Top Tips For Making Money as a Flower Farmer

start. So I want to share some of those thoughts with you today. And truly, without sales and marketing, there is no business. So first of all, number one, the why, why do you want to be a flower farmer really, really delve deep into this? Is it a lifestyle business? Is it to replace income that you have from another job or a corporate role? Is it because you want more flexibility around the family is just my number one advice is build a business that works for

you. There is very little point in having a wedding business if you don't like working weekends, farmers markets or at weekends. Wholesale florist, for instance, are during the week, normally Wednesday and Thursday. Funerals are obviously during the week, and they tend to be planned. So you can plan your life workshops, or when you decide and work around you. So I really think you need to think about why you're you're doing this, why do you want to be a flower farmer, and what you want to

make out of it. My number two piece of advice is about transitioning. Now the thing about transitioning from a corporate or a job or a career or anything, whatever you want to call it, is that flower farming is a difficult role to make money from on day one. So what you need to do is transition from a career. So let's assume that you currently

earn 50,000 pounds because my maths isn't very good and allows me to divide it by five days of the week, let's assume you earn 50,000 pounds. So that's 10,000 pounds a day. My advice would be if you need to make an income is to drop one day and go to a four day week with your current employer. If they allow you to do that. This means you now need to make 10,000 pounds a year as a flower farmer. If you drop two days a week is 20. If you drop

three days a week is 30. But I believe that people need to transition out of a career and a full time role into flower farming. This is because the investment required for flower farming and the time it takes to actually get going. And to even get to a break even point will be about 18 months. There's lots of investment in polytunnels in foliage and trees and plants. And it's just to be prepared for that. And know that the income will not match what you've previously had on day one. But

don't be put off. Number three know which market you're going to serve. So are you going to do weddings, funerals? Are you going to sell to wholesale florist? Are you going to do farmers markets? Are you going to sell at the end of the gate? What market do you want to serve? Or indeed all of them are a mixture of them? Most importantly, and one that always gets neglected? is price. What

do you sell something for. And my number one piece of advice on pricing is that you must cost in yourself, you must give yourself an hourly rate. Because if you couldn't work in this business, you would have to have somebody who could. So you need to give yourself an hourly rate that you need to achieve. So let's say that's 25 pound, freelance florists are generally working out between 18 and 22 pounds an

hour. And therefore as a flower farmer, you need to set yourself an hourly rate and cost yourself in. So you need to cost in

everything you need to cost in the growing time. And also the picking time and conditioning time. And then the arranging time to everything that goes into making that product is actually a cost. So your time is also a cost. And that will be in some ways a wake up call. And it will then determine which products in which markets you actually go into.

So for instance, if you're making a bouquet for 45 pounds, you have materials, you have a vase you might be putting it into, you have other flowers you've picked, you have the time you pick the flowers, and you can't and you condition them and you arrange them and then you might be delivering them. And there might be a fuel cost involved in that. And it depends how far you're going to deliver it. So on a one off bouquets situation at 45 pound, there won't be a margin there really

won't be a margin. So it needs to be a volume business if you're doing bouquet And they need to be either collected from you, or you need to be delivering regularly. So like a flower Friday or something, but it does home in on the cost and pricing. On that note number five, think about your products, what are your products? What flowers are you actually going to sell, which will determine

what you're going to grow. If you've determined what markets you want to go into, then you will determine what you want to grow. So if you're in a wedding market, for instance, it's very, very different to a funeral market, or a bouquet market, or even a wholesale florist market. Talk to florist, if you're going to sell wholesale and ask them what they need, you will never never have enough foliage. So bear that in mind. florists are always looking for lots and lots

of foliage. The trend for weddings, for instance, is lots of installations, you'll need lots of branches, lots of trees. Bear that in mind, when you're planning what you're actually

going to grow. Very early on, I grew things like yellow chrysanthemums, which have very little market whatsoever. Peonies are great, but it's a very short market. So only a three week window, grow things that people will want to buy, and that you've got a longer growing season. And then that's a good start. So think about all your products. Number six, think

about your brand. Think about you your brand is you something that people want to connect to write down on a piece of paper, have a sort of mind mapping exercise, why you're different to everybody else. And that is your brand. If you're in the UK, and you're British flower farmer, you're a British flower farmer. So you'll be into sustainability and eco, the same if you're anywhere else in the world. Just write down on a piece of paper, why you're

