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Capture Every Sale: POS Built for Farmers
306 Plays6 days ago
Barn2Door CEO Janelle Maiocco and Success Team Lead Kevin Soncrant discuss the Point of Sale (POS) system built for Farmers to bridge the gap between in-person and online sales. Learn how real-time inventory tracking and integrated email capture empowers Farmers to streamline their operations, secure year-round sales and attract loyal Buyers.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction to The Independent Farmer Podcast
00:00:10
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.
00:00:20
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.
Barn2Door's Mission and Software
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle, the CEO of Barn2Door, and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners are aware, Barn2Door builds software for independent farmers all across the country. By getting a system in place to sell direct, market to local buyers, and manage orders, farmers can skip the middleman and build a strong business with recurring sales. Barn2Door is built for farmers, which means we built what farmers need to easily sell online and in person to wholesale and retail customers, including tracking real-time inventory. And we just debuted helping farmers with local delivery. In today's conversation, we plan to dig into POS built for farmers, one of our favorite topics.
Expanding to YouTube and Kevin's Journey
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm happy to welcome Kevin. He's in charge of our success department. Cannot wait to dig in with you today. Yeah, I'm really excited, Janelle. Thanks for having me back. It's sort of like where to begin, right? We've had POS in the water for a couple years now, and we just have the engineering team continue to work on it and farmers tell us what more they need. And we just keep going in that direction. Yeah, it's great to see how it's expanded. And listened to farmer feedback to continue to make improvements based on what they're looking for and really just helping them meet all their selling needs with one device. It's pretty awesome. You know, in another month from now, you're not probably be doing this as a YouTube. Can you believe that, ah that we're... Kicking off our YouTube channel here soon. Holy smokes. This is the first time you get to keep hiding behind cameras with no cameras, which is kind of fun. Yeah.
00:02:03
Speaker
Very excited for the YouTube channel, though. It'll be good. Okay. A little bit about your role. Just give people some context, a little introduction to you, how long you've been at Barn to Door, what your responsibilities are, including the success team, right? You're in charge of. Yeah, so I've been with Barnador for over three and a half years now. Started as an account manager, working closely with farmers across the country, literally hundreds of them, after they graduated onboarding and once they were working on implementation of Barnador as a software. So...
00:02:32
Speaker
What that meant was really meeting with farmers every day, you know, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 plus meetings a day sometimes, and really just helping them reach their business goals, utilize the Barnador software to improve the way in which they conduct business, help them ditch the office work, help them make more money. And, I loved it. It was ah such a great role. I still will do that to this day and still meet with farmers regularly.
00:02:54
Speaker
But I went on to then lead that team. And now I oversee both the onboarding and account management team as well. So I'm also onboarding farms on a daily basis. So working with them right after they sign up with our team, helping them get everything set up and in place, and then having them work with an account manager after they graduate onboarding. It's funny because I don't think every company has quote unquote success team. And it literally is farmer success that you think about all day, every day. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Live Support and Early Work Hours
00:03:23
Speaker
It's really unprecedented, especially in terms of what we provide for our farmers and the access to our team to be able to get support. Besides like us scheduling regular meetings with farmers, we do daily live office hour sessions. So we have two 45 minute sessions every weekday on Zoom that are free for any farmer to join for free live support. So a member of our team is waiting there to answer any questions. So we're just constantly looking for ways to make it easier for farmers to use the software and understand how to get their questions answered with a real person. Real humans in an AI world. I mean, really, like actual real humans every day showing up for farmers, visually live in office hours and on one-to-one calls all day back-to-back. And kudos to Kevin. I tell you what, he's one of the earliest folks to get into the office every single day, which is amazing. And it always makes me think of farmers because while my grandfather was a dairy farmer, and they're always up before the rest of the world. to milk cows. And so we're like, when we're serving farmers, it's, you know, early is early, but they already are all up. Yeah, absolutely. I get up as early as many of our farmers probably. I'm usually up at about 4 a.m. every day. So I'll usually be getting online after ah working out and then in office by at least seven.
