build that loyal customer base, they'll kind of just buy whatever you have, which is why we continue to add products and and different enterprises, because we're like, we already have these amazing customers. Like, what else can we offer them? But we didn't add everything at once. I would definitely say start with one thing.
Speaker: get that profitable and then add instead of trying to start with like four different things. And then you're just putting out fires all the time. You're trying to figure out how to get all of them profitable all at once. And it's just not going to be realistic, at least for us. ah There's probably some farms out there that did start with a a bunch of things and they got them all profitable. But for us, we could we couldn't do that. So yeah, start small, get profitable and then scale from there is what I would say.
Speaker: Awesome. Great advice. All right. Well, I want to extend my thanks to Rachel for joining us on this week's podcast episode. You can check out more and follow Shank Family Farm on their Instagram at Shank Family Farm. Here at Barn to Door, we're humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We are delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers make more money, ditch the office work and look like a pro.
Speaker: We literally talk all day, every day to farmers and farmers working with Barn to Door can go to office hours daily or schedule one-on-one meetings with team members for consulting on their business. We exist to support farmers like Rachel. If you're an independent farmer just getting started or interested in selling direct, or if you want to simplify your business or build up your local customer base, please visit barntodore.com backslash learn more. Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn to Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country.
Speaker: For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barntodore.com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.
