If you weren’t able to get a place on our free Live Zoom last night, or see us in person at the Flowers from the Farm conference in January, here’s a summary of our 10 Tips to make your Growing Business More Profitable.
We focus on profitability in all our courses because it’s the key to sustainability. If we can’t make a living from growing cut flowers, it’s not sustainable. We need lots more growers producing quality blooms for sale to maintain a vibrant and viable local cut flower industry.
Here’s our 10 Tips to make your Growing Business More Profitable
Grow for Your Customers
Make sure you grow the flowers that your customers need. A few blooms will be useful across the board, but a lot will be more suitable for particular markets. For example, poppies are great cut flowers for events and weddings but less so for market bouquets.
Right Plant, Right Place
Grow what grows best where you are. Paula is the only one of the 3 of us who can grow lupins well. They like her deep, damp soil and thrive, providing buckets of fabulous blooms over 6-8 weeks in early summer. They need no irrigation or special care. Carol has a few but they need watering and don’t produce the same quantities of stems. Claire has dry clay soil so can’t grow them at all. She can grow amazing sedums though. Find out what grows well where you are, on your soil and in your climate, and you’ll produce good quality flowers with little effort, more profitably.
GRow mulitpurpose plants
If a stem is useful as cut foliage, flower, dried and as a seedhead, you have 4 chances to cut and use it and it’s unlikely to be wasted. Achillea can be cut fresh or dried and also stands for a long time on the plant, making it more usable as it doesn’t go over before you have the chance to cut it.
Stop Wasting Your Time!
What do you do that fritters away time? Do you spend 20 minutes looking for the tools you need before you can start working? Are you forever walking around things to get to where you need to go? Do you walk up and down the field with a single bucket to cut an order? There are lots of ways to waste time and that might be OK if you’re just growing a few flowers for the house, but when it’s your business, efficiency increases productivity. The less time you waste, the more effort you can put into producing great flowers. And you’ll also have some energy left at the end of the day to have a life!
Look After Yourself
If you’re ill or injured you won’t be able to work for your business and you’ll have to turn down orders or pay someone to do your job. There are lots of things we all need to do to look after ourselves. An obvious and straightforward one is to use the correct safety equipment when using tools. Eye protection, ear defenders, safety helmets and workboots are all as essential as seed packets and watering cans if you’re a flower farmer. Use them!
Price it right
Make sure that you’re charging the right price for your work. It selling flowers doesn’t make a profit, you won’t be able to make a living and your business will be unsustainable. It can be a challenge to get pricing right, but it’s worth the effort (Claire does a great course!). If you sell too cheaply, you’ll undercut other growers and impact on their businesses too - unlike TV shows, in the real world small businesses work together and support each other.
Understand what profit is
You might have a great income and take lots of money for your flowers, but if your costs are high your profit will be low. Do you include your car mileage for deliveries? Have you worked out a percentage of your household bills if you work from home? It’s easy to think we’re making a profit, make sure you actually know it!
Sell All your flowers
A successful flower farm has an empty field and a full bank balance! If you put money, time and effort into growing fantastic flowers, also work at making sure they’re all sold at the end of the week.
Get help
It can be counterintuitive to pay extra for help to be able to make more money, but if it’s done carefully it does work that way. Cutting flowers is where we all started to pay for freelance help. It has to be done in a defined period of time, often on a specific day and one person can’t physically cut more than a certain amount. Getting help with cutting means you can accept more orders and be able to sell ALL your flowers (see Tip no 8!).
Make it Your business
Your business needs to work with your life. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s business, serve the same sorts of customers or grow the same flowers. We’re fond of saying that there’s no blueprint for a successful flower farm, and it really is true. Make your flower farm YOUR business, with your own aims and values in mind, growing flowers you love, enjoy it and it’s got the best chance of success!
This is just a flavour of the information, guidance and support available in The Business of Growing Flowers online learning programme, but it will give you an idea of our approach and philosophy. Our aim is always to support other growers to build their own businesses and provide high quality flowers and foliage for their local market. This is the final time we’ll be running The Business of Growing Flowers, our lives are changing and our own businesses are adapting too.
For more information on The Business of Growing Flowers, press the button below