00:04:33
Speaker
I love that. See, all the farmers are in good company with you helping out with literally their success every single day and all your team, which is just incredible. Okay, so besides helping farmers get set up as they are moving into a new system to run their business, which is what Barn to Doors platform helps with, and then of course as they progress, they're going to start to get to the point where they get their ores in the water, they figure it out, they know how to use this new system to run their business, sell to those local customers easily and readily, and then there's a whole opportunity for account managers to talk about strategy and different things like that, which is so neat. I've been reading over testimonials all morning and the amount of kudos we get from farmers who are like, Barnes Adores, success teams, support teams, real-time health, office hours, connect program with the farmers, even. It's a rich resource and good. It should be. That's why
Feature Requests and POS System Introduction
00:05:21
Speaker
we're here. But one of the things you do on the success team is you work with the product team. Explain what that means. Sure. I'll talk about it from a team standpoint and then an individual standpoint as well. So from a team standpoint, it's extremely simple for us to work with our product team. We have a feature request form. That's an internal form that we fill out. It's three fields. It's an email address and it's context for what farmers are looking for, for improvements to the software. So anytime we have farmers that are requesting the software do something that it may not
00:05:51
Speaker
currently do. We'll pull open that farm. We fill it out in live time or right after we meet with them. And all of that goes directly to our product team. Literally every single feature request is manually reviewed and read. And then ultimately more farmers that are requesting a particular feature, the more that it'll impact are two of the bigger factors when it comes to our team potentially implementing that in the future. Needless to say, pooss is on that list in a lot of different capacities. We can't work on everything every farmer requests, but the more farmers that request, it does move the needle and it's great that our team has access to do that at any time. So that's the first and easiest way we interact with our product team and then I work very closely with our product lead as well. We have a weekly sync where we review updates or requests or feedback or anything that's top of mind. So we'll do a 30 minute meeting once a week. And then once a month we'll meet as well as a part of a larger sync with Janelle, our CEO. as well. Kind of the same thing, really just give more feedback that's maybe not coming through as frequently on those feature request forms. That is still very important for our product team to be aware of when it comes to what we can do to continue to improve the software and make it easier for farmers to be successful.
00:06:59
Speaker
I love talking about what farmers want. But we also just love to build what farmers want. But you're right. Kevin's team, who literally talks to farmers all day, every single day, captures feedback and attaches it even to each farmer. And so we can pull that data together, look at the dashboards and look what people are asking for. So POS, for example, when we can look at that and be like, oh, here's the top three things that farmers are asking for, et cetera. But we also...
00:07:22
Speaker
To Kevin's point, we'll sit down and say, okay, but it's the beginning of the farm market season. That also weighs in. Like, what do they need immediately out of the gate? Or what can we build as the season is occurring, right? If it's middle of the summer, we're going to keep improving POS and adding on complexities and features and in so many words, empowering the farmers even more so every day with everything that we build to make it easier for the farmers to sell and the buyers to buy. So it's a lot of fun.
00:07:50
Speaker
So we put the POS in the water. I think we're into our fourth year now. And it sometimes is a blur, folks. It's been a lot of years of building software for farmers in a great way, and we love it. But the POS was so exciting. Having been working at this company for about a dozen years now at this point, every time we put bigger things in the water in addition to all the little things. It's just next level in terms of dreams come true. So before POS, we made it so farmers could have an online store, of course, manage inventory, orders, finances, deliveries, everything. But when POS came on the scene, the beauty of that was now we could help farmers truly have their entire business all in one system, all under one roof, because they could finally sell not just online, but in person.
00:08:36
Speaker
And so the promise of farmers being able to easily sell anywhere, anytime to any customer, in person, online, wholesale, retail, you name it. Hopefully customers are in their pajamas with slippers at midnight ordering from them. It's one of my favorite visuals. Now it's true. We can help that be a seamless experience for farmers across orders and
Store Credits and POS Flexibility
00:08:54
Speaker
inventory and customers. So POS is certainly one of our favorite things that we put in the water. And it's just been great because we have team members working on the POS kind of around the clock in terms of what more we can bring. In fact, Kevin, we have a POS feature coming out today. I can't believe we're doing, well, we're recording the podcast. So when this comes out, which I think is pretty quickly, it will already be true that we have store credits on POS. Just for fun, let's just run and through the, like, there's farmers saying, I want this to you and you're capturing that and you're sending it over to the product team and then they send it to the engineering team to build and then they build it and it comes out. What does that feel like for you and success?
