No one gets into flower farming because they love business analytics, however if you don’t know how to make sense of your business and make a profit, you’re not going to stay in business for very long. Luckily we’ve got Lennie Larkin of B-Side Farm to help us cut through the clutter and tell us how to plan to make a profit in our own flower farm businesses. She’s on the pod this week, telling us about her new book, Flower Farming for Profit, which will be out in January.
We talk about how to evaluate your whole enterprise from the close-up, such as whether an individual crop is making you money or not, to zooming out to tell whether an entire market is right for you or not. For example, we talk about how even though the same stem that sells for a dollar to a wholesaler might be worth many times more at a wedding, there are a lot of other costs associated with getting an individual stem to a wedding. So if you’re more of an enjoy-my-time-on-the tractor type of person, you might be more suited to wholesaling and foregoing the big markups associated with weddings and other events. We also talk about the process of moving Lennie’s own farm from CA to OR, how to avoid engaging in magical thinking, and how to get prices above the market average for your flowers.
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