Profitable Mindset

#289: Depression, Dollars, and the $15,000 Surprise - Part 6: Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE [https://charlottemsmith.com/start] This is the episode where it gets real. Not Instagram real. Actually real. Hayden's MRI confirmed a cartilage tear in her wrist. Recovery is months out, surgery is possible, and she can barely make bouquets one-handed. She's been in a depression. Her corporate job is doing layoffs and she doesn't know week to week if she still has one. She wanted to quit. And then she opened an email and found out she'd won a $15,000 grant from Ag West Farm Credit — the one she spent days applying for back in March and never thought she'd get. She was crying when she read it. That grant is going toward a greenhouse, season extension supplies, and, for the first time, hired help. On the sales side, the four-week CSA subscription is done. Pre-selling $1,200 back in spring funded her startup costs and meant she didn't have to market during the busiest harvest weeks. The flowers were already spoken for. But pickup logistics were a mess. Friends texted asking for exceptions. She ended up delivering some bouquets herself. Next year she wants a community drop point and stricter boundaries. The U-pick events were the biggest learning of the summer. Her practice run with 20 friends revealed that people were scared to pick the flowers, cut stems three inches long, and needed way more upfront education than she expected. The paid events went better until a bachelorette party of 10 bought tickets to her intimate sip-and-snip evening. They showed up 15 minutes late from a winery. Lesson learned: group bookings get a private event option with a minimum price. The two biggest fails? She didn't get succession planting done, which meant spending $200 at Wilco on plant starts right before the U-picks so the field didn't look empty. And she hasn't tracked a single harvest, expense hour, or bloom count all season. No system, no clipboard, no data. She knows it'll cost her in planning next year. The biggest strategic shift: she's moving away from summer bouquet sales entirely. Next year she wants to focus on early spring flowers with season extension, run the CSA from March through Mother's Day, and spend summer on higher-profit events instead of sweating through harvests in 90-degree heat while working 12-hour corporate shifts. Life is 50-50. This episode is proof. Click HERE and Let's Meet! [https://charlottemsmith.com/strategy] Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

#288: Depression, Dollars, and the $15,000 Surprise - Part 6: Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE [https://charlottemsmith.com/start] This is the episode where it gets real. Not Instagram real. Actually real. Hayden's MRI confirmed a cartilage tear in her wrist. Recovery is months out, surgery is possible, and she can barely make bouquets one-handed. She's been in a depression. Her corporate job is doing layoffs and she doesn't know week to week if she still has one. She wanted to quit. And then she opened an email and found out she'd won a $15,000 grant from Ag West Farm Credit — the one she spent days applying for back in March and never thought she'd get. She was crying when she read it. That grant is going toward a greenhouse, season extension supplies, and, for the first time, hired help. On the sales side, the four-week CSA subscription is done. Pre-selling $1,200 back in spring funded her startup costs and meant she didn't have to market during the busiest harvest weeks. The flowers were already spoken for. But pickup logistics were a mess. Friends texted asking for exceptions. She ended up delivering some bouquets herself. Next year she wants a community drop point and stricter boundaries. The U-pick events were the biggest learning of the summer. Her practice run with 20 friends revealed that people were scared to pick the flowers, cut stems three inches long, and needed way more upfront education than she expected. The paid events went better until a bachelorette party of 10 bought tickets to her intimate sip-and-snip evening. They showed up 15 minutes late from a winery. Lesson learned: group bookings get a private event option with a minimum price. The two biggest fails? She didn't get succession planting done, which meant spending $200 at Wilco on plant starts right before the U-picks so the field didn't look empty. And she hasn't tracked a single harvest, expense hour, or bloom count all season. No system, no clipboard, no data. She knows it'll cost her in planning next year. The biggest strategic shift: she's moving away from summer bouquet sales entirely. Next year she wants to focus on early spring flowers with season extension, run the CSA from March through Mother's Day, and spend summer on higher-profit events instead of sweating through harvests in 90-degree heat while working 12-hour corporate shifts. Life is 50-50. This episode is proof. Click HERE and Let's Meet! [https://charlottemsmith.com/strategy] Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