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's very exciting for us. We all work with farmers. When we have a new feature coming out, we'll have generally a couple of farms that come top of mind and go, I can't wait to tell this farmer about this new update. And so this one in particular for customers to be able to buy digital currency online, store credits in a farmer's store and then be able to use them in person. Certainly something we've had many farmers requests, so really excited to bring that to fruition for them. And it's really a big deal. There's not a lot of software out there that allows for this capability. So Farmers will have the ability when they're at a market or they're in person or they maybe they have a farm store or they're doing deliveries to pull open their point of sale app and have access to all of the customer profiles that have store credits on them. So if anybody's coming in person, they don't need to actually have any payment methods now. They've already purchased store credits. They can just walk up and use their digital currency with that farm and buy anything that that farmer is selling there. So it's a huge shift for just availability for customers and a huge shift for our farms too, in terms of some of the capabilities they'll be able to offer to their customers.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, we often have customers that want to give farmers a couple hundred dollars early in the season, right? So it's like you can contribute a couple hundred dollars early in the season and then just spend it whenever online or in person. But at that point, it's just door credits, right? The farmer already has the money. You know what else? is kind of interesting. I noticed a lot of people from out of town buying that as gifts for other people, right? So if your mom or dad are like, what do I get you? Be like, well, store credits with this farm because I love their dairy or protein or produce. So just give me store credits from them for my birthday. And then they can spend it anytime.
00:11:03
Speaker
So put that on your birthday list if you're a buyer from your favorite farm, which is really neat. It's a great present, Janelle. I bought my dad farm food last year for his birthday. And it's an online gift card. So that's exactly what the store credits can be used for. In addition to buying them for yourself, you know, give it as a gift to anyone that you you want, whether it's for the holidays or a birthday or a special event, or just because you want to say I love you and here's some access to some great farm food for their store.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, there's no better way to say I love you than a beautiful filet mignon from a grass-fed beef farmer that's local. I'm just saying. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about POS. This is funny. We have to add this humor because when do we first dropped POS, and I love farmers because I think it's hilarious, but POS is not necessarily a super common word. Like, why would you run across POS? And so we had to actually start writing point of sale because you're smiling, Kevin. We all know that you just might mean piece of, and it's not proof. But that is so funny. The first time that that happened, I was rolling on the ground. It was just awesome. Okay. Just for the delighting all of us, Kevin, and tell us what a POS is when it happens to deal with software powering farmers' businesses.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, it stands for point of sale. So it'd be a point of sale device. So what Barnador provides is a card reader that pairs with a mobile app. The card reader can fit in the palm of your hand, and that's what farmers will use to take credit or debit payments there in person, as well as mobile wallets like Google and Apple Pay. Then it syncs seamlessly with a mobile app that's free to download on any Android device, iPhone, iPad. You could go right now and download It's called Barnador Point of Sale. You've course, need to have bar to door storefront to actually use it, but it'll sync with live inventory for farmers and allow them to take in-person payments. What's great about it too, is not just for digital payments, although that is going to be the primary method in which customers will want to pay. Farmers can also use it to take cash and check payments and still seamlessly manage all their inventory and take sales in person. So it's really just the best avenue to allow farms to sell their products so anywhere at any time. Okay, you have to say something more about that because, first of all, farmers absolutely, this is perfect if they're at a farmer's market, right? Like all day, every day. We have some farms that are at 20, 30, 40 farmer's markets and they use the Barn-to-Door POS, which is just so fun to watch and have them have so much success. Where else might they use them?
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, great question, Janelle. One of the most common use cases would be an on-farm store. This is a no-brainer to make sure they're using our point of sale as well. It's going to allow you to sell all your products there in person, whether it's you have consistent hours or just a once a day or once a week optionality for an on-farm store. It's going to allow for easy, seamless checkout for customers. Probably another really common one would be pickups and deliveries. So meeting customers at a local pickup, maybe you're meeting them in a church parking lot or a coffee shop or some other local business, bring some extra product with you as the farmer in case people want maybe a couple extra packs of ground beef, for example, or a couple other dozen eggs. As long as you have your card reader and your mobile device, which who's going anywhere without that nowadays, you can ring up more products there. And same with delivery. We have farms that will bring it with them on their delivery routes. The exact same use case, just to have some extra product in the vehicle to do any additional add-on sales for products that people are constantly adding on to their
POS Benefits for Farmers and Chefs
00:14:23
Speaker
orders. We have other farms put the point of sale reader in their purse literally everywhere they go, you know, doing a pickup for their kids at a school. Can easily sell products right then and there.
