Paula, Mill Pond Flower Farm

How long are you going to be a flower farmer?

It may be a strange thing to consider when you’re just starting out as a flower farmer, but it’s important to think about the timespan of your business as it will affect the decisions you make.

If you have rented land on a three year lease, you may decide that your planting will be short term, fewer shrubs, perennials and trees, with more focus on annuals and easily moved plants in case you need to move it all. A three year timespan may give you the chance to try out flower farming and see whether it’s going to be a feasible longer term business for you.
If you have access to land long term and have small children who have just started school you might feel that flower farming is a ‘job’ you can do around your other commitments in the longer term. You might decide to plant low maintenance shrubs, trees and long-lasting perennials that will require less work initially when you have limited time, but provide a good quantity of stems over a long period.
If you’ve taken early retirement and are concerned about being able to maintain the physical elements of the work you might concentrate on growing for your own floristry, creating a cutting patch that can provide you with good quality blooms for arranging but can be easily converted into a beautiful garden when you become fully ‘retired’.

Whatever your circumstances and plan, thinking ahead will help you get the most out of your time as a flower farmer and look at what happens to your business when you’re not involved personally.

Planning to get the most from your hard work

What you don’t want is to spend a lot of time and money to set up a flower farming business without being able to recoup some of the time and resource invested if circumstances then change and you aren’t able to keep running your business.

How you approach this will depend on your circumstances to a great extent, whether you own or rent land and what your own plans are for your future. There are a few different options to consider:

• Passing it on

You may have family who would be willing and able to continue what you’ve started. A traditional farming approach is for a child to take over a farm from their parents. As many flower farmers operate in a very different way to traditional farmers, it might not be something you’ve thought of, but it is an option, particularly if the family members are already involved in the business in some way. There is a lot of good advice about succession planning for farmers available if you’re considering this option.

• Bringing in management

If you have a vibrant, successful business that is running really well and that has a loyal customer base, it might be straightforward to employ a manager to run it for you. It’s possible to train up an existing employee or find someone new specifically for the role. You could choose to be as involved or hands-off as you want, still retain ultimate control, but relinquish the day to day responsibilities.

• Selling your business or brand

What you create has value, it is worth money. If you have a successful flower farm, with regular, loyal customers and a field full of stock plants it would be a good purchase for someone who wants to run a flower farm. Not everyone wants to start from scratch and go through the early days and sound businesses can find buyers relatively easily.

• Closing your business

When you no longer want to be a flower farmer, but the previous options aren’t possible or desirable, then it’s time to close down your business. Making the decision that it’s time to stop is not a defeat or a failure, it’s just what needs to happen at that point. It can be hard to let go, but limping on without being able to fully commit to the business will not help you or your customers. You may be able to recoup some of your investment by selling stock, plants and equipment if they are still in good order, and if you can organise a sale. Make a firm, positive decision, communicate it well to your customers and suggest alternative suppliers, tidy up the loose ends and admin, set a date and then stop.

Although you may not really want to consider this now, it’s worth bearing in mind. If you’re setting up your flower farm with one of the options as a possibility, however far away, it can help you to look at long term development, investment, systems and processes that will help any transition. In the past few years, I’ve successfully closed a business and sold a business.

Mill Pond Camping

We set up a campsite on our smallholding in 2011, using the only sound bit of a derelict cottage as facilities and the flatter bits of our land near the pond as camping ground. I set up a small website, advertised on a few free websites, promoted it on Twitter and off it went! We had 5 pitches for tents and campervans, encouraged groups to come together and take over the whole field and ran it for five successful years. The people who came were generally great and it was a good experience for us. There were a couple of ‘memorable’ campers -one with no trousers early on a Sunday morning and a renowned drug dealer who wanted an alibi – but on the whole, it was very positive. However, as the flower farm got busier and we made progress with the renovation of the buildings we decided we didn’t want to continue. The option of selling, management or passing on weren’t possible as I wanted to use the land for growing flowers. We set a date as the end of the season in 2016 and closed it down.

Heirloom Silk

In 2014, I was sent a photo of a lovely bouquet by a bride who’d booked wedding flowers, as a style she liked. It had a gorgeous silk ribbon draped around and when I looked for a supplier I could only find one in the US. So, I made some silk ribbon and dyed it with elderberries, posted it on Twitter and got orders! I added a shop to our website and Heirloom Silk became part of Mill Pond Flower Farm, selling natural dyed silk ribbon to florists and sending it by mail order. It was great to make and very popular, however I knew I wouldn’t want to give up flower growing to do it full time so from the start I had in mind that I might want to sell the business at some point. By 2017, I was completely overloaded with work, running to keep up with both flowers and ribbon-making so I decided to sell Heirloom Silk. I did some investigation, came up with a value for the business – it consisted of equipment, stock, expertise, customers, the Heirloom Silk brand and goodwill/reputation. That's what I would be selling, a three year head-start for a small business.

I advertised it on Instagram, Twitter and on our website and it sold easily. I trained up the new owners as part of the sale, passed on the stock and equipment, set up a link to send enquiries from my website to their new one, and that was it! Heirloom Silk is still doing well, growing as a business and developing new lines.

See my blog posts about the sale of Heirloom Silk

https://www.millpondflowerfarm.co.uk/apps/blog/ show/44666871-ribbon-business-for-sale- https://www.millpondflowerfarm.co.uk/apps/blog/ show/44775713-sold-