#287: First Flowers, First Grant, and Selling Before You Feel Ready - Part 4: Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE [https://charlottemsmith.com/start] Hayden's four months into building Big Oak Flower Farm and she's in that weird middle spot — wishing she was selling more while intentionally holding back because she doesn't have enough flowers yet. Sound familiar to anyone starting out? The free queer wildflower walk she organized at Champoeg State Park? Twenty people showed up, almost 100 people and businesses shared it on Instagram, and one attendee turned out to be a tourism marketing director who called her event email "marketing gold." She didn't spend a dime on advertising. She just offered something free that her ideal customers actually wanted, then asked local businesses to share it. Every single one said yes. She won a $900 grant from Wine Country Pride to fund supplies for her U-pick events — snips, vases, signage, all the stuff that adds up way faster than you'd think. And even though she didn't get the money just to learn, the grant application process forced her to budget down to the cost of parking signs and scissors. That kind of planning pays off whether you get funded or not. On the sales side, she's at $1,000 in pre-sold subscriptions, a couple of walk-up bouquet sales, her first bulk "bucket of blooms" order for a baby shower, and a $40 custom bouquet she sold at a party after someone saw the flowers she'd brought as a gift. She's also dropping bouquets at local coffee shops with her business card — something that terrified her a month ago and now feels natural. The real talk this episode: $1,300 for farm insurance as a first-year business (and why you need it before your first event), using Wave for free accounting, and why she's finally turning to AI to help her figure out what to actually say in her marketing emails instead of staring at a blank screen. Click HERE and Let's Meet! [https://charlottemsmith.com/strategy] Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

#286: First $1,000, First Failures, First Real Fear - Part 3: Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE [https://charlottemsmith.com/start] It's the end of April, and things are moving fast — maybe too fast. The rain stopped weeks early, it's been in the 70s, and Hayden's scrambling to get irrigation set up while working 14-hour days at her corporate job. A whole bed of ranunculus? Crispy dead. She forgot about them during her work week. That's the reality nobody posts about. But here's what she did pull off: eight bouquet subscription pre-sales totaling her first $1,000. Every single buyer is someone she knows. Not a stranger in the bunch. And not one of them has seen a photo of what they're actually getting. They bought because they trust her. That's what relationship-based marketing does. She ran a $200 ad in the local Newsburg community newsletter and made $240 back in subscription sales within the first week — plus new email subscribers she can't even track yet. She went from 4 beds to 10 finished 20-foot rows, with plans for 17 total. She applied to two grants, and even though she hasn't heard back, the process forced her to write a three-year business projection, budget out her U-pick events down to the cost of scissors, and think bigger than just this first season. The biggest win? A free queer wildflower walk she's hosting at Champoeg State Park that got shared by over 80 people on Instagram. She asked a dozen local businesses to share it, every one said yes, and now she's getting messages from people she's never met. One connection led to an invitation to vendor at a 1,000-person plant sale. She's also setting boundaries — done working outside by 1 p.m., actually cooking dinner instead of eating mac and cheese for the fifth night in a row, and canceling plans when she needs a recovery day. Because the busy season hasn't even started yet. Click HERE and Let's Meet! [https://charlottemsmith.com/strategy] Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

#285: First Steps, First Wins: Part 2 - Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE [https://charlottemsmith.com/start] It's been two months since Hayden decided this was happening, and things are getting messy in the best way. The work party? Eight friends showed up at 10 a.m. and worked for hours pulling out buried metal, layers of old landscape fabric, and foot-long weed roots. At the end, they all thanked HER. Turns out people stuck in apartments and suburbs are genuinely excited to get muddy on a farm. She's got 20-foot rows going in, her first seedlings planted, and a grow tent crammed into an 8-by-12 converted shed she can barely fit inside. On the business side — website drama. She built the entire site on Shopify, hated it, and started over on Squarespace. Hear why, and what she learned about choosing the right platform when you're small and seasonal and need to throw up a product listing in 15 minutes, not 2 hours. She launched her email list February 10th and hit 43 subscribers in the first month — half of them strangers she doesn't recognize. She got them without spending a dime, just word of mouth and Instagram. Her welcome email includes a survey, and the responses are already shaping her sales plan: more people want grab-and-go bouquets than subscriptions, and at least one person signed up specifically to support a small, queer-owned farm business. We also get into what's next: a possible Mother's Day peony pop-up, selling bouquets through local coffee shops and wineries, a creative idea about marketing to real estate agents for closing gifts, and why she's skipping farmers markets entirely. You'll hear real-time decision making, plenty of second-guessing, and both of us laughing at the chaos of figuring this out as she goes. This is what it really looks like to build a farm business from nothing. No polish. No playbook. Just figuring it out. Click HERE and Let's Meet! [https://charlottemsmith.com/strategy] Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.