00:14:31
Speaker
And then another great one would be local pop-ups, right? So if you have like a pop-up events or some kind of community event, wherever you're at, whether it's you're selling from a tent or you just have a little booth, that's going to allow farmers to manage these in-person events and complete all their sales. Yeah. So helpful. The point is helping farmers be able to sell product literally anytime. So to have a mobile app to carry with them, if you will, and sell anywhere, anytime. I've worked a lot of years in the restaurant industry, and it is very common for chefs to be like, oh, I forgot to order. Like, do you have a couple boxes of tomatoes?
00:15:03
Speaker
And a lot of farms that I know intentionally are always carrying some extra produce or even to showcase something that just came out of the ground or they had a bumper crop of, right, if they're trying to move some extra products. So great to just be able to take that payment and then appropriately track that inventory and catch all of the above. So pretty exciting.
00:15:20
Speaker
Okay, very fun because the heart of Barn to Door is we're not building, you know, e-commerce or business software or POS just for anyone. We think about farmers all day, every day, and what do they need to make more money, to make it easier for themselves, to make it easier for the buyers. We always say ditch the office work. How can we carve off more hours of their time in the back office and get them back out on the farm or in front of people? And then, of course, looking like a pro.
00:15:45
Speaker
But when it comes to POS specifically, there are a number of things that this POS does because it is built for farmers. That is not typical of just a generic POS device, which makes us proud. but This is why we're here. This is why we exist. You mentioned seamless real-time inventory. I think you and I have mentioned this multiple times because it is such a big deal.
00:16:06
Speaker
If you're selling a whole chicken online and a whole chicken at the market, you can literally... sell two chickens online and then two at the market five minutes later, and it'll say minus four chickens. But the beauty of it is, is you might've sold the ones online for $25 each in flat price. And the ones in person might've been 3.4 pounds and 4.2 pounds because you weighed the chicken. And it's still accurate inventory. So that's a big deal in terms of a seamless inventory.
00:16:32
Speaker
I could get into the weeds on this, but if you're selling a dozen eggs versus a case of eggs wholesale and a couple of dozen in person to consumers, it doesn't matter what unit size or price. It's still going to accurately subtract from your inventory. That was a big build by Barns-to-Door to make sure The farmers are just easy. That had just literally created zero work for them. And inventory would be completely seamless and accurate across wholesale, retail, different units, even set weight versus pay by weight, et cetera. So that's one of my favorites.
Building Customer Relationships through Emails
00:17:02
Speaker
Pick one of your favorites, Kevin, because you talk to farms every day. Like what gets you excited about? Can you believe it does this for farmers? Because of course it does, because that's why we're building it. Well, I think a new favorite of mine is going to be store credits for sure.
00:17:14
Speaker
But to add on to the real-time inventory s sink, just one other point that's really important for farms know is they can oversell with the inventory as well and the point of sale in person, which is a great feature. as If a farmer happens to forget to update their inventory, if something's still listed as sold out, we trust the farmer knows that they're holding two pounds of ground beef and they're cooler right behind them. And if they have it right there, and even if it's sold out online, they can still sell it in person with the point of sale. And then, yeah, I mean the sell by weight flat price functionality that you've mentioned there bears repeating because it is not common. There's not really any point of sale out there that allows farmers to flip back and forth between flat pricing or selling by weight. You mentioned the chicken, right? If they have a price per pound set in the store, it'll automatically multiply the weight times the price per pound when the farmer enters it in. My favorite one, I would probably have to give the edge to captured emails directly at time of purchase. We all know the customer list is so crucial to a farm success and owning their own customers is even more important. And unfortunately, a lot of point of sale devices out there kind of have this gated off where farms can't collect emails or if they can, they don't have access to them unless they pay for them or they use whatever email service that particular point of sale requires them to use. We've had farms go and try and download their customer list and literally physically can't get the emails unless they pay for them. So Barnador allows for a seamless collection of that.