different. And that will start to form your brand, it will start to talk about your messaging, it start to position you and about why you're so different. Most importantly, and I don't really know why I've left it to number seven is your marketing plan. As I said

earlier, no marketing, no sales. No business is the harsh reality. And it's probably the hardest bit if you don't come from a career in marketing. So I want to tell you all the different ways that you can market your business, and they will vary based on your markets. So they are build a website is one of the fundamental things

you can do. You can do it yourself, you can build a website, there are there are templates out there on Wordpress templates out there on Squarespace, you can build a website, in the beginning, if you can't, then you can obviously contract somebody to build a website. Most importantly, within website is about being found being found through the search engines. And

that is still as important today as it was 1520 years ago, when I started in digital marketing. I equate it to if you can't find your website, if a user cannot find your website, it's like having a book in the library on a library shelf. And you walking into the library one day and saying to the librarian, I want a book. And it's about flowers. And I think it's red. And I'm sure I'm sure we found it once upon a time somewhere over

there, but I can't remember. And that's what a website is, if you think there are so many billions of websites in the world, unless your website has good natural search engine optimization, and people can find you for what you're actually selling is really is a Lost Book. Think about the words that people would use to find you. So if you're a flower farmer in Nottingham, you want to be found for British flowers, Nottingham.

If you're a flower farmer in New York, and you want to be you know, you're obviously choosing a different area you want to be found for the area you are in New York, think about the area you serve, and the distance that you want to travel for the search terms that you want to be found for. And think about the products that you're actually selling. And really take some time out to build the keywords that you need to be found for on your website.

Of course there is paid search as well through Google, Google exist as a business. And obviously people are doing adverts on Google to be found. So at certain times of the year, you might want people to find you for Christmas reefs, for instance, or Mother's Day, and you might want to invest in some paid search and short, sharp campaigns. Social media has become more and more important. Having an Instagram account, having a Facebook account, tick

tock and so on. Think about your market go back to who your audience are and where they're going to be. Obviously it fieldgate flowers are market's quite mixed. So we have Facebook, we have a Facebook presence feel Kate flowers, we have an Instagram presence at fieldgate flowers, we have a tick tock, which should be bigger than it actually is. And it's something I need to put more effort into. But I need to

know where my market is. And currently an awful lot of my market is on Facebook, My Brides are actually on Instagram. So you need to kind of work out where your market is going to be. And play in those ponds. You can have paid social media. So when we're launching a course, or we're launching various things, we will launch Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok adverts, we will really track them. And we will really know the cost of acquisition of a customer. And that's fundamentally important.

What you don't need to do is pay an awful lot of money, and actually not watch the return and not watch the analytics. And know that if you spent 100 pound, what does that convert into, that's really important that you get the Analytics set up. If you're going to use paid search, paid search and paid social media, perhaps one of the most important things is to build an email list. Now think about social media and Instagram and Facebook, we don't own that

that's not our assets. So building an email list is your asset. It's your list is your database. And you can own that, and you can communicate with them. If for some reason your Instagram account gets hacked, which has just happened to somebody in our industry, and they lost 45,000 records, if you'd had an email list of those 45,000 records, and you could go back to them and say I'm sorry, I'm setting up a new Instagram account, here I am now you have a chance to rebuild that asset.

If you don't, then you have lost all of those years of hard work. So email list comes really top of my list. Facebook groups are really important if you're going to run online courses, or if you're going to build communities, Facebook groups are a nice way to build communities. We have a number of different Facebook groups. What I'm doing today podcast, so it's all about visibility, you got to think

about being visible. And if you can be visible on web, you can be visible on social media, you can be visible in emails, you can be visible in Facebook groups, and also in podcasting, you can build your audience. So what I'm doing today is being visible, and hopefully helping you and inviting you to join some of our groups, blogs, blogs on your website will help your natural search. And you should have a blog calendar, which reminds you to be able to blog

regularly. And that will obviously help your website natural search rankings. Pr Pr is really important. You can hire a PR agency, you can do it yourself. Again, go back to your markets and where your people are. And think about who will be reading what you've got to say. Another one is collaboration. A marketing collaboration is quite important. Whether you're going to go live on Instagram with someone else, or whether you're going to collaborate with

