How to create realistic 5 figure flower sales goal

Are you struggling with creating a sales projection for the upcoming season? Have you thought about what your sales target is? If you haven’t and you’re looking to make money as a flower farmer, then you should! It’s not hard and in this video, I take you through a step by step process on how you can do this as both a new flower farm (no historical data) and as a grower who has had a couple of seasons under their belt.
Links mentioned:
Growing for market podcast: • Growing a profitable f...
Lennie Larkin’s Free Jan 9 Webinar: mailchi.mp/flowerfarmingforpr...
Other prior KZbin videos mentioned:
I brought in over $23k in sales as a 2nd year flower farm side hustle. But was I profitable?: • Real $ numbers from a ...
Year 3 Flower Farm Planning for 2024: Considerations growing for wholesale & retail customers: • Flower Farming: Year 3...
Did this video help you? Looking for more content like this that accompanies my KZbin videos or want to support me? For $5 a month, join my Patreon where you’ll get access to gated content and a private Facebook group!: www.patreon.com/bareflowerfarm

[@corydoyal8709]

Great video. I’m a data nerd too and appreciate your focus on the business side of things. Growing anything is pretty easy to dial in. Making sure you have a market to sell into is the hard part. The scenarios you presented are very helpful!

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yes yes! Data nerds unite! I just pinned this comment because it is so true. Yes, there will be new challenges each season with growing but as Dave Dowling said, if you're growing flowers but can't find a market, you're a gardener. It's selling that makes you a farm! :)

[@bareflowerfarm]

Thank you, Melissa! I will climb out to climb back in if I end up scaling winter tulips the way we are envisioning haha!

[@terribeach4400]

Thank you for taking the time to break all this information down! I look forward to watching more!🌷

[@bareflowerfarm]

Thank you, appreciate you taking the time to write this comment!

[@Wyldheatherfarm]

Another great video! I preordered Lennie’s book and signed up for her webinar. I can’t wait for you to interview her! 👏🏽👏🏽 We can all geek out on numbers and spreadsheets.

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yay!! I will set up a poll in the community tab & on my instagram in early February to solicit any questions people may have from the book so definitely read it and lmk if you have any follow ups! We can totally geek out - Lennie's done alot of great interviews already but I want to dig in deeper with her :)

[@BlommaFlowerCo]

Love the numbers! Can’t wait for Lennie’s book and for your interview. Thanks for the great content!!

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yay!! I actually received the book (I have no idea how I got it so early) but it is so good. You will definitely like it if you like the numbers!

[@lindaknight7052]

Thanks for another informative video! Lennie is amazing, I've been following her for a while and listening to all her interviews. I'm tired of floundering with the business side of things, so I'm stepping out of my comfort zone and signed up for her course. I look forward to your interview with her.

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yes! I’m so excited for you. It’s great to see people take the reigns on this topic. I would love to hear your thoughts on the course after you complete it 🙂

[@LaurenS21]

Thankful for your videos. This will be my first season trying to sell my flowers!

[@bareflowerfarm]

Ohh you're in for a fun ride!! Happy first season! :)

[@glaizaroe]

Thanks for all you do!

[@bareflowerfarm]

I appreciate that!

[@Kathywake23]

This is so helpful for those starting a flower farm. Thanks so much!

[@bareflowerfarm]

I'm so glad to hear this! I'll have another video in the coming weeks about advice for the first year flower farmer that builds on some of the principles mentioned here :)

[@amyyoung5237]

Love your videos! I always learn so much 😊

[@bareflowerfarm]

Thank you! I'm so glad to hear this!

[@EvelynM-vlogs]

Good info. One thing I might add for those growing on a smaller scale (my whole urban lot including house and double garage is only 0.146 acres), is to think a little outside the box when it comes to wholesale. I, for example, have just finished talks with a local wedding florist who buys all her flowers down island in farm country where there are a lot of flower farms. In talks with her she realized she could add elopements back onto her website by buying from me. It was not worth her while to drive down island for a small amount of flowers and so she had just taken elopements off of her 2024 offerings, but I am only a short distance from her and I can easily supply smaller amounts of wholesale flowers to her without interrupting my custom orders and flower wagon sales. That is a win/win. My point is that wholesale does not always mean volume sales if approached correctly. Also total numbers nerd here. I track my sales by the day, by the month, by the year, calculating what percentage I want to increase by the month and not by the year. Focusing on the month that performs the best consistently and then trying to up the game of the other months to do the same. I also separately track the type of sale that performs the best per month/year. My favourite way to track numbers? Good old pencil and paper making use of customized by me columns that I do print out. I actually find doing it by hand is way faster and more relaxing than using a spreadsheet, clearly I am very good at math.

[@bareflowerfarm]

Good points! If you can find a florist like that, that's gold! The only thing at that point is consistency I assume! Smart to do it by month. That will likely be me going forward as I see myself really scaling up the winter tulips and scaling back on other times of the year. I think as long as you're doing it, it doesn't matter what mode (spreadsheet or paper) :)

[@EvelynM-vlogs]

@@bareflowerfarm This is not the first florist that has worked with me this way. Sadly the previous florist moved to France which is why I was looking for another. The key was to be chill and up front about not expecting or looking for regular purchases, but rather to work with her however it might work best for both of us. It helped that she was familiar with my flower wagon and front yard dahlias, as unbeknownst to me when I reached out, she drove past my place regularly. The previous florist originally had put a note in my cash box to introduce herself to me three years ago.

[@mhubertcfi]

Great breakdown and cheers to climbing out of the hole!😊

[@bareflowerfarm]

Thanks Melissa! I will climb out of the hole just to climb back in if we end up scaling winter tulips the way I envision haha

[@GraceFilledHomestead]

Totally a data nerd ❤

[@genevievefairchild1516]

Thanks for making this feel less intimidating💐

[@bareflowerfarm]

I'm so glad this feels more within reach! Please do reach out if you have any questions or struggle with getting started :)

[@TheFragrantBunch]

Great episode! I also listened to the podcast that Lennie was on and was wondering if you were going to talk about her since you are also data driven. Can't wait for the interview!

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yes!!! She’s done a lot of fantastic interviews ahead of the book launch. I wanted to wait after her book launched so that I could also solicit questions from other folks (lmk if you have any!). We’ll likely do it after vday since I’m heavy in winter tulips right now 😅

[@TheFragrantBunch]

​@@bareflowerfarm I heard on the podcast that Lennie got "crap" for charging her bouquets at a high price. How did she handle the feedback?

[@jordonsflowerfarm]

Agree on the cosmos in September! The issue I ran into was that it was so hot in July that the direct seeded seedlings scorched and I lost the crop!

[@bareflowerfarm]

Yes!! I remember you saying this! And this makes me wonder if I should just soil block them versus direct seeding since I'm realistically only growing a few dozen :)

[@macrosense]

I do not know much about the flower business

[@JoyoftheGardenandHome]

Now that you're talking high intensity, do you have a realible source of compost? And the bigger question, how long can the land go before it needs to rest?

[@bareflowerfarm]

This is a really great question and one that I have been asking myself and trying to figure out in terms of resting parts of the field. For compost, my neighbor has about 120 chickens and shares the compost he makes from the chicken manure. It is flower farming gold! We are also now composting our own green waste and I practice bokashi for our food scraps. Last year, we actually did not truck in any additional soil amendments, outside of some top soil we used to seed grass which I used a tiny bit of.