00:18:32
Speaker
As soon as that transaction's complete, and there's a screen that'll pop up prompting the customer to enter their email address to be added to the email list. So really great feature. And then that will sync over as well, provided they have the Mailchimp account and have that integrated in Barnador, they'll automatically sync over to their email list. So when they go to send their next newsletter, those people will be on their customer list.
00:18:52
Speaker
So to be clear, you're saying if it's generic POS, they don't have access to those customer emails. But with Barn to Door, they do, which is neat. If you have ever listened to even a few of our podcasts or blogs or e-books, or if you're a farmer using Barn to Door and you've gone to one of the k Connect sessions, which is hosted by other farmers, you will hear a lot of chest beating over a non-collection because it is gold. A podcast being recorded recently had a farmer say,
00:19:18
Speaker
If my whole farm was burning down, i would just grab my email list. I'd be fine. I'd rebuild my farm. And it was just a drop the mic moment because it's like, yeah, if you have your customer list, you can rebuild, you can sell, you can build recurring revenue. So that email list really is gold because it's those regular order reminders and emailing people. And that drives recurring sales. And we've seen it time and again.
00:19:41
Speaker
We have so many farmers who purport to every time they send out an email, it's like going to the ATM. It's how you ensure sales. So really exciting. In particular, the POS, I think they added that like a year plus ago or something like that. But just the fact that it captures emails right there when your customer's paying and automatically then adds them to your barn-to-door list.
00:20:01
Speaker
And then, of course, if you do have the integration with MailChimp, like Kevin was saying, it'll add it there as well. Yeah, not not to get too dark here, Janelle, but I do want to just add some context for farmers to think about, like especially for farmers that rely on all their sales coming from farmer's markets. If there's bad weather day and the market has to shut down or God forbid it shuts down altogether and they haven't been growing their customer list, they're really out of luck. They're starting from scratch at that point. Whereas if farms are taking that seriously and diligently and every time they get the opportunity to add to their customer list with every transaction, if that farmer's market doesn't happen because of weather for a given week, They can send an email to all their customers and do like a one day delivery day or one day meetup to go and still accumulate sales. so they're not completely reliant on third parties that they have no control over.
00:20:46
Speaker
I appreciate that. That wasn't too dark. Although I will say, i know during onboarding on your team, when farmers first are getting set up, we see every size email list. We see no emails because the farmer's just getting started.
00:20:59
Speaker
We see farms with thousands of emails and everything in between. But when a farmer is at a farmer's market currently selling and not collecting emails, it literally like tears into the heart of the onboarding manager every time. You know, the emoji with the screaming face. They're just mortified on behalf of the farmer. They're like, oh my gosh, this is such a huge opportunity. Collect emails at the farmer market. It's like double duty at the market. Sell, but at the same time, you're moving product. capture emails and you're growing your customer list so make it twice as worth your time to be at the market we have so many farms that have used that exercise of collecting emails at a farmer market to enter a new geography and be like okay here's my presence now i'm collecting these emails
00:21:45
Speaker
Now I'm emailing these people on non-farm market days. I might add extra pickup or delivery. And now they're building into that community because they started at the farmer market and were collecting emails. And that's just how you get your tendrils into the entire community, right? And just start to expand. Yeah, particularly important for farmers that want to get out of farmers markets as well. They want to get their Saturdays and Sundays back. You know, if they're able to do that effectively, they can do a once a week or once every couple week delivery instead, as long as they have a viable customer list that they can reach out to. We have farmers that love farmers markets and will be there forever and ever. And we have other farmers that have done that as a marketing exercise, especially collecting emails and then building up their brand loyalty and then exiting sometimes those farmers markets, right? Because they have the sales replacing those days. So it gives farmers optionality. I think that's what's miraculous and something that I think about Austin and I know everybody else here does, which is How do we just keep giving farmers power to make decisions for their business?