another flower farmer. Get out there, collaborate network, talk to people, let people know you're there. If you're into weddings or funerals, then you need to talk to venues or funeral parlours, that's marketing, go along, have a chat. Let them know what you're up to. Referrals often forgotten, ask your current customers to refer you to their friends and relatives. And lastly, and probably not something we do an awful lot of

is print media, and leaflets. So if you live in a small village, and you'd like to leaflet, drop your village and let them know what you're doing. That's a really good idea. So I would build a marketing plan and have all those elements involved. But the most important thing about marketing is consistency. You need to be consistent. So if you're doing blogs, you need to stick with it. If you're doing podcasts, you need to do them regularly. We're doing podcasts now every Friday, and that's

consistent. So people who subscribe to our channel and listen to us will know that every Friday, they will have a new podcast from us. And that's really important. So number eight, I think we're on but you'll if you know me, you know I can't count. So when I say the top 10 tips, it normally turns out to be more than that. But we'll start with what I think is number eight, the financials. Okay, so this is why you're doing it. We go back to the why, how much money do you need to earn and always

focus on the financials. I use a system called profit first. If you haven't heard of it, I recommend that you get the book on Kindle or you go to a well known book company and get profit first. I would certainly highly recommend it. I use Profit First I always use a banking system. which allows me to put my money into different bots. And I hold on to my VAT and I hold on to my tax in different pots, because that is

not my money. What you don't want to be doing is at the end of the year realising that you have a tax bill to pay, and no money to pay for it. So I would

suggest the bank, there's lots of lots of banks all over the world that now allow you to have different pots of money and put the pots put the money into different pots as it comes in. I use Starling but I know there's lots of others in the UK, there's lots of worldwide banks do. But I would advise that use profit first and that use a bank that allows you to put the money into different pots, because then you know it's not yours. A good accounting package is vital. Start early, go digital,

we use Xero. But there are lots of them too. I love it because I just photograph my invoices or send my invoices straight into Xero. They appear I reconcile, it's easy peasy. So start really early on with a really good accounting package. I think I'm on number nine now. I think I'm on number nine is hilarious, isn't it? Number nine, competition. Obviously, be wary of the competition go and have a look at what they're doing. And

I don't mean be weary. I mean, be aware of the competition, know they're there know what they're doing. You may be collaborating with them, you both may be serving the same markets. I truly believe if there is no competition, there is no market. So if there aren't competition in your market, then it's probably because the market is quite small. So bear that one in mind. But I do believe there's no such thing as competition. Because you're different. Your brand is

different, you're different. So what I would suggest is that you do have a look at the competition you you do see what they're up to. And you make your own stand and you stay in your

own lane. If you think about my local little town, in Newport Pagnell, it's quite small. There are probably five Chinese restaurants and for Indians at a guess. And there's a Greek and there's a Turkish that offer very similar food. So do I visit all the Indians? No, do I visit all the Chinese No. Over the time I've home in home did on my favourite, the brand that I buy into the menu that I like the pricing that I want to and the personality when I walk through

the door. So that's really important to remember that remember, when you're thinking about competition of the amount of Indian restaurants or Chinese restaurants, and they don't worry about the competition. They stay in their lane, and they produce their brand. And that's what I would advise you to do. And the last one number 10. Being a flower farmer is the most rewarding, fun career you could possibly have. I did transition out of a corporate

role into flower farming. It took me a number of years to be able to do it. I had small children at school, and I had a full time role. And I did transition into flower farming. I can now proudly say I am after 10 years of full time flower farmer and I love it. My markets, my products. Where I'm selling is all very different. I do have a marketing strategy. And so I hope this podcast has been useful for you. I hope that you will follow us and I'll put some links in the show notes.

And I look forward to welcome you to our podcast every Friday. Do subscribe, do rate and review us and I look forward to seeing you every Friday. Next Friday. We have the wonderful, Ben I call him Alstroemeria, Ben and Alstroemeria. Ben Heads up crosslands Nursery in the UK. He is a specialised alstromeria grower and he also runs a movement called British flowers rock. He is one of the most passionate and motivated people

I have ever met. So I hope that you will join me and listening to Ben next Friday.