00:22:46
Speaker
Do you want to sell to all retail or wholesale? Do you want to be at farmers markets or not? Do you want to be in certain cities or not? Like where is it that you want to target? Do you want to consolidate? We have farmers that have consolidated farmers markets or consolidated delivery days. So it's just the power of being able to make those decisions for your business and change up even what you're selling or how you're selling it. So there's a lot of good in that, that's for sure. POS gives you all the options in terms of when and where you're selling, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Customizing Sales with POS
00:23:15
Speaker
Since we were talking about checkout options, right? So one of the great options as well when going to checkout is being able to have customers provide a tip. It's something that some farmers have trouble asking for. So if it's right there on a screen, It's really simple for them, right? They're able to go ahead and just prompt people to leave a tip. People want to provide additional support for the farms they're buying from, for local businesses in general. And so giving them that optionality is really important. There's three different preset amounts, which can be modified, and then a custom amount as well that anybody can enter it in. We have custom tipping language as well that allows farmers to choose between a variety of different options there. But it really just gives them an opportunity to pay themselves a little bit more for all their hard work. So I can't understate this one enough.
00:23:57
Speaker
And people love to tip their farmer. And I think that's great. But you know what? Some farmers are a little uncomfortable with that because farmers are like, look, I love that my buyers want to give me money, but I don't like calling it a tip. It just makes me uncomfortable. And so to Kevin's point, farmers using the POS and honestly the online store too can alter the language and even put in custom language for tip. And I think what are some of the things they can call it? Donation, help cover fees, Yeah, donation, tip, help cover fees, and then gifts are the four preset options that they can choose from. But it's just neat, right? Because you can customize that in a way that makes, you know as a farmer, that you're more comfortable still giving those buyers an opportunity to contribute. Awesome. Any other call outs?
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, a couple other custom options that we have are the ability to make custom items. So right there on the spot, if a farmer doesn't happen to have an inventory item in their online store. Before they add items to their cart, they're able to just click a button to add a custom item, which they can bring up any product that they want right there in person. So if they have some unique product that they're selling is just a one-time thing, they can go ahead and create that. And I had a farmer just attend to an event and they were selling like custom artwork that they weren't going to have in their storefront. It was just a one-off sale, but they wanted to be able to sell it at that event. So they were able to just make a custom item for that. I love that. My brain was going through all the different ideas for custom items. Yeah, it'd be great to see the most unique custom item that's been run through the point of sale. I couldn't even venture a guess. But in addition to custom items, farmers can also offer custom discounts so they can do cart level discounts. When they're in the cart, they provided with an option to add on a percentage or a dollar amount off the entire transaction. So if they want to give a discount for friends and family, maybe they want to do a military vet or a teacher discount.
00:25:38
Speaker
Maybe they have a loyal customer that they just want to say an extra thanks to. They could give them a couple bucks off or a couple percentage points off their entire cart. It's just a seamless couple taps with their thumb to be able to initiate that and apply that cart level discount. Good.
00:25:52
Speaker
Love it. I really appreciate Certainly a lot to be thinking about. And we're not done. We're going to continue to build. And i know actually that we're working on things right now. So definitely keep an eye out for that for the firms that are already using POS. And if you're a farmer considering POS, well, dig in, right, into the details on what it is that you need to be successful.
00:26:11
Speaker
We love being helpful. Kevin, at the beginning, like if I'm a farmer, curious about using the POS and I just signed up for Burn to Door and I run into you on one of my first calls, you're going to explain to me how it works to get started. What does that look like? Sure. Yeah. So that's actually very simple when it comes to getting started. For our farms, they just enter in a couple basic pieces of information in their online store, and then they're able to order that point of sale card reader shipped directly to their door. They will be able to get that in usually like three to five business days after ordering it. So pretty quickly, the device itself is only 59 bucks plus shipping. They do standard shipping. It's only an extra like 10 or 12 bucks. And then we're running a discount for every farm right now where within six months of purchasing that first reader, they actually get the 59 refunded back to their card as long as they do just a thousand dollars in sales within first six months of purchasing that device. But once they purchased it or even before, we'll give them a run through of how the point of sale actually works. So we'll have them download the free app on their phone and just walk them through doing a sample transaction, doing like a cash check order through the app. Or if they don't have it or they can't download it or for whatever reason they want us to show them, we can also just join from a Google meeting from our devices as well. So I can connect my phone screen to that. I have the app on my phone as well. I'm able to go into my fake store and show them the ins and outs, cover some of these details and the features that are provided and show them exactly how this will work. One thing we didn't get to as well is just in addition to how easy it is to use, the farmers do also have a variety of pricing sheets available, which is really crucial because they might be selling, you know I'll take ground beef for an example, at eight, nine, $10 a pound at the farmer's market. But they might also sell that to a wholesale customer and they might have placed a huge wholesale order doing delivery to them and they needed an extra five pounds. With the different pricing sheets that we have, they're able to have a wholesale price that is different than that retail price. And they could even do ah a whole separate price for private pricing if they have. Maybe local people get an even extra big discount. So all that's right there. It's very seamless. They click on the item. It'll have the different pricing sheet prices that are able to be added to the cart seamlessly. All the fun.
00:28:17
Speaker
That is neat. I know I was thinking if you're selling it to your sister, you better give her a discount, right? I would hope so. But some farms also have like clubs. They have beef clubs or a CSA club or membership or something like that. And so oftentimes those loyal customers have kind of a forever discount or slightly different pricing that they get access to. And so the farmers can keep that entire price list per product and quickly flip back and forth. Same thing with wholesale. I actually love that you mentioned delivery because if a farmer has their POS device and app with them when they're dropping off at a chef and then next they're going to a consumer just to retail homes or whatnot, it is easy for them to flip back and forth between the pricing sheets for all the same products and just choose, hey, is this
Wholesale and Retail Transactions with POS
00:29:00
Speaker
a wholesale customer? Is it a retail customer? Or is it one of my member customers? It's literally so easy to just click the correct type of customer to get all the right pricing and units.
00:29:10
Speaker
Because when I worked in the restaurant industry, chefs, they might actually scoot over to the farmer market, but they're going to be there at the crack of dawn when the trucks are getting unloaded, right? I worked for this awesome restaurant for a while and they just had the best creative menus and it changed frequently, like almost every day. So they would go to the farmer market as the trucks were being unloaded. So that's pretty common too. But nice to be able to have it all set up easy and take no time at checkup, right, with the various customers and just have the flexibility for those farmers to service and transact with any customer. regardless of whether they're wholesale, retail, or inverse, et cetera. So all the fun. We could talk about this forever. We definitely could.
00:29:47
Speaker
And we will be able to. I'm sure we'll have some new features that'll come out soon and we'll probably do another podcast in about a year. Well, Kevin, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate that. Any last words of wisdom or advice for any of our farms before we sign off? Look for opportunities to do in-person sales. One thing that we didn't mention earlier, I'm glad you asked for last thing, is on-farm events. That's another great use case for the point of sale, but a great way for farms to bring in some extra revenue, particularly in the off-season.
00:30:14
Speaker
So like I have a farmer that they do farm-to-table dinners. And so they charge people to come eat the food that they grow on their farm cooked by a professional chef, right? other farms that'll do come pet the cows days, farm tours. like All of those are opportunities to get interest, get people to your farm. And then once they're there, sell them more products that you have there in person with the point of sale. So those are really just limited to your creativity and your desire to actually have people out to the property. But I promise you, people want to come see your farm and do events that are unique because they're not things that they normally get to do. And so it's just a great opportunity to expand your offerings and make more money.
00:30:50
Speaker
And I love the plug for the off-season. We work with farms to push for year-round sales, right? And there's a variety of ways to do that. POS events is a great example. And of course, they're naturally collecting all those emails every single time somebody's signing up for the dinner or buying something at their on-farm store or what may be so... juicy ideas. See, this is what happens when you talk to members of the success team is you literally walk away with a million great ideas for your farm to be successful and hopefully deeper, deeper knowledge of a software that was built specifically for you to be
Empowering Farmers and Call to Action
00:31:20
Speaker
successful. So that's sort of why we exist. to be on risk is to do whatever we can to help farmers crush it farmers all across the country so thank you kevin for joining us on this week's podcast episode at barn to door as you may or may not know we're humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country we're delighted to offer services and tools help farmers make more money ditch the office work and look like a pro we literally talk every day especially kevin to farmers and farmers working at barn to door can also go to office hours don't forget kevin mentioned that twice a day
00:31:50
Speaker
live human people waiting to help or schedule one-on-one meetings with different team members on the success team. If you're an independent farmer just getting started, awesome, or interested in selling direct, great. Or if you have a really substantial business and you want to simplify and get some time back and build up that local customer base, please visit barntodore.com backslash learn more. We'd love to talk to you. Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
00:32:25
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.
00:32:42
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.